Tag: regime change

There They Go Again in Venezuela

Mark Twain allegedly quipped, “God created war so Americans would learn geography.” Whether or not he actually said that, it would be a good test – for the world’s mightiest military power to be prevented from waging war if a majority of Americans failed to find the alleged enemy on a world map.

This should not need to be said, but the United States has no legal authority to attack Venezuela (or Iran, Sudan, Somalia, or any other country). Nor does it have the legal right to engage in covert action to overthrow any government, including that of Venezuela. Should the United States do so, it will be opposed by everyone south of the Rio Grande, and it will rightly be seen as a racist resumption of the Monroe Doctrine. Whatever one thinks of the current government there, nearly 30 million people live in Venezuela, and they don’t deserve to be demonized or threatened for the policies of their president, since Venezuela poses no threat to the United States.

The American people get this. A recent CBS News poll shows widespread public skepticism and disapproval of any U.S. military attack against Venezuela, properly so, with 70 percent opposing the United States taking military action.

Moreover, the current U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is an unnecessary and dangerous provocation. U.S. Navy warships and Marine deployments to the region should be reversed to ease tensions. The United States would not likely invade Venezuela with ground forces as even gung-ho-for-blood Secretary of War Pete Hegseth must know a quagmire would ensue, but the Trump administration may see political advantage to have this as a simmering, manufactured “crisis” to distract from the Epstein files, Trump’s sagging popularity, and his failed domestic and foreign policies. And Trump’s declaration closing Venezuelan air space has zero legitimacy, though it did scare many airlines into changing flight routes.

An obvious question: Is this really about oil, not drugs? Fentanyl is not coming into the United States via Venezuela, and the alleged drug ring run by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro does not exist. However, Venezuela does have the world’s largest known oil reserves.

I can’t imagine anyone wants a rerun of the Iraq wars. Let’s not test the adage that “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme” (which again, Mark Twain may or may not have said). We don’t want to have to dust off our “No War for Oil!” protest signs. And there is also already a metastasizing problem with violent competition for rare earth minerals in Venezuela. 

The brouhaha about the second attack on the alleged “drug boat” on September 2 possibly being a war crime misses the point, though Hegseth should be held to account. No evidence has been presented that it was a “drug boat” and even if it was, there was no legal authority to attack it, once or twice. All the attacks on the alleged “drug boats” are illegal, and unauthorized by Congress.

Speaking of which, Congress needs to not only investigate these shady “drug boat” attacks but assert its constitutional authority by passing a War Powers Resolution to stop the out-of-control Trump administration from further attacks or escalation. The U.S. Senate failed to pass such a measure last month, 51-49, with all Democrats voting in favor and all but two Republicans voting against upholding the Constitution. The “world’s greatest deliberative body” should try again. Perhaps Republicans can read the polls better now.

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‘Kill Them All’

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
— Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023)
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

As we learn more about the events on Sept. 2, 2025, in international waters 1,500 miles from the United States, the behavior of the United States military becomes more legally troubling than at first blush. We have learned from members of Congress and others who have seen the videos of the attacks on the speedboat that day that the first strike mainly — but not completely — destroyed the boat and killed 9 of the 11 persons aboard.

The two survivors clung to the wreckage for 45 minutes, during which they frantically waved at what they hoped were American aircraft, expecting to be rescued. This attack was the first of many since ordered by President Donald Trump, and it was done without warning. After the passage of 45 terrifying minutes, three more attacks obliterated the two survivors and their wreckage, for “self-defense,” the White House said.

When two courageous persons privy to all this revealed it two weeks ago to reporters for The Washington Post who corroborated the revelations with five others, the Post published the story. Then, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denied he ordered the survivors killed; it was, he said, “the fog of war.” Then, the White House countermanded that denial. Then, the admiral in charge acknowledged that he ordered the kills pursuant to the secretary’s initial orders.

The military has a duty to rescue the injured and the shipwrecked. And the military has a duty to disregard unlawful orders — a position that Attorney General Pamela Bondi herself argued to the Supreme Court when she was in private practice, and Hegseth himself argued when he was a private citizen.

Not rescuing these survivors was criminal. But the entire killing process is criminal.

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Jaw-dropping moment US commandos storm Venezuelan ‘terror tanker’ in breathtaking airborne takedown as tensions rocket toward conflict

This is the dramatic moment when US commandos stormed a Venezuelan oil tanker in a breathtaking airborne takedown amid ratcheting tensions in the Caribbean. 

Footage released by the Trump administration on Wednesday showed American forces swooping on the tanker in helicopters and rappelling down ropes.

Troops with guns drawn darted up stairs to the bridge to take control of the vessel off the coast of Venezuela.

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a statement on X: ‘Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.

‘For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations.’

The release of the video comes hours after it was reported on Wednesday that the tanker had been seized, sparking fears of a potential blockade and spiking oil prices. No name was given for the ‘stateless’ vessel, nor was it confirmed precisely where off the coast of Venezuela the raid unfolded.

Trump called it ‘the largest one ever seized’ and warned that ‘other things are happening.’

The capture sent oil prices climbing sharply, with Brent crude rising 1.21 percent to $62.69 a barrel amid fears the escalation could disrupt global supply. 

Venezuela is one of the largest suppliers of oil to China, which has been the destination of between 55 percent and 90 percent of the country’s oil exports. 

A Bloomberg report called the move ‘a serious escalation’ after Trump demanded Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro step down. Caracas did not immediately respond.

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Venezuela and the Most Blatant Coup in History

There was a time, not long ago, when the U.S. had the social etiquette to conduct its coups clandestinely. That is important because it means they recognized that it is wrong. Coups were carried out by the CIA, and we often only found out years later. Now, they are carried out by the navy for the world to watch on television. The change is a reflection of Washington’s hubris and the belief that they can do what they want.

There may never have been a more public and obvious coup than the coup attempt unfolding in Venezuela. Hardly under cover of the dark of night, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the nuclear powered USS Gerald R. Ford, brought its, at least, 40 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, its EA-18G Growlers, its two squadrons of helicopters, its five destroyers and it B-52 Stratofortress and much more to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, about 560 miles from the coast of Venezuela. Its more than 4,500 troops join the more than 10,000 troops with their Aegis guided-missile destroyers, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones, P-8 Poseidon spy planes, assault ships and a secretive special-operations ship who were already in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

The U.S. military buildup is too small for a full-scale invasion and too large for stopping small boats carrying drugs. But it is perfect for a coup. The threat and pressure it exerts on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is overwhelming and unbearable.

U.S. coups in Venezuela are not new. They were not new in 2002 when the democratically elected Hugo Chávez was briefly removed from office in a coup before the people and the military restored the popular leader to power.

But the script has changed little since they were new in 1908 when the U.S. helped oust the left leaning Cipriano Castro and his objections to American power and influence in Latin America.

From its birth, Venezuela, along with Cuba, has represented an unacceptable challenge to the spread of America’s vision of form of government and leadership in what it perceives as its own backyard. Conceived almost in conversation with the 23 year older American constitution, the first constitution of Venezuela, as Greg Grandin has pointed out in America, América: A New History of the New World, sought to balance America’s preoccupation with individual liberty with the common good. The constitution calls for the “renunciation of the dangerous right to unlimited freedom” and insists that “because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate and education to all citizens.”

From Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar, who fought first for Venezuela’s independence and then for a united Latin America, to Hugo Chávez who united and galvanized the Latin American left, Venezuela has been a challenge to the spread of American ideology and hegemony in the western hemisphere.

But the American response has never been so public and bellicose. In late November, Donald Trump spoke to Maduro by phone. The phone call lasted less than 15 minutes. Precisely what transpired on that phone call remains unknown. But one thing is clear. Like a sheriff in a bad western movie, Trump, with guns drawn, Trump told Maduro to get out of town. He told him that he had one week to leave.

What happened next is not clear. It is not entirely clear whether Maduro refused to leave or if Trump refused Maduro’s conditions for leaving. According to reporting by The Miami Herald and Reuters, Trump told Maduro that safe passage would be granted to him, his wife and his son if he agreed to resign right away and flee Venezuela for the destination of his choice.

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6 Major Warning Signs That Indicate That Military Strikes On Venezuela Could Be Imminent

They are getting all of their ducks in a row for a war with Venezuela.  Do you think that it is just a coincidence that Southern Command just canceled leave for Thanksgiving and Christmas?  And do you think that it is just a coincidence that the Trump administration just designated “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization?  This is going to allow the Trump administration to take military action against Venezuela without formally declaring war.  As you will see below, so many of the things that we would expect to see just before a major military operation commences are happening right now.  The following are 6 major warning signs that indicate that military strikes on Venezuela could be imminent…

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The Same Democrats Who Said NOTHING When Obama Drone-Bombed 16-yr-Old US Citizen Al-Awlaki Are Furious About Trump Bombing Dangerous Venezuelan Cartel Members in a Boat

Al-Qaeda leader and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in September 2011 in a targeted strike.
Al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico and attended college in Colorado.

Obama dropped a bomb on his head.

In May 2012 The New York Times revealed that Barack Obama was the official who actually made the final call on US drone strikes.

Seven months before the New York Times report, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen from Denver, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in October 2011.

Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi was the son of terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi. He did not have a trial.  He was sixteen.

Barack Obama dropped a bomb on his head.

In January 2020, the United States killed General Qassim Soleimani, a top commander of Iran’s al-Quds Force, in an airstrike at Baghdad’s International Airport. The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Seven people were reportedly killed in the airstrike.

Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of dozens of US military men and women in Iraq.

Speaker Pelosi, Democrats and the fake news media were outraged over the death of the world’s number one terrorist.

The media and Democrats hammered President Trump all day.

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US Agency for Global Media CEO Kari Lake Discusses Pro-CCP Corruption at Radio Free Asia and Pro-EU Radio Free Europe’s Attempted Regime Change in Hungary – SLAMS Seditious Democrats

United States Agency for Global Media CEO Kari Lake recently spoke to The Gateway Pundit about the corruption and taxpayer-funded left-wing Globalist propaganda within her agency, as she continues her many-months-long crusade to expose the rot. 

It can be recalled that Lake gave bombshell testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on USAGM’s record of waste, fraud, mismanagement, self-dealing, and national security failures in June, and each day, she is finding more.

Established in 1994, the federal agency oversees taxpayer-funded grantee news outlets, including the Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, with the intent of delivering news and information to people worldwide. However, the news content produced has become infested with leftwing ideology and Globalist propaganda, funded by taxpayers to the tune of nearly $1 billion per year.

Lake recently revealed in a Frank Speech interview that one of the grantees, Radio Free Asia (RFA), shut down its operations and began auctioning off equipment worth thousands of dollars for literal pennies, while falsely claiming that it was necessary because the US government had not paid them. Lake, however, shut down the auction and sent in auditors to “find out where every single penny went,” she said.

While speaking to The Gateway Pundit, Lake explained that RFA was attempting to offload “millions of dollars worth of equipment that was paid for by the taxpayer” from “HD cameras that cost thousands– in some cases tens of thousands of dollars– to teleprompters, to full-on, literally news sets for pennies!” This presents a national security issue, Lake said, explaining that equipment, such as hard drives and laptops, cannot simply be sold off by the independent entity “unless we have verification that they’ve been cleaned and scrubbed of any data and information that could be problematic if it got into the wrong hands.”

And despite RFA’s claims that they stopped programming and began auctioning equipment because they weren’t receiving money, Lake says, “we have paid them every single penny that was appropriated to them.”

She also revealed the “interesting” timing of their move to end news coverage and begin the fire sale, which coincided with President Trump’s visit to Busan, South Korea, for the 2025 APEC Summit, where he participated in high-stakes meetings with various Asian leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It was right before, just a few days before, President Trump’s historic trip to Asia, his five-day trip, where he did amazing things, like signing peace agreements, signing amazing trade agreements with many Asian countries,” Lake told The Gateway Pundit. “It was really a good news tour for the President, which they did not cover because they said we didn’t pay them.” This makes sense for a USAGM grantee that Lake says “has not always been in alignment with our foreign policy” and is guilty of pushing “anti-American” and “pro-CCP coverage.”

Additionally, it was recently revealed that another USAGM grantee, Radio Free Europe (RFE), had been using its Hungarian-language service, Szabad Europa, to undermine US ally Hungary’s conservative Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, with Globalist propaganda meant “to destabilize that country,” Lake said.

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“We Have Only Just Begun to Kill Narco-Terrorists” – War Sec. Pete Hegseth Responds to Reports of “Illegal” Orders to “Kill Everybody” on Narcotrafficking Boats as Democrats Call for Prosecution of “a War Crime or Outright Murder”

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has responded to a recent report, claiming that the Department of War, under dubious legal authority, ordered secondary strikes to kill drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea after they survived an initial strike, and that US forces are killing narcoterrorists without justification. 

“As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors,” the Washington Post report claims. According to an anonymous source, Hegseth gave a verbal order “to kill everybody” in the September 2 strike against narcoterrorists trafficking narcotics into the United States, which killed 11 designated terrorists.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, President Trump posted footage from the strike on September 2, stating, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”

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Trump Declares Closure of Venezuela’s Airspace

President Trump on Saturday declared that the airspace “above and surrounding” Venezuela is to be closed, a sign that he might soon launch an attack on the country with the aim of ousting President Nicolas Maduro.

“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

It’s unclear if the declaration means that the US will impose a no-fly zone on Venezuela, which would be an act of war. Such a step or any military strikes on Venezuela would be illegal without congressional authorization, per the US Constitution.

The order came after the president said that he may “very soon” expand the bombing campaign against alleged drug-running boats in the region to strikes on Venezuelan territory.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump spoke to Maduro by phone last week and discussed the possibility of meeting in person, but it doesn’t appear that the conversation did anything to slow the US military buildup in the region and push toward the US launching a regime change war.

The Times report said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been leading the campaign against Venezuela, joined Maduro and Trump in the phone call. They spoke a few days before Rubio’s State Department declared the Cartel of the Suns, or Cartel de los Soles, a group that doesn’t actually exist, a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

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How To Topple Elliott Abrams’ Delusion

Elliott Abrams has resurfaced with familiar instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet feels entitled to rearrange like a piece of furniture in Washington’s living room. His new proposal is drenched in the same Cold War fever and colonial mindset that shaped his work in the 1980s, when U.S. foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.

My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world rarely sees: stories of displacement, of death squads, of villages erased from maps, of governments toppled for daring to act outside Washington’s orbit. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think-tank biographies, but from the grief woven into Central America’s landscape.

Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived inside the countries his policies have destabilized. His newest argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority, by virtue of power alone, to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the hemisphere is still an extension of U.S. strategic space rather than a region with its own political will.

In this telling, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who bothers to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. The money laundering happens in New York and London, not in Caracas. The guns that sustain the drug corridors of the continent used to threaten, to extort, to kill, come overwhelmingly from American producers. And the history of the drug war itself, from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary enforcement wings, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.

Even U.S. government data contradicts Abrams’ narrative. DEA and UNODC reports have long shown that the vast majority of cocaine destined for U.S. consumers travels from Colombia through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a “Venezuelan narco-route” is politically useful: it turns a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case file and prepares the public for escalation.

What’s striking is that Abrams never turns to the real front line of the drug trade: U.S. cities, U.S. banks, U.S. gun shows, U.S. demand. The crisis he describes is born in his own country, yet he looks for the solution in foreign intervention. The United States has long armed, financed, and politically protected its own “narco-allies” when it suited larger strategic goals. The Contras in Nicaragua, paramilitary blocs in Colombia, and death squads in Honduras. These were policy tools, and many of them operated with Abrams’ direct diplomatic support.

I grew up with the stories of what that machinery did to our neighbors. You don’t need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you only need to listen. In Guatemala, Maya communities still grieve a genocide that U.S. officials refused to acknowledge, even as villages were erased and survivors fled into the mountains. In El Salvador, families continue lighting candles for the hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds left by the Contras, a paramilitary force armed, financed, and politically blessed by Washington, remain visible in the stories of burned cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word disappeared is not historically remote; it is widely remembered, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of U.S. anti-communism.

So when Abrams warns about “criminal regimes,” I don’t think of Venezuela. I think of the mass graves, the scorched villages, the secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he championed. And those graves are not metaphors. They are the cartography of an entire era of U.S. intervention, the era Abrams insists on resurrecting.

Abrams now adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” anxieties about “Iranian operatives,” alarms over “Chinese influence.” These issues are stripped of context, inflated, or selectively highlighted to manufacture a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development paths that do not answer to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats—not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken U.S. dominance within it.

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