Tag: venezuela

US President Donald Trump has greenlighted additional measures to pressure Venezuela and prepare for a potential broader military campaign, including covert CIA operations targeting President Nicolas Maduro’s government, the New York Times has reported, citing US officials. 

At the same time, Trump has approved a new round of back-channel negotiations that reportedly led to the Venezuelan president offering to step down after a delay of several years – a proposal the White House rejected, the outlet said on Monday. 

The Pentagon has deployed warships to the Caribbean and has carried out controversial strikes on small boats it claims are involved in drug smuggling from Venezuela. The White House maintains that Maduro is an illegitimate, cartel-linked ruler, fueling speculation that direct military action might be imminent. Maduro has denied the drug trafficking allegations and warned the US against launching “a crazy war.”

According to the NYT, while Trump has not yet deployed combat forces to Venezuela, Washington’s next steps could involve “sabotage or some sort of cyber, psychological, or information operations” aimed at increasing pressure on the Maduro government. 

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Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) offered his ringing endorsement of a recent closed-door briefing on the ongoing campaign of U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats from Latin America, and urged the Trump administration to go public with its legal rationale for the operations.

Rogers was among a handful of lawmakers briefed on the strikes on Nov. 5, in a closed-door sensitive compartmented information facility, commonly referred to as a “SCIF.” Such facilities are used to control access to information that the U.S. government has classified.

“There was nothing that we should have been in a SCIF talking about,” Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, told The Epoch Times on Nov. 12. “They should be talking to all y’all, because it was very well done, completely legal what they’re doing, and they should be more transparent about it, in my view.”

Alongside a U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean Sea and a campaign of pressure against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro that have been growing since the summer, U.S. forces have been bombing suspected drug boats in the region since September. In that time, U.S. forces have conducted at least seven strikes in the Caribbean Sea, nine in the eastern Pacific, and three more in unspecified locations throughout the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility, which covers Central America and South America.

“I’m fine with what they’re doing down there, and I think that the lawyers that did that, talked about the legal basis, should do it publicly,” Rogers said.

The ongoing U.S. military campaign, which the Trump administration has described as a “non-international armed conflict,” has met with skepticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

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For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth – it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) – the “Nightstalkers” – the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away – but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered – and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey – not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal” – or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking – while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

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The US military firepower concentrated off the coast of Venezuela, already massive, has increased dramatically.

Oh, how the times have humbled Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro!

When the US was struggling under feeble Joe Biden, an emboldened Maduro banged his war drums non-stop, credibly threatening to invade neighboring Guyana and seize its oil-rich Essequibo province.

But the first year of Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House and the subsequent siege of Venezuela with the largest military detachment since the Cold War led the ‘tyrant of Caracas’ to cynically become a self-professed ‘advocate for peace’.

So, Yesterday (10), Maduro was in Colombia for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), to make a desperate plea for unity of Latin American countries.

But today, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, USS Gerald R. Ford, and its entire strike group have arrived in the area of responsibility of the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM).

Pressure is building.

Latin Times reported:

“Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro called on Latin American countries to ‘proclaim the unconditional defense of our America as a peace zone’ as the U.S. continues its military campaign in the region.

[…] ‘The union of America is not a rhetorical gesture, but the condition of our liberty and key to our dignity’, Maduro said during a passage of the lengthy letter.”

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