Boat strikes: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military had destroyed four more vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Monday, killing 14 people — the biggest one-day toll since the campaign began last month. One person survived, he said, and Mexican officials had “assumed responsibility” for the rescue. Mr. Hegseth did not provide evidence for the administration’s contention that the vessels were smuggling drugs, the basis for an operation that has killed at least 57 people.
Trump's fake war with Venezuela
- Thread starter Hume
- Start date
AI Overview
+14
An act of war is an action by one country against another that either provokes a conflict or takes place during an ongoing armed conflict.
Trump is happily killing people in Venezuela, claiming they are drug runners bringing Fentanyl to America. They are in out bord motor boats which cannot travel to America. Fentanyl does not come from there. He did not question them or provide a defense. He shot them from afar, and joked about making them dead. This is a horrible black eye for America. Trump showed how much he respects human life.
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These are criminal acts....as the world watches.
Yeah, pretty bad stuff. Another article along the same lines:
Venezuela’s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If…
scheerpost.com
Who has POTUS been "happily killing in Venezuela"?
That's what US intelligence agencies told him. I don't recall you doubting the assessments of these 51 current and former intelligence officials in 2020.
- James Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence)
- Michael Hayden (former CIA and NSA Director)
- Leon Panetta (former CIA Director and Defense Secretary)
- John Brennan (former CIA Director)
- Thomas Finger
- Rick Ledgett (former NSA Deputy Director)
- John McLaughlin (former acting CIA Director)
- Michael Morell (former acting CIA Director)
- Mike Vickers
- Doug Wise
- Nick Rasmussen
- Russ Travers
- Andy Liepman
- John Moseman
- Larry Pfeiffer
- Jeremy Bash
- Rodney Snyder
- Glenn Gerstell (former NSA General Counsel)
- David B. Buckley
- Nada Bakos
- Patty Brandmaier
- James B. Bruce
- David Cariens
- Janice Cariens
- Paul Kolbe
- Peter Corsell
- Brett Davis
- Roger Zane George
- Steven L. Hall
- Kent Harrington
- Don Hepburn
- Timothy D. Kilbourn
- Ron Marks
- Jonna Hiestand Mendez
- Emile Nakhleh
- Gerald A. O'Shea
- David Priess
- Pam Purcilly
- Marc Polymeropoulos
- Chris Savos
- Nick Shapiro
- John Sipher
- Stephen Slick
- Cynthia Strand
- Greg Tarbell
- David Terry
- Greg Treverton
- John Tullius
- David A. Vanell
- Winston Wiley
- Kristin Wood
The boats who were sunk or seized are "go-fast" speedboats (typically 20-50 feet long, multi-engine vessels capable of 50-80+ knots in open water), designed for high-speed smuggling from Venezuela, Colombia, or other South American origins through the Caribbean to the U.S. or islands like Trinidad and Tobago. These are not "boats that cannot even make it to the United States", they are built for long-range transit (up to 700 miles round-trip) and can carry up to 3,000 pounds of cargo per vessel)
It comes primarily from China and Mexico. It enters the US somehow. Can you categorically explain how this occurs?
Circumstances prevented those options. It's not the POTUS's job to interrogate or provide a defense to designated terrorists in international waters, is it?
I believe you'll find that the US military carried out is lawful orders.
Need a tissue?
I don't agree.
I don't value their lives either. Are you gonna cry, now?
Yeah, pretty bad stuff. Another article along the same lines:
Venezuela’s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If…
This article is primarily an opinion piece (op-ed), not neutral reporting. It was originally published on Common Dreams as an "Opinion" piece.
ScheerPost republished it unchanged, and progressive outlets like Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, and Smirking Chimp routinely tag such submissions as opinion or analysis.
Jeffrey Sachs (economist and frequent critic of US foreign policy) and Sybil Fares present a clear argumentative thesis: US actions toward Venezuela are not about democracy or drugs but "gangster politics" aimed at seizing oil. The title itself—"America’s Gangster Politics"—is editorial framing, not a factual headline.
Loaded throughout with phrases like "dusting off its old regime-change playbook," "utter disregard for sovereignty," "flimsy moral pretext," "addicted to war," "reckless disregard," and "epitome of gangsterism." These are interpretive judgments, not reported facts.
It's a ~1,200-word essay building a historical indictment of US imperialism (citing 1953 Iran, 2003 Iraq, etc.) to argue the current Venezuela policy fits the same pattern. No pretense of balance—no quotes from Trump admin officials defending the policy, no Venezuelan opposition voices.
From what I've read, this isn't about curtailing the drug trade, it's about oil. From the article I linked to previously:
**
The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.
The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.
In 2023, Trump openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources. .
What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
On October 26, 2025, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent US military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.
**
Now, I think it's notable to make special note of the paragraph immediately after the text above:
**
Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The CIA knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.
In March 2015, Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The White House has maintained that claim of a US “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president. This tragicomedy of the US eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the US dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.
**
So clearly, Trump isn't the only U.S. Presidnet to use these shady tactics.
Well, I've quoted the introduction in my last post here. Feel free to point out how any part of it is innacurate.
I didn't say it was inaccurate. I had @GrokAi analyze it and I posted the results.
Partisan political opinions, whether you read 'em somewhere or otherwise, aren't evidence of "shady tactics", are they?
I took a glance. I left the analysis to the machine.
Agreed. I'm personally more interested in the claims made in the article. Ofcourse, you'd have to at least read the article in order to begin to determine whether or not any of their claims are false.
Good for you.
The AI did that, too.
Run the analysis yourself.
Of course, I'll understand if you don't.