Hidden History -- In The Making

OVER A QUARTER OF AMERICA’S “DRUG BOAT” SEARCHES FIND NOTHING

A 2024 Coast Guard Report Found 27 Percent Of Drug Boat Searches Came Back Empty-Handed, But What Does This Mean For Venezuelan Boat Strikes? It Means Many Innocents Have Been Murdered.

President Donald Trump says American military strikes on eight vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, mostly targeting boats from Venezuela, were legal because they carried drugs being delivered to the United States.

But Republican Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky, who is also chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said maritime law enforcement statistics show that not all boats suspected of carrying drugs actually have drugs onboard. He said the military’s strikes were not in line with the usual American policy.

“When you stop people at sea in international waters, or in your own waters, you announce that you’re going to board the ship and you’re looking for contraband, smuggling or drugs. This happens every day off of Miami,” Paul said on October 19^th on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “We know from Coast Guard statistics that about 25 percent of the time the Coast Guard boards a ship, there are no drugs. So if our policy now is to blow up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running, that would be a bizarre world in which 25 percent of the people are probably innocent.”

Paul made a similar statement in an October 12^th interview.

More than 30 people have been killed so far in the strikes, and the Trump administration has provided no evidence that the vessels contained drugs. We rated Trump’s recent statement that each strike saved “25,000 American lives” false.

Paul’s office pointed PolitiFact to the American Coast Guard’s 2024 fiscal year report, which said that year the agency intercepted drugs in about 73 percent of cases when they boarded boats, with about 27 percent of vessel interceptions yielding no drugs.

Experts said the data supports Paul’s point, but noted that it’s unclear how the Coast Guard defines the term it uses to describe intercepting drugs – “a drug disruption”.

“If the (Coast Guard) boards a vessel and finds a known drug trafficker but no drugs, and that individual gets arrested and convicted, does that count as a ‘drug disruption’?” said Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher. “Or suppose they approach the vessel, it jettisons the drugs overboard, and so the Coast Guard seizes the vessel but the drugs have disappeared into the water. Is that a successful disruption?”

Paul’s figure might not translate directly to the recent boat strikes, experts said, since the American regime might have had intelligence about those specific vessels.

The Coast Guard was contacted about its data collection process but did not respond.

BESIDES THE UKRAINIAN NORD STREAM SUSPECT, WHAT IS POLAND HIDING

It Wasn’t That Long Ago That The Mysterious Attack On The Nord Stream Pipelines Was A Massive Outrage Across The Western World. What A Difference A Few Years Makes When Covering Something Up.

With Russia the presumed culprit, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen vowed the “strongest possible response,” while a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared it “a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.”

What a difference a few years makes. Not only is Russia no longer a target in the criminal investigation, but most Western officials have seemingly lost interest in finding out who was really behind the attack and bringing them to justice.

Maybe that’s because the main investigation of the case, conducted by Germany, has led instead to the upper reaches of the Ukrainian government. That is very awkward.

Last week a Polish court put a major wrench into the gears of the case, blocking a Ukrainian suspect’s extradition to Germany and ordering him released from custody, with the judge declaring his alleged crime a lawful military action taken that was “justified, rational and just,” and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk deeming it “rightly so. The case is closed.”

It’s an odd response to an attack in Sweden and Denmark economic zones that crippled infrastructure partly owned by Europeans (the pipelines were located in the Baltic Sea and brought Russian natural gas to Germany and were 51% Russian owned, with the rest owned by companies in Germany, France, and the Netherlands), an attack once widely denounced by much of the Western establishment. But this is just the latest instance of Polish officials’ disinterest in, if not outright public celebration of the sabotage.

Probably the best-known instance is former foreign affairs minister and now Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski’s now-infamous (and since-deleted) “Thank you, USA” tweet, posted mere hours after the attack in September 2022 and accompanied by a photo of the aftermath of the underwater explosion. But you could go back much further.

There are more than half a dozen cables in the WikiLeaks-released tranche of American diplomatic communications that detail the Polish government’s opposition to Nord Stream dating back to the 2000s, including from Sikorski himself, who had served an earlier stint as foreign minister from 2007 to 2014.

In one September 2007 cable, Polish officials laid out their government’s official position that “Poland considers the project as opposing our interest and the general rule of European solidarity.” Another from November that year describes Poland as “among the most vocal opponents of the project,” and that Poles viewed it as the “modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” referring to the secret deal between Moscow and Berlin in 1939 to carve the country in two.

Poland has been an unwavering opponent of the pipeline ever since, viewing it as a dangerous political project to not just sideline Poland and Ukraine, but make Germany and other Western European powers more dependent on Russian energy.

So it’s not exactly surprising that while much of Europe expressed outrage at the pipeline’s destruction — especially with consensus being for a time that Russia was responsible for destroying its own geopolitical trump card — Polish officials have been somewhere between celebratory and gloating.

“The destruction of Nord Stream, as far as I’m concerned, was a very good thing,” Sikorski told The New Statesman a year later. “The problem with North Stream 2 [the English translation of the pipeline’s name] is not that it was blown up,” tweeted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk earlier this month. “The problem is that it was built.”

Meanwhile, while Germany has been understandably eager to get to the bottom of who was responsible — the switch-off of Russian gas exports to the country that the attack contributed to has sent its energy market reeling, hastening a process of economically ruinous deindustrialization — Poland has not exactly been helpful. As German investigators followed the trail of evidence to Ukrainians and then Poland, which the saboteurs allegedly used as an operating base from which to plan and resource the operation, they were met with resistance from their counterparts in the fellow NATO state, who dismissed the widespread reports of possible Polish complicity as simply Russian propaganda.

By September last year, angry German investigators were privately accusing the Polish government of having sabotaged their probe and engaged in “obstruction of justice.” One former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, charged outright that it had done so to “to cover up its own involvement in the attack on the pipelines,” because “operations of such dimensions are inconceivable without the approval of the political leaders of the countries involved.”

In other words, the Polish court’s decision to release the leading suspect is just the capstone to this alleged Polish campaign of obstruction of Germany’s investigation. The judge who ordered the case closed, it should be noted, was not acting in defiance of the official Polish government position, but in deference to it. Polish officials, including Prime Minister Tusk, repeatedly spoke out publicly against the suspect’s extradition in advance of the ruling.

It all adds to mounting tensions between the two NATO allies, tensions that could strain the alliance should evidence ever surface that Germany’s own ally assisted what is essentially a terrorist attack against it. Lucky for everyone involved, the Ukrainian suspect’s release makes it exceedingly unlikely not only that the perpetrators of the attack will face justice, but that the world ever finds out which larger powers, if any, were behind it and for what reason. It’s not farfetched to wonder if that’s by design.

LEARN ABOUT THE AMERICAN REGIME ABUSING THE WORLD

The American Regime Can Make Threats, Impose Sanctions And Amass War Machinery, But You Don’t Truly Know They’re Serious About Attacking A Country Until They Start Churning Out Pentagon Propaganda.

It’s just news story after news story about the American regime and its allies terrorizing the world today.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been filming themselves committing horrific massacres in Sudan over the last couple of days, reportedly murdering some two thousand civilians. You can see the bloodstains on the ground in satellite images. The RSF and its atrocities are backed by the UAE, a close partner of the United States.

Meanwhile Israel has committed another wave of massacres of its own throughout the Gaza Strip, reportedly killing 104 people in a single day, including 46 children. This is as many Palestinians as would typically be killed on any given day in Gaza prior to the so-called “ceasefire”.

CBS News’ 60 Minutes has released a cartoonishly blatant war propaganda piece on “Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator” about how poor and unhappy the people of Venezuela are under their current government. The piece featured an interview with Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said that “If I was Maduro I’d head to Russia or China right now; his days are numbered.”

The American regime can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don’t truly know they’re serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press.

In the same interview, Scott also said that if Maduro is successfully ousted, “it’ll be the end of Cuba.”

“America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy,” he added.

The senator’s statements suggest that the American regime is preparing a push in Latin America similar to what it has been executing with Israel in the middle east, eliminating any powers which refuse to bend the knee. South of the American border the top two disobedient governments are the socialist states of Venezuela and Cuba. In the middle east the American regime and Israel have spent the last two years bombing Iran and Yemen, securing a regime change in Syria, and doing everything they can to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah in order to rule the region uncontested.

And of course we’ve still got the horrifying American regime’s proxy war in Ukraine, where men continue to be dragged off against their will to fight in a nightmarish conflict that most Ukrainians now oppose, but which Zelensky is saying he intends to keep fighting for years against the will of the public. This whole miserable ordeal could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but the western power alliance avoided off-ramp after off-ramp in order to ensure that Russia would get sucked into another costly military quagmire.

All over the world the American regime and its allies are murdering and abusing people in order to dominate the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system with which its power is intertwined. It is a giant murder machine feeding on human blood and the life force of our biosphere while providing nothing but obstacles to a healthy world.

The American-centralized empire is a disease that affects our entire species. We had better find a cure, and fast.

GAZA RESIDENTS ARE UNABLE TO REBUILD THEIR LIVES BECAUSE THEY FEAR MORE ISRAELI ATTACKS

Despite The “Ceasefire” Between Israel And Hamas, Israeli Attacks Continue To Kill Palestinians, Causing Them To Lose Faith In The Truce.

While the United States-brokered ceasefire reached between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas earlier this month has provided a sliver of respite, repeated Israeli violations have left Palestinians constantly fearful of renewed attacks, unable to resume the lives they lived before Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023, let alone begin anew.

On Wednesday alone, more than 100 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 253 others injured in several Israeli air strikes on southern Gaza, the worst violation of the ceasefire.

The Israeli army launched some 10 air strikes on Khan Younis in southern Gaza early on Thursday. This is despite Israel’s assertion on Wednesday of a “resumption” of the ceasefire after a large wave of strikes it claims was carried out in retaliation for Hamas killing one of its soldiers in southern Gaza – an accusation Hamas denies.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 211 people have been killed and 597 others injured in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire took effect.

“While the ceasefire might technically exist, the sounds of the explosions, the sounds of gunfire coming from the eastern side [of Gaza], the deep mechanical hum of the drones … in the skies of the entire Gaza Strip is a constant reminder of how fragile this ceasefire has been so far,” said Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, adding that it is also “a reminder that peace is out of reach in this region.

“People always talk about how uncertain they are, how concerned they are of the ability of the ceasefire to hold … and to reduce the level of fear and trauma they have been experiencing.”

Israel’s attacks on Gaza are in violation of the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on October 10^th under President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan. Phase one includes the release of Israeli captives in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The plan also envisages the rebuilding of Gaza and the establishment of a new governing mechanism without Hamas.

‘Where are the international guarantees that were promised?’

The psychological impact of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed at least 68,527 people and wounded 170,395, on Palestinians is profound; the relentless suffering is unimaginable.

ISRAELI ATTACK IN GAZA CONTINUES

As Israeli attacks on Gaza continue Mazen Shaheen says:

“We’re waiting for a real chance to try and rebuild our lives. We started to pick things up again during the first week or two after the war, but then the truce was breached; thankfully, it ended quickly. We hadn’t even caught our breath when the second breach happened,” Mazen Shaheen, a Gaza said.

Many Palestinians are losing hope due to Israel’s continuous breaches of the ceasefire.

“Now, after the truce and the new wave of bombings on Gaza, people who had just begun to feel some sense of safety, peace, and reassurance – who believed the war was finally over – are once again living in fear, especially the children and women,” Gaza City resident Hassan Lubbad said.

In the streets of Gaza City, people talk about “how the ceasefire hasn’t brought any certainty or peace, only more questions of when the next strike will happen, will it enter more easily or will there be an end to this cycle of fear?” said Mahmoud.

Palestinians are determined to send a message to the world about their thoughts on the ceasefire and their expectations of the international community.

“The message we want to send is this: where are the international guarantees that were promised? Where are the mediating countries that helped broker the ceasefire and pledged to ensure its continuation?” said Shaheen.

One of Shaheen’s friends was wounded in Wednesday’s attacks. His friend’s condition is now stable, he said.

Suha Awad said as Israeli attacks on Gaza continue:

“We want a complete end to the war, a total ceasefire. We just want to live in safety. We want full commitment to the truce, not just for a week or two, only for things to return to aggression and war,” Gaza City resident Suha Awad told Al Jazeera.

A UKRAINE NO-FLY ZONE MUST BE REJECTED BY NATO

The Reckless Idea Has Resurfaced The Past Few Weeks. Even A Majority Of Hardline Figures In The West Considered The Move Too Dangerous, Since It Would Lead To Direct Clashes Between NATO And Russian Aircraft.

In the past few weeks, Russian drones and jet fighters have repeatedly penetrated the airspace of Poland, Estonia, and other NATO members. Western officials have reacted harshly to those episodes, shooting down intruding drones and, in the case of President Donald Trump, issuing threats to attack even manned Russian aircraft if such incidents continue.

NATO leaders and their supporters in the news media are responding to the rising tensions by reviving an idea from the earliest days of the Kremlin’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine: imposing a no-fly zone over that country. It is an especially provocative and dangerous scheme that carries a serious risk of triggering World War III.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for NATO to establish a no-fly zone when Russia invaded in 2022. However, President Joe Biden spurned the proposal, and NATO’s foreign ministers explicitly declined to take that step at a March 4^th session. Even a majority of hardline figures in the West considered the move too dangerous, since it would lead to direct clashes between NATO and Russian aircraft. Support for the initiative was confined only to the most hawkish, reckless individuals and groups, such as then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Liz Cheney’s male alter ego. Even scholars at the Atlantic Council came out against it.

Zelensky has never relented in his quest for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, however. In June 2024, the president and his advisors pushed a more limited option of creating such a zone over just western Ukraine, relying on air defense systems in neighboring NATO countries to enforce it. Their logic was that using such weaponry to shoot Moscow’s planes out of the sky would be less dangerous than sending up NATO aircraft to intercept their Russian counterparts in Ukrainian airspace. After the surge in drone incursion incidents this September, Zelensky joined his Polish counterpart in again calling for NATO to install a no-fly zone over his country.

Kiev’s enthusiastic lobbyists in the West kept up the pressure as well. Writing in July 2023, Andreas Umland stated that imposing a no-fly zone was as imperative as ever. With the arrogant certitude so typical of Umland and his ideological compatriots, he casually dismissed warnings that offering such protection to Ukraine was unduly perilous. “Many observers see Western-backed no-fly zones over the Ukrainian hinterland as a path to World War III. But it is unlikely that such an escalation would occur, so long as Western troops are not deployed on the front lines.” Other pro-Ukraine lobbyists, such as former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis, are still advocating the scheme of confronting Russian planes.

Imposing a Ukraine no-fly zone was an irresponsible idea when ultra-hawks first proposed it in 2022, and it is now even more so. NATO’s initial response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to adopt new economic sanctions against Moscow and to provide economic and limited military aid to Kiev. That involvement has expanded into a NATO proxy war against Russia. NATO members are not only supplying vast quantities of sophisticated offensive weaponry to Ukraine so that Kiev can attack targets deep inside Russia, but have also provided direct logistical assistance, including targeting data, to Ukrainian forces. The Wall Street Journal now reports that the United States is willing to give Kiev crucial intelligence assistance for such long-range missile strikes.

Vladimir Putin’s government has remained surprisingly patient and restrained with respect to such growing provocations. But Moscow’s patience is not infinite. Putin and other high-level Russian officials have stated bluntly that NATO is waging war against their country. The Kremlin is now warning that it regards American military personnel who assist Kiev in operating Ukraine’s Patriot air defense systems as legitimate targets. Indeed, one such incident may already have taken place. The latest declaration is just one more indication about how alarming tensions between NATO and Russia are rising. For its part, Moscow appears to be probing the alliance’s air defense systems with the proliferation of drone and fighter plane incursions into the air space of NATO member states.

Attempting to impose a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine in such a dangerous, increasingly unstable political and military environment is virtually begging for trouble. NATO leaders have not yet officially endorsed the idea, but resistance to the scheme among prominent members of the Western foreign policy establishment is noticeably less vocal and extensive than it was in 2022 or 2023.

Even flirting with the scheme is ill-advised. Russian leaders already were furious about how the United States and its allies contemptuously dismissed Moscow’s repeated warnings that making Ukraine a NATO member or de facto military asset would cross a bright red line and pose an existential threat to Russia’s security. Perceptive Western analyses warned about NATO’s tone deaf policy, but to no avail. Scott Horton’s splendid book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, provides the most detailed, sobering account of NATO’s policy malfeasance and the tragedy it caused.

Unfortunately, the NATO powers seem determined to repeat the blunder of ignoring Moscow’s new warnings and red lines with even worse potential consequences. The blustering, confrontational reaction of Washington and its allies to Russia’s growing intrusions into the airspace of NATO members conveys a contemptuous belief that the Kremlin is just bluffing—that Putin would never actually attack a member of the alliance and risk a devastating military response from a united NATO. Such confidence may be erroneous, just as the consensus that Moscow would not launch a full-scale war against Ukraine proved to be.

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s level of involvement in the conflict has escalated inexorably and dramatically. Over time, the NATO powers have become de facto belligerent parties in the war. Russian leaders now openly assert that NATO is waging a war against the Russian Federation. Trying to establish and enforce a no-fly zone could be the capstone to the Western process of escalation. Imposing and trying to enforce such a zone also might well be the action that sparks a regional or even global conflagration.

YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD TO FEAR MUSLIMS WHILE THE AMERICAN EMPIRE TERRORIZES THE WORLD

The Empire You Live Under Is Everything You Are Trained To Fear. Your Own Rulers Are The Murderers. Your Own Rulers Are The Terrorists. Your Own Rulers Are The Tyrants.

Your own rulers are the problem.

An article was put out last month about a leaked polling report commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs which actually found that promoting Islamophobia is the most effective way of combatting the way worldwide public opinion has been turning against Israel.

“Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high,” Ryan Grim wrote: “By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’ Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country.”

So this is an actual, planned tactic. The shrieking vitriol we’ve been seeing about Islam and Muslims lately is being deliberately and systematically fomented as a calculated strategy.

One of the moronic things about this latest wave of Islamophobic hysteria is that the American regime, Israel and their allies are vastly more murderous and tyrannical than the entire Muslim world combined.

The Trump administration is currently sending the world’s largest aircraft carrier and a bunch of warships to the waters off Latin America, where they’ve been waging a bogus new war on terror with increasingly frequent attacks on boats carrying alleged “narco-terrorists”. They’re not even disguising the fact that this is actually about preparing for regime change interventionism in Venezuela, a government that Washington has long sought to topple because of its massive oil reserves and noncompliance with the capitalist world order.

The American power alliance is constantly doing things like this. Waging wars, bombing countries, imposing starvation sanctions, staging coups, backing proxy conflicts, meddling in foreign elections — all with the goal of total planetary domination. It’s accepted as the baseline norm and the western press often barely even reports on its abuses (did you know Trump has bombed Somalia more than 80 times this year?), but that doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical.

And we’re being told day in and day out that we all need to be afraid of Muslims, who even with a worldwide population of two billion still manage to be far, far less violent and destructive than the American-centralized power alliance.

In fact, the most abusive Muslim states are America’s partners in crime like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose genocidal butchery in Yemen was backed by the American regime and its allies from 2015–2022. The UAE is funding genocidal atrocities in Sudan right this very moment. The American-centralized empire is the most destructive power structure on earth, and the most destructive Muslim states are backed by that same western power structure.

The empire you live under is everything you have trained to fear. Your own rulers are the murderers. Your own rulers are the terrorists. Your own rulers are the tyrants. Your own rulers are the problem.

Your rulers want you shaking your fists at Muslims, immigrants, disobedient governments, and members of the other mainstream political party so that you don’t start shaking your fists at them.

AMERICA’S ATTACKS ON SMALL BOATS ARE ILLEGAL

Since The First Of September, The American Navy Has Been Blowing Up Small Vessels Off The Coast Of Venezuela. The Perpetrators Should Be Subjected To Prosecution Under International War Crimes Laws.

Since the first of September, the American Navy has been blowing up small vessels off the coast of Venezuela. Over 10 nine boats with approximately 42 dead have reportedly been attacked. The American regime declares that these boats are an imminent threat to the country because they are operated by narco-terrorists. It appears no evidence was necessary to suport these attacks by the regime.

The Trump administration has completely eschewed the legal requirements for due process or normal interdiction procedures. Sadly, due to the Global War on Terror, we Americans have tragically grown accustomed to their government assassinating people because they are merely suspected terrorists. Leaving aside moral issues, it is worth recalling that these actions are illegal under both domestic and international law.

First and foremost, these actions are in contradiction to the United States Constitution. Article I, section 8 clearly states that Congress shall have the power to “declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” Article II, section 2 states: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” The president does command the forces, but only Congress can declare war—and Congress has not declared war against alleged “drug boats” in Latin America. These small boats 1,300 miles from the Florida Keys pose no emergency threat, and blowing them up is clearly an act of war.

Congress has appropriated many trillions of dollars for a plethora of wars since World War II. However, since 1942, they haven’t had the courage to take responsibility and actually declare war as the Constitution requires. Over the years, they usually haven’t even had the fortitude to refuse to finance wars with which they disagree. As a result of congressional unwillingness to exercise their mandated duties, the forever and failed wars have continued unabated. Congress does not want to be caught voting for wars which the public doesn’t want. Especially if the war becomes a failure, as is normally the case, they enjoy being free to say whatever the public wants to hear without the record of a pesky vote to contradict their dishonest rhetoric. To aid this ruse, the leadership tends to wrap the military budgets into big continuing resolutions or omnibus bills so there is no vote showing undeniable support for particular wars. The result: a win-win for duplicitous politicians and the military industry, but a big lose-lose for the American people and the poor American and foreign souls murdered and maimed.

The latest attacks and killings are also forbidden by article 2, section 4 of the UN Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Article 51 allows unilateral use of force only in self-defense against an “armed attack.” America is not threatened by small outboard motor boats more than 1,000 miles from it’s shores, and their mere existence in international waters, even if they are carrying drugs, certainly doesn’t constitute an “armed attack.” Off the coast of Venezuela there is a significant American flotilla, which is fully capable of intercepting these small boats without having to obliterate them.

International Maritime Law (UNCLOS) article 88 states, “The high seas shall be reserved for peaceful purposes.” While drug interdiction may be permitted, the standard procedure is visit, search, and seize, not summary destruction.

Or consider the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in 1998 and signed by the American regime in 2000. This statute sets out the court’s jurisdiction over war crimes among other issues. In May 2002 Undersecretary of State John Bolton formally notified the UN secretary general that the United States “does not intend to become a party to the treaty.” (Anyone surprised it was John Bolton who made this submission?) The George W. Bush administration was prepping for the invasion of Iraq—and the other countries on the neocon hit list—so were looking to limit the liability for those illegal wars. Remember, Iran is the last on the list that hasn’t been wrecked to date.

In 1950 the United States voted to approve the United Nations Nuremberg Principles, several of which are relevant to the Trump administration’s military campaign in Latin America:

Principle III: “The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.”

Principle IV: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Principle VI: “The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law: Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i). (b) War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder…” “…or devastation not justified by military necessity. (c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population…”

Back to domestic law: The 1981 Executive Order 12333 section 2.11 signed by President Ronald Reagan states, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” This order has never been revoked.

When you consider the above, it is no surprise the admiral in charge of SOUTHCOM—the regional command responsible for Central and South America, their territorial waters, and the Caribbean—recently opted for early retirement.

Of course, the American regime has ignored these laws with impunity for decades because of its stature and power in the world. That is changing rapidly, and America’s leaders should begin to contemplate that they may be held accountable by international courts. Because of America’s many illegal and unjust wars, the number of countries who have lost respect for and dislike America is increasing rapidly. There may come a time when those countries or a large group of them will hold our leaders responsible and pursue prosecution.

ISLAMOPHOBIA IS PUSHED BY THE ZIONISTS BECAUSE IT’S EASIER THAN GETTING GOOD PEOPLE TO LIKE ISRAEL

Israel Makes Everything Gross. It Makes The World More Violent, More Sociopathic, And More Hateful. The State Is Sustained By Nonstop Violence And Hatred.

Have you ever noticed how whenever you see someone promoting hatred toward Muslims, nine times out of ten it will be someone who supports Israel? There’s a reason for that.

Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel.

Support for Israel is a hard sell. On paper it’s just a crappy, evil country full of shitty, evil people, and has no redeeming qualities as a state. Nobody can explain how it’s an important ally in a way that makes sense; all the problems they claim it helps solve are problems Israel itself creates with the help of western backing. Unless you’re a devout Jewish Zionist or Christian Zionist there’s nothing about the modern state of Israel you’d naturally be inclined to support.

Appealing to western racism, however, is much easier. We’ve got entire mainstream political factions whose whole platform is just grimacing in disgust at anyone who looks and acts a bit different. White supremacism runs deep, and westerners have been fighting and killing Muslims for many centuries, so there’s plenty of cultural memory to draw on for this specific form of hatred.

So they don’t worry so much about explaining the positives about the state of Israel, focusing instead on fearmongering about the religion whose adherents tend to wind up on the receiving end of Israeli military violence. They can’t convince us that Israel is good in and of itself, but they can convince many of us that it’s good to drop military explosives on Muslims.

Most of the Islamophobia you see in the west comes from Israel supporters and people who’ve been propagandized by Israel supporters. A small minority comes from extreme fringe rightists who hate both Muslims and Jews, but the majority is the product of western support for Israel and the west’s warmongering in the middle east which Israel consistently plays a role in.

That’s why you’ll see high-profile Israeli social media accounts fearmongering about the growing Muslim populations in Europe, for example. You wouldn’t think it would be any of Israel’s concern if there are a lot of Muslims in Belgium or whatever, but it is in Israel’s political interests to keep westerners fearful and disdainful toward members of the Islamic faith.

We’re seeing more and more of this as Israel increasingly alienates western centrists and progressives, relying more and more heavily on support from the western right. As the narrative that a poor persecuted religious minority needs to have its own homeland loses traction with its intended audience, we’re seeing it increasingly replaced with the narrative that them there Muslims need killin’, yeehaw.

Israel makes everything gross. It makes the world more violent, more sociopathic, and more hateful. The entire state is sustained by nonstop violence and hatred. It’s a malignant tumor on the flesh of our species.

MORE THAN 150 CONTRIBUTORS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES ARE GOING TO BOYCOTT THE PAPER OVER IT’S GAZA COVERAGE

They Demand That The Paper Examine Its Bias, Update Its Style Guide On Israel-Palestine, And Call For An American Arms Embargo To Israel.

More than 150 New York Times contributors have signed a pledge not to write for the American newspaper’s opinion section, citing its “biased coverage” of the Israel-Palestine conflict and war on Gaza.

“Until The New York Times takes accountability for its biased coverage and commits to truthfully and ethically reporting on the US-Israeli war on Gaza, any putative ‘challenge’ to the newsroom or the editorial board in the form of a first-person essay is, in effect, permission to continue this malpractice,” the signatories to the letter wrote.

“Only by withholding our labor can we mount an effective challenge to the hegemonic authority that the Times has long used to launder the US and Israel’s lies,” the writers added.

The letter was signed by dozens of high-profile activists, artists, and American politicians including Rima Hassan; Chelsea Manning; Rashida Tlaib; Sally Rooney; Elia Suleiman; Greta Thunberg; Viet Than Nguyen; and Dave Zirin.

“We owe it to the journalists and writers of Palestine to refuse complicity with the Times, and to demand that the paper account for its failures, such that it can never again manufacture consent for mass slaughter, torture, and displacement,” the authors wrote.

Some other prominent names joining the boycott include Chris Hedges; Marc Lamont Hill; Noura Erakat; Vijay Prashad; Mariame Kaba; Robin DG Kelley; Mohammed el-Kurd; Susan Stryker; Jia Tolentino; Eve L Ewing; Dean Spade; Nyle Fort; Susan Abulhawa; and Rashid Khalidi.

THREE DEMANDS

The signatories issued three demands to The New York Times.

First, it called on the newspaper to conduct “a review of anti-Palestinian bias and produce new editorial standards for Palestine coverage”.

The signatories called for new sourcing and citation practices, along with a new style guide for how the paper uses vocabulary to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict. The letter also called for a ban on any journalist who has served in the Israeli military.

The writers also called on The New York Times to retract a December 2023 article titled “Screams Without Words,” which alleged that Palestinians who took part in the Hamas-led 7^th October 2023 attack committed sexual assault against Israeli women.

That article relied largely on the testimony of an unnamed Israeli special forces paramedic. A spokesperson for the kibbutz where the article claimed the assaults took place later denied the allegations made by The New York Times.

Anat Schwartz, one of the report’s authors, was later investigated by the paper after it emerged that she had liked a social media post calling for Gaza to be turned into a “slaughterhouse”.

Prior to the article, family members of the girls killed during the attack, who were the alleged victims of the sexual assault, gave several interviews that appeared to contradict the claims made in the story. However, none of these interviews were used in the New York Times piece.

The letter’s signatories also demand that The New York Times’ editorial board call for an American arms embargo on Israel.

The signatories said their demands were neither “impossible nor unreasonable”. The authors noted that the paper updated its style guide during the late 1980s AIDS crisis and also apologised for erroneous reporting following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

“There is no US newspaper more influential than The New York Times. Editors and producers in newsrooms across the West take cues from its coverage, it is widely considered the ‘paper of record’ in the United States,” the letter said.

“Since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza, The New York Times has obfuscated, justified, and outright denied the occupier’s war crimes, thus continuing the paper’s decades-long practice of acting as a bullhorn for the Israeli government and military,” the signatories added.

THE AMERICAN REGIME’S LAWLESS AND ARROGANT ATTEMPT AT REGIME CHANGE IN VENEZUELA

The Trump Regime Is Ramping Up Military Aggression Against Venezuela. His Attacks On Several Boats In The Caribbean Have Killed At Least 27 People As Of October 17th.

Now, President Donald Trump has signed a presidential finding, which approves CIA covert action in Venezuela.

The military and national security veterans at the Eisenhower Media Network disagree strongly with the use of the American military in the Caribbean and the bullying of Latin America more broadly.

Senior fellow Michael Baker assesses the situation succinctly: The airstrikes in the Caribbean are “murder in international waters of unknown people and without due process.”

“Members of the Trump administration are like vigilante cops,” says senior fellow Bill Astore. “They think they can enforce the law by breaking the law. In attempting to display toughness, they’re showing moral weakness by murdering people who could well be innocent.”

The White House and the Pentagon have not even released the identities of the people on board or the precise nature of the cargo.

Senior fellow Matthew Hoh recalls the Tom Clancy war novel A Clear and Present Danger, which featured a well-funded covert program against a drug cartel in a Latin American country. “That storyline is now being implemented with one important addition: regime change,” Hoh explains.

“Tom Clancy was a hawk’s hawk, but even he knew the limits of military power, as well as the great dangers that come from a President’s constitutional crimes. Clancy’s story is a tragedy and a cautionary tale, not a triumph.” Citing the United States’ catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Hoh stresses that Washington’s efforts at regime change never end well.

LEGALITY

The legal foundations for murder in the Caribbean are shaky, as Congress has authorized neither missile strikes nor war.

The administration designated the Cartel of the Suns (“Cartel de los Soles”) a terrorist organization and continues to argue that the cartel is a criminal group headed by Venezuelan President Nicholás Maduro. Such a designation triggers an asset freeze and certain travel restrictions. It also demonizes the group and convinces some members of the American public to support attacks on that group.

The administration further argues that it’s self-defense to strike boats that allegedly bring drugs to America.

“Self-defense” is a tried and true pretext for American military activity. It was used to justify bombing Libya in 1986, invading Panama in 1989, bombing Iraq in 1993, invading and occupying Iraq in 2003, and bombing West Asia and Africa (e.g., Syria, Yemen, Somalia).

“In a world where government lies may be easily refuted in seconds, Trump’s initiation of war for Venezuelan oil and resources presented as a war on drugs and made up narco-terror is as illegal as it is embarrassing,” concludes senior fellow Karen Kwiatkowski.

A BIPARTISAN AFFAIR

The American regime’s history of aggression against Latin America is extensive. Washington, D.C., makes sure that no country, especially one in the United States’ “backyard,” opposes the American-led capitalist order or dares to use natural resources to benefit people instead of multinational corporations.

Hugo Chavez attempted to do just that in 1999. A coup soon followed – one which CIA, at the very least, knew about in advance.

It was the Obama administration that originally declared Venezuela to be a national security threat, unlocking many legal authorities, including the imposition of economic sanctions.

The first Trump administration expanded economic sanctions and imposed an embargo barring financial transactions with Venezuelan government officials and freezing all of the government’s assets in America.

The Biden administration then levied more economic sanctions against Venezuelan officials and the oil industry and increased bounties on Venezuelan government officials.

CONGRESS

Long in favor of fully funding nonstop war and worldwide military deployments, including those throughout America’s Southern Command, the Democratic Party has yet to try to rein in the Trump administration’s Caribbean warfare.

enator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) shows the opposition party’s lack of backbone: “We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations. I have no problem going after drug traffickers.”

The Nation explains, “In other words, Slotkin’s goal is not to stop Trump’s bombing campaign and possible rush to war with Venezuela but to simply make sure it follows proper legal protocol.”

“The CIA — and the spineless members of Congress who never met a war they didn’t like — remain both consistent and ascendant,” says Kwiatkowski. “The only war Americans need today is the one we must fight against the military-industrial-congressional complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us of almost 65 years ago.”

The military and national security veterans at the Eisenhower Media Network favor diplomatic engagement with Venezuela, not armed conflict or economic warfare.