Monday 8th of September 2025
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drunk on power, addicted to himself....

The US military’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers traveling by boat in international waters in the Caribbean is an illegal use of war powers to address what should have been a situation of law enforcement. Unless this dangerous precedent is condemned and curtailed, it will enable US authorities to summarily shoot anyone they choose by simply declaring a “war” against them.

 

Trump’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers sets a dangerous precedent
Kenneth Roth

 

Last month, it was reported that Donald Trump had signed a secret decree authorizing the Pentagon to use military force against certain designated Latin American drug cartels, claiming that they were “terrorist” organizations. On Tuesday, Trump wrote that on his orders the military had targeted Tren de Aragua “narcoterrorists”, accusing them of “operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro”, the Venezuelan leader, and being “responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere”.

No reported attempt was made to interdict and detain the boatload of people. The video accompanying Trump’s statement suggests that the boat was simply blown up. When asked why the boat wasn’t stopped and its occupants arrested, Trump ducked the question and suggested that the killings would force traffickers to think twice before trying to move drugs to the United States.

Under international standards for law enforcement, lethal force can be used solely as a last resort to meet an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. That rule makes sense because law-enforcement officials should ordinarily seek to arrest and prosecute criminal suspects. That is the best way to ensure they have committed the offense in question. It also respects the fact that for most crimes, the penalty upon conviction is a prison sentence, not the death penalty – let alone summary killing without trial.

Trump has sought to evade those standards by in effect declaring war against Venezuelan drug cartels. Beginning with Richard Nixon in 1971, US presidents have repeatedly referred to a “war on drugs”, but that was a metaphoric war, a rhetorical claim that the effort was important, not a literal war. The distinction is important, because in genuine armed conflicts, opposing combatants can be summarily shot unless they are surrendering or in custody. There is ordinarily no duty to try to capture or arrest them.

There was nothing in the encounter in the Caribbean Sea that is indicative of a war. There has been no suggestion that the alleged drug traffickers were firing at US forces or otherwise engaged in what could fairly be described as combat. The US military simply blew them out the water. It wrongly applied wartime rules in what should have been a law-enforcement situation.

That Trump calls drug-trafficking suspects “terrorists” doesn’t change the rules for law enforcement. Terrorists are criminals, not combatants. Absent an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, they must be arrested, not shot.

That illicit drugs such as fentanyl cause enormous harm also does not alter the rules governing law-enforcement operations. Much criminal activity causes serious harm, but unless that harm constitutes an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury and cannot be stopped by other means, law-enforcement standards require arrest and prosecution, not the use of lethal force.

Nor does it matter that the people killed may have been hardened criminals. Even despicable individuals are entitled to arrest and prosecution rather than summary killing.

If war rules could be applied to suspected terrorists or drug traffickers by a mere declaration of “war”, the risks would be enormous. Law-enforcement officers could shoot anyone anywhere on the mere assertion, never proved in court, that they were part of the group against which a “war” had been declared. What just happened at sea in the Caribbean could be replicated on the streets of New York, London or Paris.

Until now, the most visible example of a leader treating a “war on drugs” as a genuine armed conflict has been the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Under his direction, Filipino security forces summarily killed thousands of poor young men. The international criminal court charged him for these executions, and he is now in custody in The Hague awaiting trial.

Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and a Republican leader on foreign policy, met the killing of the 11 with callous bravado: “I hope America’s adversaries are watching & now understand there’s a new sheriff in town.” But even a new sheriff must abide by policing rules. Trump did not.

We have every reason to worry that the Trump administration intends to continue this lawless behavior. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warned that such operations “will happen again”.

To avoid normalizing such flouting of law-enforcement rules, the Trump administration’s killing of the alleged drug traffickers must be broadly and firmly criticized. If we close our eyes to this instance of misapplied war rules because of dislike for Venezuelan drug cartels or fear of illicit drugs, we risk setting a precedent in which our most basic right to life is suddenly dependent on whether Trump or other leaders decide in effect to declare a war against us.

  • Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/04/trumps-killing-alleged-venezuelan-drug-traffickers

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

IN THE TOON AT TOP, THE NAME OF THE DOG IS J.D. VANCE....

"dumbomacy"....

 

Trump and the Post-American World

MELVIN GOODMAN

 

Donald Trump’s blatant campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize has a new claim for his resume—his “diplomacy” is contributing to a new world order.  Unfortunately, it is a world order that not only lacks a place for the United States, but actively excludes the United States.  This world order is contributing to the burgeoning ties between Russia and China, which are without precedent, as well as among China, India, North Korea, and Russia.  U.S. relations with each of them are in decline.  Relations between the United States and India are the most recent victim in the formation of the new world order.

The United States had been the key to understanding the world order created at the end of World War II.  For the first time in 80 years, the United States is on the outside looking in, not only in Europe but in the Indo-Pacific as well.  Washington’s decline can be perceived in terms of power, influence, credibility, and standing.  For the first time in 80 years, the United States lacks an influential national security team that can work closely with a president who has peculiar ideas about policy and process.  The fact that Marco Rubio serves as both secretary of state and acting national security adviser (and has very limited influence in either capacity) speaks to the problem.  As a result, Rubio has thrown his powers into limiting visas for foreigners, particularly for foreign students, a key factor in U.S. isolation.

Trump has gone out of his way to isolate the United States in the global community.  His latest action was the denial and revocation of members of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to attend this month’s UN General Assembly in New York.  This comes at a time when key U.S. allies (Britain, France, Canada, and Australia) are planning to join with 147 UN members that already recognize a Palestinian state.

The denial of the visas for the PLO violates the 1947 UN charter, which states the United States “shall not impose any impediment” to the travel of representatives of the UN missions to the “headquarter district” in New York City.  This visa ban will affect more than 80 Palestinians as well as the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.  (In 1988, the General Assembly met in Geneva so that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat could address the assembly.)  This week, the Trump administration suspended all types of visas for all Palestinians.

Sino-Russia:  China and Russia have never had a relationship as close as the one that currently exists.  There are multiple reasons for this, but the actions of the Trump administration are central to the forging of these close ties.  Joint military exercises are a key part of the current situation as well as the generous exchange of military intelligence and weaponry.  The convergence of Moscow and Beijing contrasts with the growing discord between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

Sino-Russia-India:  This week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security group led by Moscow and Beijing, brought Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to China for the first time in seven years.  Again, Trump was the catalyst for Modi’s decision due to Trump’s tariff policies and taking false credit for the cease-fire between India and Pakistan several months ago.  Xi’s diplomacy played a major role in bringing India closer to both Moscow and Beijing.  Xi gained from making sure that India would not join Washington’s policy of containment against China.

Sino-Russia-North Korea:  Kim Jong-un’s attendance at the summit in China marks an important step in ending the discord between Beijing and Pyongyang.  Kim’s relations with Moscow are also on solid ground in view of the military support from North Korea for Russia’s war with Ukraine.  Trump’s mishandling of the recent meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and a tough trade policy with Japan are additional points of contrast.

BRICS:  The founding countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have added Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates to the fold in an effort to form an alternative to the G7.  Its objectives are anti-Western and anti-US.  The Israeli genocide and US complicity, as well as Trump’s tariff and trade policies, have added to BRICS’ popularity and credibility.

U.S.-India:  Until recently, India, the world’s largest democracy, and the United States were on course to create a cordial and reciprocal diplomatic and economic policy where both sides could accommodate each other.  Trump has virtually brought this policy line to a halt with a doubling of tariffs on India exports.  At the same time, the United States and India have created troubled democracies.

Finally, the Trump and Biden administrations have both contributed to the isolation and alienation of the United States in the international community with their complicity in Israel’s profane genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.  Trump’s postwar plan, modeled on his notion to make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East,” would create a U.S.-administered trusteeship in Gaza for at least ten years, while it is turned into a tourist resort.  Only real estate barons such as Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Wytkoff could come up with such a cynical and exploitative idea.  The fact that some of the same Israelis who created the dysfunctional Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that failed to distribute food to the starving masses in Gaza completes the hideous picture of Israeli genocide.

Meanwhile, the rubble in Gaza continues to mount, and deceitful Israelis continue to deny that famine exists.

 

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/04/trump-and-the-post-american-world/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

a WH terrorist....

 

+ Kill 11 people riding somewhere in the Caribbean on a dinghy with an outboard motor, broadcast the kill shot, gloat about it as if you’d sunk a Chinese battleship, then ask your minions to try to come up with a legal basis for the assassinations a couple of days later, if they could (they can’t)…


+ There is no legal justification for Trump’s military strike on an alleged “drug boat” off the coast of Venezuela. The boat, a simple speedboat, posed no threat to the US Navy vessels. The little boat could have easily been interdicted, searched for drugs and its occupants detained if any were found. No proof was offered that it was carrying drugs or was associated with the Tren de Aragua “narco-terrorist organization.” In any event, drug trafficking is not a capital offense, even when it’s been proven. Most countries would consider this an act of terrorism and mass murder under international law. Indeed, such a strike is also prohibited under US law.


+ The Trump Administration didn’t know where the boat was going or why 11 people would be taking up space on a small, open-air craft that was supposed to be packed with illicit drugs. Were they fisherman? Immigrants? Who could believe them? Rubio’s State Department has repeatedly lied about Venezuela and accused immigrants from the country of being Tren de Aragua gang members based solely on tattoos or the fact they’re wearing Air Jordans…

+ Marco Rubio on Tuesday: “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.”

+ Trump later on Tuesday: “11 Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists were transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”

+ On Wednesday, Rubio reversed himself to be in alignment with Trump, saying the boat was headed toward the US:

The President, under his authority as Commander-in-Chief, has a right under exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States, and that’s what he did yesterday in international waters, and that’s what he intends to do.

+ Can you pinpoint that “right,” Marco?

+ According to the New York Times, “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public  was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

+ If, in fact, the boat was traveling to Trinidad as Rubio first alleged (which makes more sense than it traveling the Caribbean 1200 nautical miles to Miami), what possible reason could the US have for striking it? (There is no justification for murdering the crew/passengers.)

+ As Gary Smith pointed out to me, it’s extremely doubtful that the targeted boat was in international waters. Smith estimates that it would have to have been around 400 miles off the coast of Venezuela to be in international waters and, Smith asks, “In which case how would they know its origin?”

 

 

SEE MORE:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/05/roaming-charges-multiple-megalomaniacs/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.