Monthly Archives: December 2025

Halliburton Files ISDS Suit Against Venezuela for Damages Resulting from… US Sanctions on Venezuela

Talk about making the victim pay… 

On December 11, as the Trump administration was escalating its military campaign against Venezuela by trying to impose a total siege on the country’s oil and gas sector, the US oilfield services company Halliburton quietly filed a suit against Venezuela at the World Bank’s international arbitration court, ICSID.

Long-standing readers are well-versed on investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a topic we’ve covered in depth over the past decade or so. As Yves pointed out in a recent post on Russia’s decision to use ISDS to go after the EU’s attempts to permanently confiscate Russian assets, the judgments made in these dispute settlements overwhelmingly benefit investors:

These treaties, designed to override the laws and regulations of states in order to give protected status to investors, make a mockery of national sovereignity. ISDS disputes draw on a small community of arbitrators, many of whom were involved in drafting ISDS treaty provisions, with hearing held in secret and typically not appealable. The rising (and correct) perception that the rules were gutting labor rights and environmental protection was instrumental to stopping their reach being extended further in the US. But it seems no existing ISDS provisions have been unwound.

What makes this case particularly pernicious is that a large part of the losses and foregone profits Halliburton is seeking to claw back stems from Washington’s economic sanctions on Venezuela. What’s more, the case was filed at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, to which Venezuela has not even been party since 2012.

The move serves as a reminder of just how difficult it is for nation states to extricate themselves from the ISDS commitments established in many bilateral trade treaties, despite the clear threat they pose to national sovereignty. Latin America has been one of the most important sources of income for (mostly Western) corporations seeking legal damages against national governments, as well as their highly paid arbitration lawyers.

There is currently very little information available on the ISDS case filed by Halliburton. The following is an excerpt of a firewalled article published by the Global Arbitration Review that was translated into Spanish and posted by the Madrid-based legal firm Bullard Falla Excurra on its LinkedIn page (translated back into English by yours truly, emphasis also my own):

On December 11, 2025, Halliburton filed a claim against Venezuela with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) under the Barbados-Venezuela Bilateral Investment Treaty. The case will be processed under the Additional Facility Rules, given that Venezuela withdrew from the ICSID Convention in 2012. The dispute stems from Halliburton’s gradual withdrawal from the Venezuelan market between 2016 and 2020, after reporting losses of approximately US$199 million. These losses were attributed to the devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar and the deteriorating economic and political conditions in Venezuela, which affected its ability to meet payments to its clients, including PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. Halliburton also notes that changes in the Venezuelan government’s exchange rate and US sanctions further complicated the viability of its operations in the country. Halliburton, which had operated in Venezuela since 1940, was forced to cease operations in 2020 [by US sanctions], although it maintained local assets and equipment in the country.

The arbitration is in its initial phase. Details regarding the specific claims and the exact amount claimed have not yet been disclosed. This case is one of seven pending ICSID arbitrations against Venezuela.

Halliburton was one of a number of US oil services companies that was forced to cease all operations in Venezuela in April, 2020 — not due to rules set by the Venezuelan authorities but rather to the first Trump administration’s ratcheting sanctions on the country.

Just over a year earlier, the US — and dozens of other countries — had recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president. The next step was to make Venezuela’s economy scream as loud as possible.

As part of that mission, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibited US companies from any activity related to the drilling, refining, purchase, sale or transportation of Venezuelan crude oil. Companies were also forbidden from participating in the design, construction or installation of oil wells.

So, Halliburton, like all other US oilfield services companies, ceased its operations in Venezuela, packed up what it could and laid off its 400 local workers by email. The company indicated that any “assets” left behind would be “expropriated” by Venezuelan authorities.

A New Global Low?

Now, Halliburton is trying to hold Venezuela’s government responsible for any losses or foregone future profits incurred partly, or even largely, as a result of the US government’s actions. In so doing, it threatens to set a new global low — that of corporations seeking damages for lost business resulting from US sanctions, not from the US itself but from the sanctioned countries themselves.

The US’ sanctions against Venezuela, first launched in 2005, have already exacted a deadly toll on Venezuela’s economy, as Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot documented in their 2019 CEPR study, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela“:

The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. They exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.

Even more severe and destructive than the broad economic sanctions of August 2017 were the sanctions imposed by executive order on January 28, 2019 and subsequent executive orders this year; and the recognition of a parallel government, which as shown below, created a whole new set of financial and trade sanctions that are even more constricting than the executive orders themselves.

We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory. They are also illegal under international law and treaties that the US has signed, and would appear to violate US law as well.

Sachs and Weisbrot’s study was published in 2019. After that, the economic noose was further tightened under Trump 1.0, only to be loosened briefly by a Biden administration desperate to offset the surging global energy prices sparked by the war in Ukraine and the collective West’s subsequent endless rounds of sanctions on Russian energy.

Trump then reimposed the restrictions, and then some, in May:

Venezuela has, however, found ways to adapt to the economic asphyxiation, as Michelle Ellner points out for Venezuela Analysis:

Oil has moved through alternative markets; communities have developed survival strategies; people have endured shortages and hardship with creativity and resilience.

Indeed, in part thanks to the Biden administration’s loosening of sanctions in 2023, Venezuela is now the fastest growing economy in South America, albeit from an extremely low base and with a triple-figure inflation rate:

It is precisely this endurance that the Trump administration is trying to break, notes Ellner:

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious: total economic asphyxiation. By tightening restrictions on Venezuelan oil exports, its primary source of revenue, Trump’s administration is deliberately pushing the country toward a full-scale humanitarian collapse.

In recent months, U.S. actions in the Caribbean Sea, including the harassment and interdiction of oil tankers linked to Venezuela, signal a shift from financial pressure to illegal maritime force. These operations have increasingly targeted Venezuela’s ability to move its own resources through international waters. Oil tankers have been delayed, seized, threatened with secondary sanctions, or forced to reroute under coercion. The objective is strangulation.

This is illegal under international law.

So, of course, would be bombing oil-rich Venezuela and oil-rich Nigeria on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day respectively…

Continue reading on Naked Capitalism

Governments in the West Are Turning Their Sights on VPNs As They Escalate Their Assault on Online Privacy and Anonymity

“Politicians have now discovered that people are using VPNs to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.”

The current Danish government is clearly no friend of online privacy or anonymity. During its rotating six-month presidency of the EU council, which is, thankfully, coming to an end, it tried to push through the European Commission’s proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse — aka, the “Chat Control Law” — despite widespread opposition.

As we noted at the time, the ostensible goal of the proposed regulations — curbing the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online — is commendable. However, the way the EU was going about it not only threatened fundamental rights and protections for everyone; it risked transforming the Internet into an even more centrally controlled, surveilled environment.

In its original form, the proposed law effectively mandated the scanning of private communications, including those currently protected by end-to-end encryption. If enacted, messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, would have to scan every message, photo and video sent by users, even when encrypted.

The proposal was opposed by enough member states, including Germany, in large part due to grassroots pressure, to prevent it from passing the EU Council. So, the Danish government went back to the drawing board. The compromise bill it came up with mandates a voluntary search for sensitive material in private chats, instead of general monitoring, and was duly approved.

While a marked improvement on the original, the new proposal still raises serious concerns. Former MEP Patrick Beyer, one of the key defenders of privacy in Europe, warns that three major problems still remain unsolved. From Euronews:

[T]he proposal still does not follow the European Parliament’s position that only courts can decide to access communication channels; it still bans children from downloading messaging apps; and, lastly, anonymous communication is effectively outlawed.

[T]he current Danish proposal does not follow the European Parliament’s (EP) position to allow scanning of communications only by court order.

The EP’s proposal is a fundamental safeguard for Europeans’ privacy of communications and sets a standard that cannot later be changed by extra pressure from EU institutions, such as the famous “Voluntary Codes of Practice/Conduct” we’ve seen for general-purpose AI and disinformation.

“Voluntary” in Europe often isn’t: opting out of a “voluntary code” can mean stricter treatment, nudging tech firms toward de facto mandatory scanning without explicitly regulating it…

[T]he Danish proposal’s Article 4(3) would effectively ban anonymous email and messenger accounts, as well as anonymous chatting:

“They would need to present an ID or their face, making them identifiable and risking data leaks”.

This alone should alarm journalists and civil society organisations that rely on private communication with whistleblowers.

Seemingly not satisfied with achieving a consensus on EU-wide control of messaging apps, the Danish government recently came up with a legislative proposal that sought to ban the domestic use of VPNs — to access geo-restricted streaming content and bypass website blocks.

The proposal formed part of a broader legislative effort to combat online piracy that has alarmed digital rights advocates, reported Tech Radar:

Jesper Lund, chairman of the IT Political Association, expressed deep concern over the bill’s ambiguous language, stating it has a “totalitarian feel to it.”

Lund argued that the current wording could be interpreted so broadly that it would not only criminalize streaming but also hinder the sale and legitimate use of VPN services across Denmark.

“Even in Russia, it is not punishable to bypass illegal websites with a VPN,” Lund told Danish broadcaster DR, pointing out that the proposed Danish law could go further than measures seen in more authoritarian states.

The good news is that the proposed measure drew so much flak from digital rights advocates and the general public that the government withdrew it — or at least temporarily shelved it — last week. Again, from Tech Radar:

The Danish Minister for Culture, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Monday that he was cutting the contentious section from the bill. “I do not support making VPNs illegal, and I have never proposed to do so,” Engel-Schmidt said in a statement. He admitted the initial text was “not formulated precisely enough” and led to a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.

The original proposal, part of a wider anti-piracy effort, sought to make it illegal to “use VPN connections to access media content which would otherwise not be available in Denmark, or to circumvent blocks on illegal websites.” This sparked alarm among privacy groups, who warned that the vague wording could criminalize not only streaming enthusiasts but also ordinary citizens using the best VPN services for legitimate privacy and security reasons…

Jesper Lund of the IT Political Association described the proposal as having a “totalitarian feel to it” and warned it could go further than measures seen in more authoritarian countries.

Denmark is by no means the only Western “liberal democracy” to have turned its sights on VPNs in recent months. Since VPNs essentially function as anonymity masks that allow users to hide their online activity and access restricted content, their popularity has grown as governments have sought to impose increasingly draconian restrictions on Internet use.

As readers may recall, when the UK’s Starmer government made age verification checks mandatory for accessing pornography and other supposedly adult content online in July, it sparked an explosion in VPN use. As we had previously warned, these online age verification checks, that are now proliferating across the collective West’s ostensibly liberal democracies, threaten to trap everyone, not just minors, in their web.

The Starmer government’s predictable response has been to buckle down by including amendments to its Orwellian-titled Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that seek to ban children from using VPNs, among other things.

As with the age verification checks for pornography websites, the new checks, if implemented, will trap both adults and children in their web.

It would be bad enough if this were just another bout of madness on the part of Europe’s political class, but the same thing is happening throughout the so-called “Collective West”. Australia just introduced its long-awaited age verification legislation, which blocks under-16s from joining social media platforms, thereby all adults to submit ID to access platforms.

As we warned in November 2024, online age verification appears to be the Trojan Horse for the mass rollout and enforced adoption of digital IDs. Other Western jurisdictions, including the UK, the EU, and the US, are now treating the Australian rules as a blueprint for their own legislation, reports Reclaim the Net.

In the United States, Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said she hopes “Australia taking this step…leads the US to actually doing something.”

Britt, a mother of two, is one of the sponsors of the bipartisan Kids Off Social Media Act, which would prevent children under thirteen from using social platforms.

Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Sydney Morning Herald that he supports similar limits. “I like it. I’ve supported age limits here in the US for kids on social media,” he said.

“I say this as a parent…Parents need help, and they feel like they’re swimming upstream when everybody else has social media.”

Hawley, author of The Tyranny of Big Tech, said he has spoken with Australian stakeholders about the ban, though he did not identify them.

The Starmer government’s proposed amendment to the also calls for requiring social media to use “highly-effective” age assurance measures to prevent children under 16 from using such services.

The problem is that most age assurance measures are anything but effective…

Continue reading on Naked Capitalism

Shining a Light on How Exxon Mobil Bankrolls Think Tank “Experts” Pushing for Regime-Change War in Venezuela

For the US oil major, this is about reclaiming its stake in a market it walked away from in 2007, after the Hugo Chávez government called for a fairer divvying up of profits. 

For the US oil major, this is about reclaiming its stake in a market it walked away from in 2007, after the Hugo Chávez government called for a fairer divvying up of profits. 

The US’ seizure last Wednesday of an Iranian oil tanker carrying Venezuelan oil was definitive confirmation that the US’ war of aggression in Venezuela has nothing to do with drug cartels and everything to do with oil majors.

Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of heavy crude in the world, with an estimated 303 billion barrels, as well as the largest reserves of light crude oil in the Western Hemisphere. But it’s not just that Venezuela is home to the largest oil reserves on the planet, it’s that those reserves are sitting “right next door” to the US, as Trump himself said in 2023:

President Trump’s obsession with seizing other countries’ oil goes back a ways, to even before he entered politics. Here he is explaining in 2011 why the US should seize half or more of Libya’s oil after murdering its leader, Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, and plunging what was arguably the richest country in Africa (on a per-capita basis) into total chaos.

The money quote: “you know the old days, when you had a war, it was ‘to the victor the spoils.’”

As has been patently clear since the very beginning, and was just reaffirmed by Democrat Senator Chris Murphy, Trump’s military strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are entirely devoid of legal or national security justifications. Yet they continue.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange has filed a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation for allowing its peace prize to serve as an instrument of war. The Wikileaks founder alleges that giving the 2025 edition award to Maria Corina Machado constitutes misappropriation of funds and facilitation of war crimes.

Yet even as the holes in the whole war narrative grow larger, mainly because of Trump’s own conflicting statements, the war drums grow louder.

Now, Trump has said the quietest part out loud: his government is imposing a total siege on Venezuelan oil because the US wants “ITS” oil back from under Venezuela’s soil — the same oil that the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez dared to take back sovereign control of from foreign companies in 2005 (more on that shortly).

Trump’s blockade of all sanctioned tankers carrying Venezuelan oil does not affect Chevron’s daily shipments. From the Wall Street Journal:

President Trump on Tuesday ordered a complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela, escalating his administration’s pressure campaign against strongman Nicolás Maduro.

For Chevron, though, it remains business as usual. The company is still sending oil tankers to the U.S. Gulf Coast, its operations unimpeded thus far by rising tension between Trump and Maduro.

As Sony Thăng points out in the Tweet below, Trump’s candid declaration of US ownership of Venezuela’s is the “most honest colonial confession of the 21st century… you are saying, out loud, what empire has always believed in private: what lies under Venezuelan oil belongs to Washington.

Coming Full Circle

There are, of course, a plethora of other reasons for the US’ aggressive moves against Venezuela that we’ve discussed before, including the country’s large deposits of gold, rare earth minerals and freshwater; the opportunity to open up a mid-sized country’s market to rampant privatisation and liberalisation.

Caracas’ close ties with Russia, China, Iran and Cuba no doubt play a play, as does its long-standing opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestine.

There’s also, of course, the small matter of the Epstein scandal, from which the Trump administration needs to distract its voters. And what better distraction than a new war, especially given the tens, perhaps even hundreds, of billions of dollars of new business it will create for the MIC?

But the main motive is — and always has been — the oil. And we’ve now come full circle, with Trump and members of his inner circle now openly admitting as much…

Continue reading on Naked Capitalism

Israel Is Trying to Turn the Tide of Opposition (to Its Genocidal Proclivities) in Latin America

Could one of the few pockets of resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and its myriad other war crimes, be about to fall?

Last Tuesday (December 9), Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo and his Israeli counterpart signed a joint declaration in Washington to formally reestablish diplomatic ties between their two countries. Ambassadors will be appointed in the near future, Saar said.

Bolivia was the first country in Latin America, and one of the first in the world, to sever ties with Israel over its still-ongoing, now-UN-formalised genocide in Gaza. The then-Luis Arce government justified the decision, taken on November 7, 2023, as a necessary response to Israel’s “aggressive and disproportionate” military actions in Gaza.

Now, that decision is in the process of being undone by the administration of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, Bolivia’s first right-wing government in 20 years.

Hamas described President Paz’s decision as a “retreat in the honorable step taken by the previous Bolivian government to cut relations with the occupation in the face of the genocide committed against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”:

“We renew our call on all countries and organizations to continue to isolate the Zionist entity and hold it accountable for its crimes against our people and their grave violations of international law and human values.”

Israel’s Biggest Con Trick

Media accounts hold that since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed over 70,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and wounded more than 171,000 others in a relentless assault that has left the enclave in ruins. Those are the official numbers, however, and they are not remotely accurate.

As Jonathan Cook points out in his substack, “the biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a ‘debate’ in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000”:

Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.

The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.

These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on…

None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.

According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.

The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.

A Thorn in Israel’s Side

Depressingly few of the United Nation’s 193 Member States can hold their heads high over their response (or lack thereof) to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Most of them did little or nothing as the world’s most televised genocide unfolded on all of our screens.

The Arab States paid lip service to the suffering of Gaza while doing nothing to relieve it. Many BRICS members, including China and Brazil, not only continue to trade with Israel but have raised it to higher levels since October 2023.

China and Russia failed to use their veto power in the UN Security Council to block the adoption of Resolution 2803, which formalised the Trump administration’s post-war neo-colonial arrangements for Gaza while doing little to stop the genocide.

The few countries that can hold their heads up high include Iran and its evolving axis of resistance in the Middle East (the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon…) as well as the US’ axis of evil in Latin America — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — which Washington hopes to regime change in the near future.

In fact, Latin America was arguably the region of the world that made the most noise (at the governmental level) against Israel’s actions. Some countries even went from words to actions. By doing so they became an annoying thorn in Israel’s side.

Nicaragua cut its diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv in November 2024 and even filed a suit against Germany at the International Court of Justice. Nicaragua alleges that Germany failed to prevent genocide in Gaza, failed to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in Gaza, and was complicit in the commission of genocide and the violation of IHL in Gaza. The case is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the governments of both Cuba and Venezuela, which had already cut their ties with Tel Aviv long before Oct 7, have been constant critics of Israel’s genocidal behaviour. The US and Israel’s traditional client state in the region, Colombia, went even further by attempting to impose sanctions on Israel:

Despite concerted pressure and criticism from Israel, Washington (under both Biden and Trump), the Jewish community and the domestic and global media, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro government has not only spoken out against Israel’s naked criminality in Gaza from the very start; it has consistently turned those words into actions. And in so doing, it has put much of the rest of the world to shame.

The Petro government severed formal ties with Israel in May 2024. It then imposed a ban on the export of Colombian coal to Israel in late August of the same year as well as on the purchase of Israeli weapons, becoming one of the first, if not the first, country in the world to impose unilateral sanctions on Israel since the genocide began.

This is in a country that itself has been described as the “Israel of South America” due its close ties to Washington as well as the presence of US forces at at least seven military bases. Colombia is also historically closely aligned with Israel. According to the Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife, the Israelis control Colombia’s spyware and help train its soldiers and paramilitaries — a situation that had been going on for decades.

Colombia-based reader Edgui also recently pointed out that Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has 13 agreements with high-level entities in Colombia (the Air Force, the Ministry of Defense, the Criminal Investigation Directorate and Interpol of the National Police, etc.) — all of which had the Israeli company as the sole bidder.

Yet despite all that, Petro has taken one of the strongest positions against the genocide in Gaza of any international head of state. However, Petro will be leaving office in March, 2026 (Colombian presidents are currently only legally able to serve one term). That hasn’t stopped President Donald J Trump from threatening Petro in pure gangster fashion.

“He’s been fairly hostile to the United States,” Trump said. “He’s going to have himself some big problems if he doesn’t wise up.”

“Colombia is producing a lot of drugs. They have cocaine factories. They make cocaine, as you know, and they sell it right into the United States. So he better wise up, or he’ll be next. He’ll be next. I hope he’s listening. He’s going to be next because we don’t like people when they kill people.”

You heard that right: the US government, arguably the biggest gangster state of all time which has spent the past two years supporting, financing and enabling a genuine, real-life genocide, doesn’t like it when people kill people.

The good news for Trump, and by extension Netanyahu, is that Latin America is seeing a new wave of right-wing leaders and governments come to power that are desperate to bend the knee to Washington as well as support Israel in whatever it does…

Read the full article on Naked Capitalism

The Empire of Lies Is Once Again Sowing Chaos In Its Own “Back Yard”

This is unlikely to end well for all parties concerned, including the US.  

It’s been a busy week for the Empire of Lies and Chaos, especially in its direct neighbourhood. The illegal seizure of an Iranian oil tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on Wednesday was a reminder of what the US’ illegal war of aggression is really about: Venezuela’s oil deposits, which represent almost one-fifth of the world’s known reserves.

The Maduro government has reportedly offered first dibs on that oil. However, Venezuelan law holds that the majority partner in any drilling consortium must be Venezuela’s state-owned PVDSA, and that is not enough for Washington. It wants more; it wants it all.

There are, of course, other reasons, including Venezuela’s large deposits of gas, gold, rare earths and freshwater. Venezuela’s close ties with Russia, China and Iran, from where the tanker originally came, and Cuba, to where the tanker was heading, are also a key factor.

There are the Military Industrial Complex’s needs to keep in mind. With the Trump administration drawing down US commitments to project Ukraine, another war must be started in order to keep the Pentagon’s money laundromat working at full speed (h/t Ashburn).

One thing that is now beyond dispute, however, as we’ve been arguing since the Trump administration began amassing naval forces in the Caribbean over four months ago, is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with combating drug trafficking.

A Total Siege of Venezuela and Cuba?

The seizure of this tanker suggests, together with Trump’s recent declaration of a no-fly zone over Venezuela, that the US is now trying to topple Maduro by imposing a total siege on Venezuela. After cutting off the country from a large chunk of the world economy through escalating economic sanctions, Washington is now trying to cut it off from its closest allies and what remains of its revenue streams (which were actually improving of late).

The Venezuelan government called the move an act of “international piracy”, and “blatant theft”.

This may be the first time that an oil tanker has been seized in Venezuelan waters but it is part of a broader trend — not just of seizures of tankers but also attacks on them, as Alex Christoforou pointed out on The Duran yesterday. According to Al Jazeera, the last time the US military seized a foreign tanker was in 2014, when US Navy SEALs boarded the Morning Glory off Cyprus as Libyan rebels attempted to sell stolen crude oil.

If the US goal is to impose a total siege of Venezuela’s economy, it has more than enough naval resources in the Caribbean to do so, as Alexander Mercouris noted in the same episode of The Duran.

Legal Justifications

So, what are the legal grounds for the US military’s seizure of the tanker?

Does it even matter?

The US has just spent the past four months killing boatloads of unknown, unnamed people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. These extrajudicial murders on the high seas have provided further confirmation, if ever needed, that Washington has zero regard for international law, apart from when it suits its own interests.

According to Bloomberg, US officials have described the ship as a “stateless vessel” and said it had been docked in Venezuela. The vessel in question, the M/T SKIPPER, had reportedly been sanctioned by the US Treasury since 2022 for its ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.

Here we have a smiling CNN “analyst” explaining how seizing other country’s oil on the high seas, and then keeping it, is not only perfectly “normal” but also legal, if the country in question has been the target of US sanctions:

Whatever the legality of this action, one thing is clear: it is an act of war.

As NC reader Johnny GL noted in yesterday’s comments, the US’ latest moves suggest that Trump is “trying to do regime change through intimidation, alone”, thereby avoiding the much greater risks posed by military action. But it is also trying to kill a number of other birds with this one particular stone, including its longest-standing enemy in the region, Cuba.

It is almost certainly no coincidence that the tanker in question was carrying oil to Cuba. Washington is clearly intent on strangling to death Cuba’s energy-starved economy. As we previously reported, Marco Rubio’s State Department has already targeted Cuba’s international medical missions, now its largest source of foreign currency reserves, with sanctions.

Will the US also try to stop oil shipments from Mexico? First initiated by former President Andres Lopez Obrador (aka AMLO) in 2023, the country’s state-owned oil company Pemex’s shipments to Cuba have become a key lifeline for the Caribbean island nation since 2023, as well as a source of friction between Mexico and the US.

The seizure of M/T SKIPPER has also provided Washington with a fresh opportunity to emphasise the close ties between Venezuela and Iran, two heavily sanctioned countries whose governments the US and Israel, respectively, are simultaneously seeking to topple.

How Russia and China respond to this latest act of war by Washington will be key. In a statement yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asked for an explanation from the US, emphasising that Russia advocates “for a collective debate on how to combat drug trafficking and guarantee maritime security, avoiding unilateral actions.”

President Putin also had a telephone conversation with Maduro yesterday in which the Russian leader “expressed solidarity with the people of Venezuela and reaffirmed his support of the policies of the Maduro government aimed at protecting national interests and sovereignty amid growing external pressure.”

For its part, Beijing has announced that it firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction that lack a basis in international law and are not authorized by the UN Security Council, as well as the abuse of sanctions.

Interestingly, on Wednesday China released its third policy paper on Chinese relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (a very long document that I hope to read in depth this weekend). The stated goal of the paper is “to draw experience, plan the future , elaborate China’s policy on LAC, and bring the relations and cooperation between the two sides in various fields to a new level.”

Next on the List?

On the same day as the tanker seizure (Wednesday) Trump also threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro, telling him that “he’s going to be next” as the US leader seeks the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“He’s been fairly hostile to the United States. I haven’t given a lot of thought. He’s gonna have himself some big problems if he doesn’t wise up. Colombia is producing a lot of drugs,” Trump said in response to a question on whether he plans to speak with Petro.

“They have cocaine factories that they make cocaine, as you know, and they sell it right into the United States. So he better wise up, or he’ll be next. He’ll be next soon. I hope he’s listening. He’s going to be next,” he added.

This is all a pantomime, of course. As readers know, Trump just pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in the US of trafficking more than 400 tons of US-bound cocaine through Honduras. That’s right: one of the world’s worst drug traffickers was just freed by a man claiming to be on a mission against the drug cartels.

Also, Petro only has a few months left of his four-year presidential term to serve, so any attack against his government or Colombia as a whole would be beyond absurd. But that doesn’t put it beyond the capabilities of Trump 2.0.

A few days ago, Petro gave a speech on the need for unity among Latin American countries. He also called for the recreation of the Gran Colombia confederation that in the early 19th century comprised Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama (It’s well worth listening to the three-minute clip below, which features English subtitles):

“Let’s reestablish the great Confederation of a Gran Colombia. Among the existing nations that were part of Gran Colombia. Because only if we unite what was once Gran Colombia. Mexico will once again look toward the south. And Brazil will once again look to its South America.”

“And the 3 largest economies in all of Latin America and the Caribbean; will once again plant the flag of unity, so that we are not disrespected. It is in division that we are disrespected. It is when each of us speaks only for themselves, sometimes defending greedy interests within their countries. Sometimes hiding the skeleton in the closet. That is why they are insulting us and not just insulting us, but humiliating us, and not only humiliating us, but killing our people.”

The Colombian Congress has also responded firmly to Trump’s latest threats against Petro. Lawmakers demanded respect for national sovereignty and called for non-interference in the Colombian electoral process. They also noted that the statements violate the principles of the UN Charter on non-intervention and urged the maintenance of bilateral relations based on diplomacy and mutual respect.

Electoral Chaos in Honduras

Meanwhile, the small Central American nation of Honduras has been plunged into post-election chaos by allegations from the governing Libre Party of “monumental electoral fraud”. From Drop Site News:

Days removed from Sunday’s presidential vote, and still without a clear winner, Honduras’s post-election crisis became more contentious after a member of the country’s electoral authority denounced “monumental electoral fraud” on Thursday evening.

Marlon Ochoa, a representative for the Libre Party on the three-member National Electoral Council (CNE), alleged coordinated and deliberate electoral fraud carried out by the other council members, Cossette Alejandra López-Osorio of the National Party and Ana Paola Hall of the Liberal Party…

López-Osorio and Hall represent the country’s traditional political parties, both of which were relegated to opposition status when Xiomara Castro won the general election for Libre in 2021. Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party has likewise alleged that irregularities may be affecting the results.

In a letter, Ochoa alleged manipulation of the results-transmission system as well as obstruction from within the state’s electoral authority. Ochoa said the TREP suffered deliberate failures, including disabled biometric checks, altered digital tally sheets, unexplained vote transfers, and the 40-hour retention of more than 16,000 tally sheets, which created massive discrepancies he claims total nearly one million votes. With the entire vote-processing chain compromised, he concluded that “there is no certainty whatsoever about the results.”

Could US-backed groups have hacked the system, as the Maduro government claims to have happened during Venezuela’s elections in the summer of 2024?

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The UK Government’s Plan to Resurrect the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) Is the Definition of Financial Insanity

The Starmer government, desperate to keep its public borrowing in check, is bringing back (in the words of a senior City of London banker) a “fraud on the people.”

In mid-November, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), an influential business lobbying group, announced it was going to advise the UK government on how it could use private investment to build new schools, hospitals, prisons and transports projects.

A week later, the UK’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting revealed that a new generation of local NHS clinics in England will be built using private money. As the FT reported, the move “echoes the controversial Private Finance Initiative (PFI) policy” that was scrapped in 2018 after being judged poor value for money by the public spending watchdog.

Buy Now, Pay Later

First launched by John Major’s Conservative government in the mid-90s and then massively expanded by the Blair government thereafter, PFI — and its later incarnation, PF2 — were essentially a buy now, pay later scheme for government — with one added advantage: they allowed the government to keep many of its current liabilities off-balance-sheet.

Under PFI, instead of borrowing to build, the government began contracting with private sector firms to finance, design, build and maintain public assets, including hospitals, schools, roads, prisons, street lighting and military equipment. The contracts typically run for 25–30 years, and many of them are coming to an end soon.

The scheme was designed by and for executives from big banks,  financial firms and building contractors that appeared on secondment to the government’s PFI Taskforce. The interest rates and other charges levied on the debt, many of them still outstanding, were crippling, as I detailed for WOLF STREET in 2018:

The interest rate on PFI deals can be as much as 2 to 3.75 percentage points higher than the cost of government borrowing. On some projects, returns to investors can be more than 25% a year.

Even without entering into any new PFI-type deals, the government has already coughed up £110 billion in fees and interest and will have to pay investors and companies another £199 billion between April 2017 until the 2040s for existing deals, which Hammond has already said will be honored. That works out at a total outlay of around £310 billion for 700 projects estimated to be worth a measly £60 billion.

According to a 2022 report by The New Statesman, NHS trusts still had around £50 billion left to pay on their PFI debt (that number has apparently shrunk to £44 billion today). Some NHS trusts are spending more servicing their PFI debts than on medicines for patients:

Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spent more than double on its PFI repayments (£45.8m) than on drugs costs (drugs inventory consumed and purchase of non-inventory drugs, which amounted to £22.6m). That works out as more than £1 in every £8 of income it received from patient care activities, finance income and other operating income being spent on paying off PFI debt.

It was followed by St Helens And Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (which spent 12.1 per cent of its income on PFI, more than double its drug spend), University Hospitals Coventry And Warwickshire NHS Trust (11.7 per cent of income on PFI, 1.4 times what it spent on drugs), and North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust (11.2 per cent, 1.2 times what it spent on drugs).

A further 21 trusts also spent more on paying back their PFI debt than on drugs, according to the accounting data…

Government figures from 2018 show the value of the initial PFI investments in the NHS was just £12.8bn, but the Department for Health and Social Care will have spent a total £80.7bn once they are all paid off (this figure includes services such as facilities management supplied by the PFI providers).

So, who benefits from these financing arrangements (because one thing is clear: it is not UK taxpayers)? An investigation by NHS campaign group Every Doctor revealed the complex layers of ownership that lay behind some of these opaque deals:

To uncover who ultimately owns each PFI project, we had to follow a Matryoshka-doll trail of holding companies. These intricate corporate structures reflect the way the projects were set up, with construction firms, facilities managers and banks each taking a stake through layered financing vehicles.

The convoluted ownership trail also makes it hard to see exactly who profits from the projects. To add to the confusion, stakes in PFI contracts are frequently sold on, meaning the firms now operating them are often not the same ones that originally built them.

Take, for example, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, one of the largest in the UK and one of the earliest PFI projects. It opened in 2001 and then was extended in 2004, again using PFI. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is still paying a company called Octagon Healthcare Holdings tens of millions of pounds a year for operating the hospital.

But Octagon doesn’t ultimately own the contract, two companies called Semperian and Innisfree Group do. The latter is an investment fund based in Jersey, a tax haven, and the former is owned by South African-born property investor David Metter.

By the time the contract comes to an end in 2037, the NHS expects to have paid Octagon a further £1.2bn. That is a vast overpayment on the £229m it cost Octagon to build the hospital.

Arguably the most insane part of the PFI story is that none of it was necessary. As Richard Murphy pointed out in a recent podcast, “Government issues its own currency, so it can always fund investments (in that currency), and what’s more it can always fund investment more cheaply than the private sector.”

The private sector always has to pay a premium for the risks associated with private sector lending, and the government does not. In that case, the claim that there was first of all no money was just political theatre. The Government can always create the money it needs to fund any project that it thinks is worthwhile.

And the claim that it was cheaper for the private sector to fund these activities than for the State to do so was very obviously completely and utterly wrong. PFI was therefore all about ideology, false accounting, political shenanigans, helping the private sector, but not for one moment was it about necessity.

“A Fraud on the People”

Even Sir Howard Davies, former chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), one of the biggest beneficiaries of PFI, admitted as much on BBC1’s Question Time in 2018, describing PFI as “a fraud on the people” — a fraud that the Starmer government now wants to repeat:

The government can borrow money more cheaply than anyone else, and therefore if you’re going to hand over the total provision of a hospital to someone whose borrowing costs are going to be higher than yours, what is the advantage of doing that? Unless you’re absolutely certain they’re going to be much more efficient. And if you think they’re going to be efficient, why not give them a fixed price contract? Why hand over the whole thing?

I think PFI has been a fraud, and there has been a very interesting report by the National Audit Office today which shows just how much we have paid for the privilege of the Private Finance Initiative.

Davies said these words after the collapse of 200-year old UK infrastructure group Carillion, whose outsized role in delivering public services had earned it the moniker “the company that runs Britain.” The firm’s sudden demise exposed PFI as a form of giant ponzi scheme, while also laying bare the abysmal quality of auditing by the sharply conflicted Big Four accountancy firms.

There are also serious questions being asked about the quality of the building work undertaken by the companies contracted for the PFI schemes as well as concerns about what will happen to the buildings when the concessions end…

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Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become? (Part 2)

Scaling back trial by jury, further attacks on lawful speech, the nationwide deployment of deeply flawed facial recognition systems… The list just keeps growing longer. 

We first asked this question — Just How Dystopian Could Starmer’s Britain Become? — just over a year ago. At that point in time, with the  government just four months in office, all we could offer as an answer was: how long is a piece of string? Now, 13 months later, it is clear that said string is very long indeed, and is getting longer by the day.

On his election, in July 2024, Starmer promised that his Labour government would “tread (stomp?) more lightly” on the lives of voters. It is one of a growing multitude of pledges Starmer has broken during his 17 months in office. In this particular case, it took just two months for Starmer to change course, telling delegates at the 2024 Labour Party Conference that the State would, in fact, take greater control over people’s lives.

In the months that followed, plans were unveiled to, among other things, launch “non-mandatory” digital identity (more on that later); expand the use of live facial recognition technology (ditto); resurrect an old Tory policy to grant inspectors at the Department of Work and Pensions increased powers to snoop on claimants’ bank accounts; and intensify the British State’s crackdown on lawful speech.

That, it turns out, was just for starters. For the main course, the Starmer government is now setting its sights on trial by jury, a legal protection that has existed in England for almost a thousand years and forms one of the bedrocks of democratic legal systems.

Curtailing a Centuries-Old Right

In an ostensible bid to reduce court backlogs, Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor David Lammy has announced plans to limit people’s right to trial by jury in England and Wales. If the plans are enacted, a new tier of “swift” courts will be created to replace jury trials for most offences that carry a likely jail sentence of less than three years as well as complex fraud and financial cases.

Speed and expediency are the goal. Under the proposed changes, only the most serious offences — murder, manslaughter and rape — would continue to be heard by a jury of one’s peers. Despite the fact that English Common Law draws upon the ancient right of trial by jury rooted in Magna Carta, Lammy asserted that “we must never forget that [Magna Carta] implores us not to deny or delay justice.”

Bearing the Orwellian title “Swift and Fair Plan to Get Justice for Victims”, Lammy’s proposal, which is presumably not his own, is extremely controversial. As writes Daniel Alge, senior lecturer in Criminology & Criminal Justice at Brunel University of London, the right to be tried by one’s peers has deep roots in the legal tradition of England and Wales:

Its origins trace back to Magna Carta in 1215, which promised that no one would lose their liberty or property without “the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land”.

The judge and legal philosopher Lord Devlin described trial by jury as “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. It is a symbolic cornerstone of justice in England and Wales. These proposals go far beyond the recommendations put forward in Brian Leveson’s independent review of the criminal courts, published in July 2025. Leveson proposed trial by judge alone where the defendant requested it, or in particularly lengthy and complex trials. But Lammy’s proposals appear to be a watering down of leaked MoJ plans to restrict the use of jury trials to only “public interest” cases with sentences of over five years.

In practical terms, jury trials already form only a small part of the system, accounting for around 2% of all criminal cases. Ministry of Justice data shows that most criminal cases are resolved in the magistrates’ courts, in which three magistrates (who are volunteer lay people rather than professional judges), determine guilt as well as sentence.

In other words, this will probably have a limited impact on the court backlogs. There can be no doubting that the criminal courts are under extraordinary pressure, with a record backlog of over 78,000 crown court cases. However, the main cause of that backlog, according to Alge, is “years of budget reductions, court closures, maintenance backlogs and limits on the number of days courts were permitted to sit.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of Lamy’s proposed changes is their potential political implications. For centuries juries have served as a democratic check on government power. In fact, that is exactly why the barons approached King John in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta, requesting the right to trial by jury — as a check on the unruly king’s power.

The renowned English jurist, justice, and Tory politician William Blackstone (1723-1780) wrote the following about trial by jury in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which (according to Wikipedia) became the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law:

“Trial by jury ever has been, and I trust ever will be, looked upon as the glory of the English law… So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate; not only from all open attacks (which none will be so hardy as to make), but also from secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial.

In the House of Commons on Tuesday, Labour MP Diane Abbot left Starmer with egg on his face by reminding him of what he himself had said about trial by jury in 1992: “the right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the State and the power of the individual.”

As Steve James writes for WSWS, one of the real targets of the proposed legislation is something called “jury equity” or “jury nullification”, which can be particularly important in trials of a political nature:

This refers to the right of a jury to determine whether a crime has been committed at all, regardless of the opinion of the trial judge.

Jury equity was famously exercised in 1985 by the jury in the case against civil servant Clive Ponting, who leaked details of the then Tory government’s misinformation over the circumstances surrounding the 1982 sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by the Royal Navy, with the loss of 272 lives.

Ponting was acquitted after a two-week trial, despite admitting that he had leaked the documents in question and the trial judge’s insistence that he had no defence in law. Ponting claimed, and the jury agreed, that releasing the documents, which exposed government lies over the circumstances of the sinking, was in the public interest.

The principle has become an irritant to governments ever since, particularly following a series of cases in which members of climate and anti-genocide protest organisations such as Extinction Rebellion and Palestine Action have been acquitted despite instructions from the bench.

Added Legal Protection for Financial Criminals?

The fact that complex financial and fraud cases, which are defined as those involving “hidden dishonesty or complexity outside the understanding of the general public”, will also be exempt from trial by jury if Lammy’s proposed bill is enacted is also deeply troubling, though it seems to be getting less traction in the media.

Without trial by jury, the legal process could be further tilted in the favour of the UK’s financial and business elite. After all, it’s easier to corrupt one judge than 12 (angry) men and women. And this is the UK we are talking about, the country that arguably perfected the art (if you can call it that) of financial crime.

However, an alternative perspective was offered in the comments section by NC reader Anonymous 2:

If you use mathematical models to commit fraud with complicated algebraic formulae and place them in front of a group of ordinary English men and women and start arguing about the merits or demerits of particular pricing models (e.g. options), then you be can be completely sure that they will glaze over mentally very quickly.

At the very least the jury should be made up of genuine peers in such cases – i.e. people with a high level of mathematical and financial skills, not the average man or woman in the street. Otherwise I am comfortable with a smaller panel of suitably qualified experts supporting the judge, who should also be a specialist in trying advanced financial fraud.

The present system is an invitation to fraudsters because if they make their frauds sufficiently complex there is not a snowball in hell’s chance the jury will convict as they have to be confident that they understand the issues and in such cases they won’t.

The drastic curtailing of jury trials would be concerning enough if it were being done by a government that had shown itself to be more or less worthy of the voters’ trust. That is not the case here.

In fact, Keir Starmer is the most unpopular prime minister since records began in 1977 — a feat he managed to pull off in little over a year. His Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is also apparently the most unpopular chancellor on record.

It’s not hard to see why: they have broken just about every promise they made to voters. As the veteran journalist Peter Oborne warned before Starmer’s election, “it would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer says — he has a long record of making promises which he then goes on to break.”

Laying the Foundations of an Authoritarian State

Starmer also has extreme authoritarian impulses. As The Guardian‘s George Monbiot warned in February, his government is laying the foundations of an authoritarian state that could be used by an even more extreme government in the future — perhaps even one led by Reform leader Nigel Farage:

Here are three of the consistent features of authoritarian states: the extreme persecution of dissent, the use of parajudicial measures to shut down opposition movements, and the selective application of the law. All three are already widely deployed in the UK. Though they were introduced in their current form by the Tories, they have been sustained and defended by Keir Starmer’s party.

What this means is that if a hard- or far-right government starts doing what they always do – persecuting minorities and opponents, ripping into public services and the enabling state – and if good citizens take to the streets to defend the people and institutions under attack, the government will be able to round them up and throw them in prison, without the need for a single new law or statute.

Freedom of speech is under constant attack. As the Times of London reported in April this year, police officers made 12,183 arrests in 2023, when the Tories were in office, the equivalent of around 33 per day, under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

The acts, which make it illegal to cause distress by sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character” on an electronic communications network, are being applied on an ever-broader basis. We don’t yet know how many arrests were made in 2024, when Starmer came to power.

What we do know is that hundreds of people, including many pensioners, have been arrested for simply protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The recent prosecution of Natalie Strecker for writing and sharing tweets calling for resistance against the genocide revealed just how twisted the UK’s legal system has become.

From former UK ambassador Craig Murray’s blog post, “The Terrifying Case of Natalie Strecker”:

Strecker is charged with eliciting support for Hamas and Hezbollah, based on 8 tweets, cherry-picked by police and prosecutors from an astounding 51,000 tweets she sent, mainly from the Jersey Palestine Solidarity Committee account….

The prosecution case is that these tweets, both collectively and individually, amount to an invitation of support for Hamas and Hezbollah resulting in up to ten years in jail in Jersey, or 14 years in jail on the UK mainland.

The prosecution explicitly stated, and the judge notably intervened to make sure that everybody understood, that it is the offence of supporting terrorism to state that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance in international law.

Judge John Saunders interrupted the prosecution to ask whether they were saying that he would be guilty of support for terrorism if, in a lecture, he told an international law class that Palestinians have the right to armed resistance in international law.

After some kerfuffle when faced with such an awkward question, the prosecution replied that yes, it could be the offence to tell law students that.

“A Fledgling Police State”

While Strecker was eventually acquitted, her case reveals a very disturbing truth about the state of lawful speech under the Starmer government, notes the journalist and author Jonathan Cook:

The British state considers it unlawful to repeat what international law explicitly states: that occupied peoples like the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal occupation.

That means:

a) The Starmer government openly rejects international law.

b) The Starmer government can scrap free speech and the right to protest – the bare minimal foundations of a democracy – whenever it chooses. We must conclude that we now live in a fledgling police state, that the number of political prisoners is going to grow rapidly, and that the room for dissent is going to shrink further and further.

The fact that this is all happening under a prime minister who before entering politics was a senior human rights lawyer makes it all the more disturbing…

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The Lies Being Used to Justify the US’ War Against Venezuela (and Latin America in General) Are Unravelling Before Our Eyes

The war narrative is so disjointed and so contradictory that even the legacy media are picking it apart.

Since the Trump administration began moving US naval forces to the Caribbean and committing the wanton murder of unidentified boat crews on the high seas, we have tried to keep a close eye on the reporting in mainstream US and Western media. What we have found is that unlike most other US-led military campaigns of recent decades, the escalation of hostilities against Venezuela has enjoyed, at best, lukewarm support in the legacy press.

That doesn’t mean that certain media outlets are not doing their bit to help craft and sell a pro-war narrative, with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal particularly standing out. But many are doing so with less enthusiasm than usual. Some outlets, including the New York Times and CBS, have even exposed some of the glaring flaws and inconsistencies in the Trump Administration’s ostensible case for war — i.e., to combat drug cartels.

The lies are so brazen and the war narrative so disjointed and contradictory that even the legacy media are picking them apart. Remember this one?

Eerie Echoes of Libya

On Saturday, Trump announced he was ratcheting up his campaign against Latin America’s drug cartels by closing “IN ITS ENTIRETY” the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela. The announcement bore eerie echoes of the no-fly zone the UN Security Council imposed on Libya just days before NATO’s bombardment of the country. And it seems to be working:

Not all flights have been cancelled, however. As Spain’s El Diario reports, flights were still coming in from Colombia, Panama and Russia on Monday. Colombian President Gustavo Petro Petro said that Washington can only restrict its own airlines and called on other countries to restore normal civil aviation links with Venezuela, emphasising the need for dialogue.

Meanwhile, as Tyler Pager reported for the Times, less than 24 hours before shutting down Venezuelan airspace, “Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who in 2021 was convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison”.

In announcing the pardon of a convicted drug trafficker while threatening Venezuela, Pager notes, Trump is displaying contradictions (which is putting it mildly):

[Trump’s] two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States…

The Trump administration has struggled to provide a clear strategic rationale for why it has amassed such a large military presence in the Caribbean. The president has most often pointed to counternarcotics operations, but the size of the U.S. forces in the region suggests bigger ambitions. In private, the president has shown an interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves, while he and his aides also have said they want to oust Mr. Maduro.

In a statement, Mr. Trump said he had issued the pardon to Mr. Hernández because “many friends” had asked him to do so, adding, “They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country.”

Those “friends” presumably include Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as the DC-based lobbying firm BGR Group. According to a 2021 VICE report, Hernández signed a deal in 2020 with BGR Group to “buttress his image as a dedicated [US] ally and an implacable foe of organized crime”. Rubio has historically been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BGR’s spending:

Although BGR presents itself as a bipartisan firm, it has inextricable ties to the Republican Party. The company was co-founded by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Its current team includes prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, and  Trump Administration State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, who is on the firm’s advisory board.

BGR has also given more than $1 million to candidates for federal office in each of the last three election cycles, with roughly 90 percent of its contributions going to Republicans. Rubio is among the top beneficiaries of BGR generosity, and he has benefited from the company’s largesse throughout his career, including BGR-hosted fundraisers during both his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns and his short-lived presidential bid.

Here is Rubio meeting with Hernandez in 2018 to thank him for his “support of Israel and the US at the UN and his partnership targeting drug traffickers.”

Which is curious given that Hernández is the epitome of a narco político. According to court documents, Hernández’s election campaigns were funded with drug money; he had Honduran police and military protect smugglers who paid him off; and his brother, Tony, was arrested in Miami in 2018 due to his ties to a trafficking organization.

He even had an accused co-conspirator killed in a Honduran prison to protect himself, and had close ties to Sinaloan capo Chapo Guzman. Hernández once apparently boasted, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”

Selective Application

In his decision to pardon Hernández, Trump has not presented a single shred of evidence that Hernandez’s trial was biased or corrupted, points out the Gray Zone’s Wyatt Reed:

“Nor has he explained how the then-president of Honduras could have been unaware of the massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy which his own brother – Tony Hernandez – was indicted for by Trump’s Department of Justice.”

Of course, Hernández is not the only US-aligned, Rubio-connected head of state, current or former, to be accused of ties to the narcotics trade. As we’ve already noted on previous occasions, the family business of Ecuador’s Miami-born president, Daniel Noboa, has repeatedly been caught transporting cocaine in its banana consignments to Europe.

When senior figures within Argentina’s Milei government were shown to have received campaign funding from known drug traffickers just a few months ago, Washington barely batted an eye.

It’s a similar story with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Just over a month ago, The Washington Post revealed that Rubio had agreed to return to El Salvador nine leaders of the MS-13 criminal group who were in US custody in exchange for Bukele’s agreement to allow the US to deport and detain hundreds of immigrants at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.

Bukele’s request came amid compromising reports of secret deals between his government and MS-13. The people Rubio promised to return to El Salvador included US government informants who were under the protection of the US Department of Justice. Who knows what has happened to them since their return?

Now, Trump’s proposed presidential pardon for a convicted narco presidente reveals the selective way the US tends to apply its war on drugs. As Judge Andrew Napolitano noted, “the evidence in this case was overwhelming.” What the Trump administration is doing is “kill[ing] the people as to whom there is no known public evidence of guilt (i.e. the boat strike victims) while pardon[ing] the person convicted in a court of law with overwhelming evidence of guilt.”

The proposed pardon is also definitive confirmation, if ever needed, that the US’ rapidly escalating war against the drug cartels is, at bottom, a flimsy pretext for another campaign of regional plunder and geostrategic domination, as we warned over three years ago:

[I]t goes without saying that the real driving motivation behind the latest calls to expand the war on drugs is not to stem the flow of drugs into the US, or to tackle the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America — if Washington was serious about that, all it would have to do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it was serious about tackling drug addiction, it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic in the first place. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.

No, this is primarily about what the US war on drugs has always been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key regions of the world while controlling and imprisoning for serious sums of money the restive populace at home. This is a point that is explained elegantly by Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence School for National Security of Mexico’s Centre for National Intelligence (CNI), in an article for the news website Contralinea:

The ideology of the “war” on drugs and organized crime in the United States is an immense fabrication. That does not mean that the problems linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited drugs and the criminal organizations that have specialized in it, and everything that this entails, do not exist. They exist and are very acute, but both phenomena were ideologized for the purposes of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and were imposed through exportable reactive and punitive public policies in matters of intelligence and security, causing social, political-institutional, cultural and economic devastation. By assuming a military dimension, (the War on Drugs) laid the foundations for armed intervention in the Latin American region and converted the territories, as well as national sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic action.

A “Clean Break” for the Western Hemisphere

Under Trump 2.0, that geostrategic action is being aimed at governments that are somewhat left of centre and are unwilling to turn their countries into US vassal states. As international relations professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer notes, the US “does not tolerate left-leaning governments… and as soon as they see a government that is considered to be left-of-centre they move to replace that government.” 

As we noted in early September, the US is essentially looking to merge two “failed” wars in Latin America, the war on drugs and the war on Terror. Or as Max Blumenthal put it in his latest podcast with Aaron Mate, it is about taking the Project for a New American Century’s “Clean Break” program for the Middle East and applying it to the Western Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, as the war in Ukraine runs out of funding and cannon fodder, Trump’s rapidly escalating fake war on narco-terrorism is opening up new profit-making opportunities for the MIC…

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