John Law (11:07)
Alright, first up, let's start with what the red is saying. The red is mixed on the ongoing strikes, with some arguing that Trump is taking necessary action to confront an immediate threat. Some question the legal basis of the strikes. Others say Trump's approach risks worsening the problem he wants to solve. In PJ Media, Sarah Anderson explored why the US can't afford to ignore Venezuela anymore Nicolas Maduro and his illegitimate narco terrorist Venezuelan government must fall. Not just for the sake of the majority of law abiding Venezuelans who deserve to have the government they voted for in summer of 2024, but for every single one of us in the US as well, Anderson wrote. Maduro isn't just some random dictator. Venezuela isn't just a failed country. It serves as a launchpad for cartels and narco terrorists poisoning and destabilizing American communities. And it's a safe haven for terrorist groups like Hezbollah. The Maduro regime itself is a cartel. Venezuela faces one of the largest displacement crises in the world. Between 2014 and 2024, 7.7 million Venezuelans fled their home country. While many of those people coming from Venezuela just wanted to get away from Maduro and find a new life, some of them had darker motives, anderson said. Human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism, you name it. That's how the TDA thugs get here. That's how terrorists from other parts of the world like Hezbollah who wish every American dead get here. Venezuela is their starting point. In the Washington Post, John Woo said Trump's boat strikes risk crossing the line between law enforcement and war. The Trump administration is right that illicit drugs are inflicting more harm on the US than most armed conflicts have. More than 800,000Americans have died of opioid overdoses since 1999. But the US cannot wage war against any source of harm to Americans. Americans have died in car wrecks at an annual rate of about 40,000 in recent years. The nation does not wage war on auto companies, wu wrote. Our military and intelligence agents seek to prevent foreign attacks that might happen in the future not to punish past conduct to perform that anticipatory and preventative function. We accept that our military and intelligence forces must act on probabilities, not certainties, but to prevent threats that might never be realized. The use of military force against the cartels may plunge the US Into a war against Venezuela, but a conflict focused against the Maduro regime is not a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade, which would violate American law and the Constitution, wu said. The White House has yet to provide compelling evidence in court or to Congress that drug cartels have become arms of the Venezuelan government. That showing is needed to justify not only the deportations, which were just overturned by the conservative U.S. court of Appeals for the Fifth Market, but also the naval attacks in the South American seas. In the Washington Examiner, Daniel DiPetras criticized Trump's unconstitutional, forever war against the cartels. To say there is a litany of problems with this militarized approach would be an understatement. Taking the fight to drug cartels has been done in the past, including in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico, all driven by the assumption that military pressure will over time result in drug trafficking organizations fracturing into irrelevance. But it hasn't turned out that way, dipetras wrote. Mexico's murder rate is slowly going down, but the numbers remain staggeringly high compared to what they were at the beginning of the century. Colombia used to be a success story, but now it is viewed as a failure. Coca cultivation increased by more than 50% between 2022 and 2023. Trump can't order somebody's death simply by calling them a terrorist. Drug traffickers may be the scum of the earth, but they aren't terrorists using violence to achieve a political objective to mix the two together, as the Trump administration is doing, has dangerous practical implications, dipietris said. Let's remember Venezuela's trende Aragua is not the only Latin American criminal group labeled by the US State Department as a terrorist organization. The list now includes Vive Ansam and Grand Grif in Haiti, Los Joniros and Los Lobos in Ecuador, and a litany of cartels in Mexico. By Trump's logic, the US is now free to bomb any and all of these groups at whimsical alright, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. The left continues to oppose the strikes, suggesting Trump is acting lawlessly. Some argue the strikes have no legal justification. Others criticize the media's coverage of the military actions in the New York Times, W.J. hennigan wrote, if we're at war, Americans deserve to know more about it. The Trump administration told Congress this week that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels. The average American knows vanishingly little about what its government seeks to accomplish in this fight. Citizens aren't in possession of the metrics by which to judge the administration's pursuit of those goals, hennegan said. We haven't been told which specific drugs they seek to stop. We haven't been told much about what specific groups they seek to destroy. We haven't been told much about what legal authorities they are acting on. Withholding this information from the American public is the administration's way to escape scrutiny. So what's the ultimate goal? The Pentagon has amassed a wide range of firepower in the region that indicates that its ambitions extend beyond destroying drug boats, F35 stealth fighter jets, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and a flotilla of warships. Perhaps, as experts have speculated, the strikes are merely the opening salvo to push Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro from power, hennigan wrote. The current deployment of US Forces, while sizable, still isn't enough for a full scale invasion, but we should know and hear more about the underpinning rationale for positioning them there. In Just Security, Marty Letterman described the legal flaws in Trump's the Trump administration's armed conflict justification is groundless. No one in the public, in Congress, or most importantly in the military itself should treat it as a plausible legal basis that might justify lethal strikes on the alleged drug vessels and the civilians on those boats, lederman said. It is necessary, at minimum one that the non state entity is an organized armed group with the sort of command structure that would render members targetable on the basis of their status because they're subject to commander's directions and control and two that the organized armed group has engaged in armed violence against a state that is of some intensity. Think of Al Qaeda's attack on September 11, 2001, and that has been protracted. The Trump administration hasn't made any effort, not publicly anyway, to demonstrate that any of the drug cartels in question are organized armed groups with the sort of command structure that would render members targetable on the basis of their status. But even if it could do so, those cartels haven't engaged in any protracted or intense armed violence against the United States, letterman wrote. When the president uses the term armed attack, he is referring not to any actual armed attack, as any state or international tribunals understand that term, but instead to the flow of illicit narcotics into the United States. The distribution of dangerous narcotics, however, isn't an armed attack or armed violence in the sense used in international law. In Common Dreams, Joseph Bouchard asked, why hasn't the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous? Within hours of these strikes breaking, major outlets were repeating the Trump administration's line that this was a strike on a drug boat. According to this framing, the attacks were justified, necessary, and part of a broader war on drug trafficking. Virtually none of those outlets even entertained the obvious legal and ethical questions. Instead, they served as stenographers for the administration. Bouchard said this is reminiscent of the Iraq war era, when corporate media parroted the Bush administration's ludicrous arguments, paving the way for an invasion and occupation that would kill at least 200,000, maim millions and destroy American democracy. Further, due process was ignored. There was no trial, no arrest, no attempt at interdiction, just summary execution. And the strikes occurred in Venezuelan territorial waters, not in an international conflict zone. If another country did this, say Russia bombing a fishing boat in the Baltic, or China attacking smugglers near Taiwan, the Western media would have declared it a war crime the same day, Bouchard said, add to this list of Western double standards in the international arena, we are seeing the destruction of the liberal order in real time. Alright, let's head over to Ari for his take.
