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Tag: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

  • ‘This Is an Insane Plan’: Democrats Fume After Briefing on Trump Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

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    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) speaks to reporters in Washington, DC on January 6, 2026. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

    The Trump administration “is going to be spending just as much time running Venezuela as they are running America,” Sen. Chris Murphy said in an address to voters. “That’s terrible news for you.”

    Democratic lawmakers were stunned as they emerged from a briefing Wednesday with Trump administration officials on the White House’s plan for Venezuela following the US invasion last week—a meeting that marked the first time all members of the US Senate and House were briefed on the details of the attack and President Donald Trump’s intentions going forward in the South American country.

    “We learned a lot, I’m glad we had the briefing,” a visibly shaken Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters. “But this is going to be a very rough ride for the United States.”

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    The senators and later members of the House were briefed by officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine.

    As Rubio told the press after the meeting, the lawmakers learned about a three-step process the White House is planning, starting with an effort to “stabilize” Venezuela by seizing and selling 30-50 million barrels of oil and then controlling how the proceeds are dispersed.

    The US will then ensure “American, Western, and other companies have access to the Venezuelan market in a way that’s fair” before ensuring that the third step is “one of transition,” claimed Rubio.

    Murphy said the proposal amounts to “stealing the Venezuelan oil at gunpoint for a period of time, undefined, as leverage to micromanage the country.”

    “This is an insane plan,” he said after the briefing. “The scope and insanity of that plan is absolutely stunning.”

    In a video he posted on social media, Murphy spoke directly to US voters about how Trump’s plan represents not only “corruption” that will benefit the president’s “energy industry and Wall Street friends” and a “failure to learn lessons” from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also an abandonment of working families across the US.

    “This is going to be a multi-billion-dollar effort which is going to take money—your money—but also enormous time,” said the senator. “Donald Trump, the White House, everybody there is going to be spending just as much time running Venezuela as they are running America. That’s terrible news for you, for the American taxpayer. Because there’s huge problems here at home. Healthcare premiums, prices going up, and now the United States government is going to be spending most of its time on many days running the country of Venezuela.”

    At a press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt elaborated on Rubio’s comments, saying that the decisions of Venezuela’s interim authorities—including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who assumed power after President Nicolás Maduro was abducted by US forces last week—“are going to be dictated by the United States of America.” She added that it is premature to discuss elections in the country.

    Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) told reporters after the House’s classified briefing that “there has to be a timeline for elections,” while Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said, “It’s like they’ll wave a magic wand and things will turn out the way they want.”

    Numerous polls have shown that Trump’s escalation against Venezuela, which has also included dozens of boat bombings since September that have killed more than 100 people whom the White House claimed were trafficking drugs to the US, is broadly unpopular with Americans. Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a Quinnipiac University survey said last month that they opposed US military operations in Venezuela.

    “Across America, people are just saying, what the hell is going on?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said after the briefing. “We need answers as to how long this is going to last. We need answers to how many troops, how much money, are there guardrails, things we don’t do, and a number of things that we had talked about were very troubling.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among the lawmakers who said the White House briefing made clear that Congress must hold public hearings on the Trump administration’s operations in Venezuela, adding that oil companies—who Trump openly said on Sunday were informed of the military strike and capture of Maduro before they happened—“seem to know more about Trump’s secret plan to ‘run’ Venezuela than the American people.”

    Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) added that the US is “four months into a sustained military operation” and has killed more than 200 so-called “enemies.”

    “American troops have been injured,” he said. “We have the US forces arranged around Venezuela. Yet neither the House nor the Senate have been willing to hold a single public hearing.”

    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.

  • Trump Murder Spree Continues as Hegseth Says 14 Killed in 3 New Boat Bombings

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    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    US forces have conducted over a dozen strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since early September, killing at least 57 people, according to Trump administration figures.

    Fourteen more people were killed and one survived three new US bombings of what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday claimed—again without evidence—were four boats transporting drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

    “Eight male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessels during the first strike. Four male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the second strike. Three male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the third strike,” Hegseth said of the Monday attacks, which presumably occurred off the west coast of Mexico.

    “A total of 14 narco-terrorists were killed during the three strikes, with one survivor,” he continued. “All strikes were in international waters with no US forces harmed.”

    Hegseth said that US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) “immediately initiated search and rescue (SAR) standard protocols; Mexican SAR authorities accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue.”

    He added that the Department of Defense “has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”

    US forces have carried out more than a dozen strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since early September, killing at least 57 people, according to Trump administration figures.

    Earlier this month, a bipartisan US Senate war powers resolution aimed at reining in President Donald Trump’s ability to extrajudicially execute alleged drug traffickers in or near Venezuela failed to pass.

    The latest boat bombings came amid the Trump administration’s mounting provocations against Venezuela. In addition to his earlier deployment of an armada of US warships and thousands of troops to the southern Caribbean and ongoing military exercises with neighboring Trinidad and Tobago, the Pentagon said last week that the president ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group off the coast of the oil-rich South American nation—a longtime target of US meddling.

    “Somehow, the United States of America has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures—the Iraq War and the War on Drugs—into a single regime change narrative… and sell it again to the mainstream media. Incredible,” Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler said Tuesday in response to US saber-rattling against Venezuela.

    https://twitter.com/davidrkadler/status/1983166871672418472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1983166871672418472%7Ctwgr%5Ea57e98709526aee23d7cea6bf87884a728816e75%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fanother-us-boat-bombing

    Venezuela said Sunday that it had “captured a mercenary group” aligned with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and had determined “that a false-flag attack is underway from waters bordering Trinidad and Tobago, or from Trinidad or Venezuelan territory itself.”

    The claim comes less than two weeks after Trump publicly acknowledged his authorization of covert CIA action against Venezuela.

    Latin American leaders, human rights defenders, and others have condemned the US boat strikes—which Venezuelan and Colombian officials, as well as victims’ relatives, say have killed fishers—as extrajudicial murders and war crimes.

    The 93-year-old great-uncle of Chad Joseph, a 26-year-old Trinidadian and Tobagonian killed along with compatriot Rishi Samaroo in an October 14 US strike, called the attack “perfect murder.”

    “There is nothing they could prove that they are coming across our waters with drugs,” he said earlier this month. “How could Trump prove the boat was bringing narcotics?”

    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.

  • ‘Another Unlawful Extrajudicial Killing’ as Trump Expands Boat-Bombing Spree to Pacific

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    Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    A boat in the Pacific Ocean targeted for military strike by the Trump administration on October 21, 2025. (Image: Screen shot via Pete Hegseth/X)

    “This is illegal and endangers America,” said one critic of Trump’s boat-bombing campaign.

    The Trump administration launched another military strike on a purported drug trafficking boat on Tuesday night, and for the first time expanded its campaign of extrajudicial killing to the Pacific Ocean.

    In a social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that President Donald Trump had authorized “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel being operated by a designated terrorist organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific.” Hegseth also said that the strike killed two passengers who were aboard the vessel.

    This marks at least the eighth time the US military has attacked a purported drug-trafficking boat, although the previous seven strikes took place in the Caribbean. Collectively, the strikes have killed at least 34 people.

    In the wake of the latest boat attack, many Trump critics once again slammed the administration for carrying out what they described as acts of murder.

    Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, described the attack as “another unlawful extrajudicial killing of a boat our military could have stopped and investigated.”

    Friedersdorf also emphasized that these killings would be unlawful even if the people on the boats were involved in narcotics trafficking.

    “Even when convicted drug smugglers go to court, they don’t get the death penalty,” he wrote. “This is immoral.”

    Kenneth Roth, former executive director for Human Rights Watch, tore apart the administration’s legal argument for treating alleged drug smuggling as an act of war by a hostile foreign power.

    “Trump’s rationale for his repeated murders at sea don’t hold water,” he wrote in a post on X. “There is no ‘self-defense’ because no one is attacking the United States. There is no ’armed conflict’ because there are no hostilities approaching a war.”

    Jill Wine-Banks, former Watergate prosecutor and US general counsel of the Army, warned in a post on Bluesky about the dangers of further widening Trump’s bombing campaign.

    “He must be stopped,” she wrote. “This is illegal and endangers America.”

    Journalist Mark Jacob said he was highly skeptical that the administration was carrying out these attacks to stop the flow of drugs into the US.

    “The Trump regime lies all the time,” he wrote on Bluesky. “A more likely explanation for these attacks is US imperialism: Trump wants to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela (with vast oil reserves) and intimidate Colombia (which criticized previous attacks).”

    Colombian President Gustavo Petro this past weekend said that the Trump administration had “committed a murder” after one of its boat attacks killed a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, who had been out on a fishing trip when the US military attacked his boat.

    Trump responded by baselessly calling Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs,” while also levying new tariffs against Colombia.

    Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.

  • Trump Threatens to Jail CodePink Protesters Who Disrupted His Dinner With Chants for Gaza

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    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    A side-by-side photo shows a CodePink activist (l) as she and her fellow activists chant against President Donald Trump at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab restaurant in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 9, 2025. (Photo: Screengrab / CodePink via YouTube)

    “It is all very reminiscent of McCarthyism,” a CodePink spokesperson said.

    President Donald Trump threatened on Monday to jail the peace activists who disrupted his dinner with pro-Palestinian chants last week, referring to their behavior as “subversive.”

    Last Tuesday, members of CodePink, a women-led antiwar group, verbally confronted the president and several top members of his administration—including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—as they dined on steak and seafood at a swanky DC eatery.

    The small group of activists castigated the president for his support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and its blockade on humanitarian aid, which has caused mass starvation throughout the strip.

    The activists chanted, “They feast while Gaza starves,” and called Trump “the Hitler of our time” for supporting the military campaign, which an Israeli general recently admitted has resulted in over 220,000 people being killed or wounded.

    On Monday, as Trump and his administration continued to map out a sweeping crackdown against left-wing speech following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the president suggested that the women of CodePink should also be punished for their peaceful display of dissent, referring to them as “professional agitators” and “total phonies.”

    “They started to scream when I got into the restaurant,” he said, “‘Ohhh’…Something with Palestine. And I said, ‘Well, I’m doing a great job for peace in the Middle East, I should get lots of awards for that, right, with the Abraham Accords and everything else.’ But the woman just stood up and started screaming. And she got booed out of the place.”

    Trump called the protester a “mouthpiece” and a “paid agitator,” before saying that he’d “asked [Attorney General Pam Bondi] to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them. Criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail, what they’re doing to this country is really subversive.”

    RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which the government has traditionally used to prosecute organized crime groups. But following Kirk’s shooting, Trump has suggested it be used to carry out what his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Friday would be an effort to “dismantle” left-wing organizations in the United States.

    Trump has threatened to use RICO charges against liberal nonprofits, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, which Vance referred to on Monday as “terrorist networks.” The vice president claimed that these groups push “messaging designed to trigger and incite violence,” with his leading example being an article published in The Nation that harshly criticized Kirk’s political views following his assassination.

    Melissa Garriga, a spokesperson for CodePink, told Common Dreams that Trump’s allegations against her antiwar group are untrue.

    “CodePink has a very small staff,” Garriga said. “A majority of our work is done by CodePink volunteers, who are not paid. ThRacketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act,ey represent the majority of the American public and are not ‘mouthpieces’ of any foreign government or political party. They are workers, veterans, artists, and peace activists from across the country. We are committed to peaceful, nonviolent means of protest when executing our actions.”

    “This is not new for us,” Garriga added. “Over the past few years, elected officials, more often Republican elected officials, have constantly called for investigations into progressive organizations such as ours. They’ve launched baseless congressional investigations over CodePink’s funding sources that their Democrat colleagues often parrot.”

    Earlier this year, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) claimed that the group was funded by “Communist China” after a retired Army colonel working with the group disrupted a committee hearing with chants of “Stop funding Israel!” CodePink filed an ethics complaint against Cotton in response, calling his accusation “untrue and libelous.”

    In 2024, when CodePink was castigating the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made a similar suggestion that the group should be investigated by the FBI because, “when they advocate for a ceasefire, it’s Putin’s agenda at play.” Prior to that, when a member of the group confronted Pelosi, the congresswoman responded, “Go back to China.”

    CodePink strenuously denied having received any funding from the Chinese government or any other foreign governments following calls from several Republicans for the group to be investigated over its campaign against military escalation with China.

    “Our financial records are transparent and audited, and any suggestion that external governments or political entities influence us is ludicrous,” Garriga reiterated to Common Dreams. “As we have officially stated multiple times, CodePink receives no money from any foreign government, and we are funded by thousands of individual donors and US-based foundations.”

    “President Trump is trying to intimidate people who speak up for peace and justice, and we won’t be intimidated,” she continued. “We represent the popular opinion in the United States: the majority who are against war and genocide.”

    According to a Quinnipiac poll released at the end of August, 60% of voters across all parties said they opposed sending more military aid to Israel, compared to just 32% who said they supported it. Half of the respondents said they agreed with the international community’s growing consensus that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

    “It is all very reminiscent of McCarthyism,” Garriga said of Trump’s threats to crack down on left-wing speech. “It’s a critical moment for other organizations to stand in solidarity, loud and clear solidarity with organizations facing repression.”

    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
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    Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.