Venezuela: American regime change with a Trumpian twist

Al Jazeera English

United States President Donald Trump has kicked off the new year with a typically deranged bang by conducting massive air strikes on Venezuela and reportedly capturing the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, who has apparently been spirited off to an undisclosed location.

The attack does not come entirely as a surprise, given Trump’s track record of doing whatever the hell he wants with no regard for the law – or for his own promise to, you know, stop waging war abroad.

Indeed, Trump has been chattering for months about the possibility of enhanced US military action against Venezuela, as the US has gone about bombing boats willy-nilly off the country’s coast, supposedly in the name of combatting drug trafficking.

This has entailed numerous extrajudicial killings and rampant accusations of war crimes. But, hey, it’s all in a day’s work for an administration that couldn’t care less about legal justification for its behaviour, much less human rights and other such silly concepts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Here is to a quarter century of US military havoc

 Al Jazeera English

The year 2025 has come to an end, and along with it, the first quarter of the 21st century. Reflecting on the course of the past 25 years, it is hard to understate the extent to which global events have been shaped by the military excesses of the United States – not that the same cannot be said for the 20th century, too. 

Shortly after the new century kicked off, the US launched the so-called “global war on terror” under the enlightened guidance of President George W Bush, who offered the professional call to arms following the 9/11 attacks of 2001: “We have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” . . . 

Bush was succeeded as leader of the global superpower by premature Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama, who, in his final year in office alone, managed to drop no fewer than 26,172 bombs on seven different countries. . .

Joe Biden, who served as president in between the two Trump administrations, distinguished his time in office by expanding Washington’s traditionally egregious support for Israeli massacres of Palestinians to underwrite an all-out genocide in the Gaza Strip with the help of billions of dollars in US taxpayer money. . . .

Meanwhile, Trump’s resumption of control over imperial “counterterror” operations has been characterised by even less restraint this time around, as his newly rebranded Department of War goes about blowing up boats willy-nilly off the coast of Venezuela and extrajudicially murdering the folks on board. . . . 

And as we embark on the second quarter of a 21st century that is already defined by the catastrophic legacy of US militarism, one cannot help but recall those unfortunate “marching orders” that started it all: “My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s Christmas gifts

 Al Jazeera English

If my memory serves me correctly, it was on Christmas Eve in 1992 that I found out there was no Santa Claus.

I was a 10-year-old elementary school student in Austin, Texas, and although I had already debunked the existence of the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, I had held onto Santa for as long as possible, apparently unready to relinquish my youth.

When I caught my parents in the act of delivering the gifts that had supposedly arrived from the North Pole, I cried.

Fast forward more than three decades, and many Americans are feeling similarly deceived this holiday season by another man in red – MAGA red to be precise.

As United States President Donald Trump nears the end of his first year back in office, he has neglected to deliver on pretty much all of his key promises aside from manic deportations, which have helped convert the country into a holly, jolly police state. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US is already at war with Venezuela

 Al Jazeera English

On Wednesday, the United States hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela – a new move in the ongoing aggression against the South American nation by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Over recent months, the US has gone about wantonly blowing up small boats in the Caribbean Sea along with their passengers, whom Trump has telepathically divined to be drug traffickers.

Exercising his passion for ridiculous overstatement, Trump proclaimed on Wednesday that the seized vessel was a “large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually”.

When asked at a news conference about the ship’s altered destination, Trump advised reporters to “get a helicopter and follow the tanker” – although folks might reasonably be wary of taking to the skies around Venezuela given Trump’s unilateral decree in November that the country’s airspace was “closed in its entirety”.

Of course, the airspace closure hasn’t managed to interfere with continuing US deportation flights to Venezuela. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

World Cup 2026: Re-disappearing Mexico’s disappeared

Al Jazeera English

The city of Guadalajara in Mexico is scheduled to host four World Cup matches next year, and labourers are working around the clock to revamp infrastructure in time for the tournament. 

On account of frenzied construction, the city’s roads are presently a bona fide mess, constituting a perpetual headache for those who must transit them. 

But Guadalajara has a much bigger problem than traffic. The metropolis is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, which happens to possess the highest number of disappeared people in all of Mexico. 

The official tally of Jalisco’s disappeared is close to 16,000, out of a total of more than 130,000 countrywide. However, the frequent reluctance of family members to report missing persons for fear of retribution means the true toll is undoubtedly higher. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Venezuela: A not-so-covert CIA disaster in the making

 Al Jazeera English

On Saturday, the Reuters news agency published an exclusive report claiming that the United States is “poised to launch a new phase of Venezuela-related operations in the coming days”. . . as a first step in this “new action” against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

This was less than shocking news given that more than a month ago, US President Donald Trump himself announced that he had authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela – a rather unique approach since one does not normally broadcast actions that are supposed to be, um, secret. . . . 

It should come as no surprise by now that the president who campaigned on keeping the US out of wars and then promptly bombed Iran has now found another conflict in which to embroil the country. And as is par for the course in US imperial belligerence, the rationale for aggression against Venezuela doesn’t hold water.

For example, the Trump administration has strived to pin the blame for the fentanyl crisis in the US on Maduro. But there’s a slight problem – which is that Venezuela doesn’t even produce the synthetic opioid in question. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Ice cream and MAGA drama in the American swamp

 Al Jazeera English

In the latest episode of the soap opera that passes for politics in the United States, President Donald Trump has dramatically split with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a former ally and a notorious wearer of the MAGA hat.

Writing on his Truth Social platform on Friday, Trump denounced his fellow Republican as “wacky” and “Far Left”, claiming that he did not have time to deal with her alleged barrage of phone calls: “I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day”.... 

Greene denies having called the president, saying instead that she had texted him to suggest that he cease endeavouring to thwart the full release of the so-called Epstein files pertaining to the late paedophile and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, which may implicate Trump....In a typical about-face, Trump has now spontaneously reversed his position on the Epstein files, posting on Truth Social late on Sunday: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.”

Trump’s apoplectic fits over the possible release of details regarding Epstein .... do not bode well in terms of drainage prospects. Then again, the fact that Americans re-elected a nepotistic billionaire and convicted criminal to head the country suggests that the swamp probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The government shutdown has escalated the US war on the poor

Al Jazeera English

Today, the United States marks its 41st day of a federal government shutdown that has seen federal employees unpaid, air travel disrupted and millions of poor Americans losing food assistance. . . .

Nearly 42 million Americans – or one in eight people – rely on SNAP to eat. According to the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US Department of Agriculture, children accounted for 39 percent of the programme’s participants in the fiscal year 2023. 

When I visited the ERS website on Sunday, I encountered the following very professional alert at the top of the screen: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse.” 

The message continued in slightly smaller print: “President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel and clothe the American people.” 

It could be funny, if only it weren’t so macabre. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remembering Dick Cheney, ‘Polarizing’ War Criminal

FAIR

The corporate media in the United States have rarely met a servant of empire who isn’t eligible for hagiography in death, whether or not they presided over mass murder worldwide. In the case of Dick Cheney, who died on November 4, media outlets have summoned everything in their power to sugarcoat the blood-drenched career of the most powerful US vice president in history, a position he notoriously occupied for the duration of the two-term administration of George W. Bush from 2001–09.

As VP, he was chief architect of the “Global War on Terror,” with a hands-on role in manufacturing the disinformation that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion based on imaginary WMDs and fictional ties to 9/11. The hundreds of thousands of deaths from that war are Cheney’s most significant legacy. . . .

As the obituaries proliferate in the establishment press, it’s hard to find a single one that isn’t complicit in sanitizing—to the extent possible—Cheney’s trajectory of mass destruction. . . the US corporate media has shown its true colors by legitimizing and euphemizing the track record of someone who is responsible for an inconceivably massive quantity of suffering and death worldwide.

As Iraqi scholar and poet Sinan Antoon recently put it: “In a different world Dick Cheney would definitely be a war criminal and would be standing trial.”

But we’re stuck with the world we have—and the media aren’t doing anything to make it any better. READ MORE AT FAIR.

 

Dick Cheney and the sanitising of a war criminal

 Al Jazeera English

And so another member of the old “war on terror” team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84. 

According to a memorial statement issued by his family, Cheney was “a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing”. 

And yet many inhabitants of the Earth will remember the late VP for rather less warm and fuzzy things than love and fly fishing. As the chief architect of the “global war on terror” – which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting “terrorists” – Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq. . . . 

In the wake of his demise, US news agencies and media outlets have restricted themselves to memorialising him as a “polarising” and “controversial” figure who, as The Associated Press diplomatically put it, “was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction he was essentially right”. 

As usual, the corporate media can never bring themselves to call a spade a spade – or a war criminal a war criminal. But against the current backdrop of Israel’s US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip and other global calamities, the loss of another mass murderer can hardly be considered bad news. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.