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.

Donald Trump won in Argentina

Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, Argentinians voted in midterm elections that attracted an uncommonly high level of international attention. This was in part due to the potential $40bn bailout promised to cash-strapped Buenos Aires by Washington. Ahead of the vote, United States President Donald Trump had made clear the cash injection was contingent upon the election results. 

And Trump’s far-right buddy Javier Milei, the equally uniquely coiffed president of Argentina, did not fail to deliver. . . . 

Before the election, Trump explained that his generous gesture to Milei – made even as the US president was overseeing sweeping cuts to healthcare and other services at home – was his own way of “helping a great philosophy take over a great country”.

US Treasury Secretary similarly contended that the “bridge” the US was extending to Milei was in the hopes “that Argentina can be great again”. Call it MAGA – the South American version.

Call it MAGA – the South American version. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

 

Why the Louvre heist feels like justice — but isn’t

Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, the iconic Louvre Museum in the French capital played host to a speedy heist in which eight items of precious jewellery dating from the Napoleonic era were spirited away from its second floor. . . .

International news outlets reported the theft with predictable drama; CNN, for example, blared the headline: “Historic jewels stolen in ‘national disaster’ for France”. The article went on to note that one of the looted diadems “features 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1,083 diamonds that can be detached and worn as brooches, according to the Louvre”.

The sensational hand-wringing was almost reminiscent of another contemporary “national disaster” in Paris – namely, the April 2019 fire at the Notre Dame cathedral that broke the hearts of politicians worldwide, even as they remained apparently unmoved by such objectively more tragic events as Israel’s recurrent slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

And now that we have just witnessed two years of all-out genocide in Gaza courtesy of the United States-backed Israeli military, it seems that the loss of all those sapphires and diamonds might ultimately not really be so “disastrous”, after all – at least in terms of, you know, the general state of humanity and the future of the planet.

In fact, many of us might even find ourselves rooting for the thieves, to some extent – if only as a symbolic middle finger to a world predicated on obscene inequality and misplaced priorities. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

 FAIR

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

. . . on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire. READ MORE AT FAIR.

What Trump said and did not say at the Knesset

Al Jazeera English

United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count. A single protester undertook a brief outburst but was swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient” . . . .

Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end – for the moment – to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000. . . .

Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”. . . .

To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” – which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US president himself. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Jared Kushner ‘Out of the Spotlight’—But Not Out of Mideast Politics, or Out of the Money

FAIR

President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel’s US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.

Kushner’s inclusion in the Egyptian expedition may have come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news—and perhaps to many of those who have, given the dearth of reporting on the continuing Middle Eastern machinations of nepotism’s favorite poster boy.

A senior adviser in the first Trump White House, Kushner was a driving force behind the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He was also the brains behind the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” plan that was meant to resolve the pesky seven-decades-long Israeli/Palestinian conflict—an undertaking for which Kushner famously felt qualified on account of having read 25 whole books on the subject. READ MORE AT FAIR.