You see, Iran is sanctioned by the west for decades now, and these sanctions eroded the Iranian economy greatly, causing much pain and suffering for the people of Iran.
These sanctions a major reason for the protest, so they are largely legitimate. To archive regime change, mix in (paid) violent protesters with AK's and Molotov Cocktails and add a Truth Social Post like
> If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP
> The FDD is a think tank based in Washington, D.C., United States.[6][7] It has been described as a pro-Israel, anti-Iran lobby group
> CEO is Mark Dubowitz
> Mark Dubowitz is [...] a proponent of sanctions against Iran[2] and was a leading critic of the Iran nuclear agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Conclusion: U.S./Israel "Think Tank" pushing for regime change in Iran financed by Isreal/Wallstreet money. So boring, always the same playbook.
Of course, the underlying goal is to deny China oil exports from Iran. Venezuela as a major oil supplier to China is already coup d'état successfully. Go U.S.A, go!
It sadly never happened for the perpetrators of the Iraq/Ukraine/Libya/Afghan/Syria/Yugoslav/... wars. Remember Collateral Murder? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Also, no one really cared about all the veterans back home, many of whom suffered and still suffer from PTSD. The U.S. truly is the biggest sh*thole on earth.
The fact that it didn't happen for the those previous administrations is why it's happening again now.
If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes, and the guilty parties were cooling their heels in a jail cell, then we probably wouldn't be seeing this action tonight.
"If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes"
and yeah who is gonna charge them ???? US have (arguably) strongest military on earth, who can put justice to them if not themselves ???? and themselves I mean US Gov. which is would never happen since every administration have "blood" in some form and another
The problem is that nearly everyone in the US national security establishment believes that the US should be involved in lots of wars. You may recall how little sympathy Biden got for pulling out of Afghanistan. I genuinely don’t think you could assemble Washington staff with the foreign policy expertise a president requires without ending up with a majority who support bombing Maduro.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan may have occurred under Biden, but it was Trump who made the decision to pull out. The only change Biden made was delaying our withdraw by a couple of months.
Always remember the role of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in preparing this unprovoked and illegal (under international law) attack on Venezuela by awarding the prize to María Corina Machado.
Julian Assange actually filed a Swedish criminal complaint against Nobel Foundation officials, alleging misappropriation of Nobel endowment funds and facilitating war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to María Corina Machado, and it seeks immediate freezing of funds and a full investigation: https://just-international.org/articles/assanges-criminal-co...
The US is actually sending weapons to China, similar to Ukraine 10 years ago (Javelins authorized and delivered by Trump). As so often, the US is the aggressor here, not China. Just look at Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Irak, Iran, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, etc. the list of countries destroyed by the USA is basically endless. I wish the US would simply accept the multipolar world.
By helping a country to be able to defend itself against aggression, the US is the aggressor? Both your logic and your morals are worthy of condemnation.
There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now.
I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven...
Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
I noticed that too and it’s kinda scary. Soon we will have the opposite of canceling, where the target will be deepfaked to say everything and its opposite to nullify their signal to noise ratio.
Yeah, I hate that also. I just subscribed to Yanis Varoufakis‘s official feed and installed a Safari extension to block everything on YT not in my subscriptions. I think this will work out: use the YouTube app occasionally to discover new material to subscribe to, but usually access YT on Safari using this extensikn.
How is it possible that a president of a country can close the airspace of another country?
How can the extrajudicial killings of (over 80 by now!) alleged drug traffickers
without any charges or trials be justified or accepted? These are, in fact, crimes against humanity.
I'm convinced at some point in the future U.S. citizens will have to learn what war means.
> How can the extrajudicial killings of (over 80 by now!) alleged drug traffickers without any charges or trials be justified or accepted? These are, in fact, crimes against humanity.
It's _been_ accepted for years, if not decades now. Ever since the US started drone striking people without trial, or via trial in absentia, this has been the new normal. It being against international law is meaningless if no one care what the international law is, and especially if other countries are also breaking the law in the exact same way.
> How is it possible that a president of a country can close the airspace of another country?
It is a de facto declaration of war, focussed (on its face, it has other propaganda and diplomatic purposes) on informing civilians of the imminent actions and associated risks so that they can conduct themselves accordingly.
> How is it possible that a president of a country can close the airspace of another country?
To be fair, closing airspace before engaging in air operations is an international courtesy. It reduces the chances of downing civilian airliners. (In a similar vein, announcing closures and then not following through is incredibly damaging.)
> alleged drug traffickers without any charges or trials be justified or accepted? These are, in fact, crimes against humanity
They are war crimes.
If you're concerned about it, call your representative and tell them you care about the American military committing war crimes. There is currently momentum on the issue [1].
It cannot be a war crime if there is no war. There is no declaration of war and no approval of Congress. The ICC classified these strikes as crimes against humanity.
Any time a state uses armed force against another state (and sometimes against other entities), there is a war in which there can be war crimes.
> There is no declaration of war
War is war whether or not it is formally declared. (And the Trump Administration has described that it is fighting a war against Venezuela for months, though it has characterized Venezuela as the aggressor.) This was, among other things, the explicit premise of the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act months ago.
> and no approval of Congress.
That might arguably make any war also a violation of domestic law, but from the standpoint of international law it isn’t particularly a meaningful argument against their being a war.
> The ICC classified these strikes as crimes against humanity.
No, an individual who used to be a prosecutor with the ICC, acting as a private individual, described them that way.
(Under U.S. law, I do believe they are war crimes given they're an abuse of war powers, whether exercised legally or not.)
> ICC classified these strikes as crimes against humanity
No, it did not. A "former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC)" told the BBC "US air strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats would be treated under international law as crimes against humanity" [1].
I haven't seen the ICC take an official position on any of this, which is expected, since it's a judicial body that grinds deliberately.
"War crimes can only be committed during times of armed conflict, either international or non-international, as understood under international humanitarian law. While it is necessary that the crime in question was committed during an armed conflict, this is in itself not sufficient: the crime must be sufficiently linked to the armed conflict. This so-called nexus requirement is satisfied if the armed conflict played a substantial role in the perpetrator’s decision to commit the crime, his or her ability to commit it, or the manner in which the crime was committed.
In order to define an act as a war crime, this act must, besides having nexus to an armed conflict, be a serious violation of international humanitarian law and entail individual criminal responsibility."
I'm certainly not defending what is happening. I don't believe that criminal organizations meet the standard for an armed group that international law stipulates as required for an armed conflict. International law doesn’t work on intuition; it works on context and definitions.
People seem to think there’s some clever little gap between war crime law, US domestic law, and human rights law that mean a government can just kill people who pose no immediate threat and without any establishment of guilt.
There is not.
The Trump admin wants to say they’re invaders therefore we don’t need Congressional authorization, but they’re actually irregulars therefore we don’t need to follow Geneva, but they’re actually terrorists therefore…
> People seem to think there’s some clever little gap between war crime law, US domestic law, and human rights law that mean a government can just kill people who pose no immediate threat and without any establishment of guilt
International human rights law is back to being an aspirational ideal. Every one of the world's great powers have explicitly rejected it. (So have most of regional powers.)
I'd love it if Trump, Xi and Putin could be hauled in front of an international tribunal for the atrocities they've committed. But it isn't happening. Not to them. Nor to Netanyahu, Kim, Khamenei, Modi, Lukashenko or MBS.
At the end of the day, the only thing that can hold Trump and the U.S. military accountable is U.S. law. Bickering over what crime is committed under that law might be teidous. But it is a legitimate activity that could bring real consequences in a way bringing up what a former ICC prosecutor thinks does not.
> All of it is nonsense
This is lazy. Top of the thread. Real debate happening around whether war crimes were committed. Dismissing that as "nonsense" enables and implicitly supports the illegal behaviour.
No argument about the enforceability of it. US law actually isn't even sufficient. The US body politic has to do it.
> Real debate happening around whether war crimes were committed
But the debate isn't about whether war crimes were committed. The debate is whether war crime law is relevant. And that debate is endless for the reason I just explained: the Trump admin will play the shell game of defining the relevant legal framework as X when it suits them, then Y when it suits them, then Z when it suits them, despite the fact that X Y and Z are mutually exclusive of each other.
Are they a stateless vessel? Are they narco-terrorists? Are they drug smugglers? Are they foreign invaders? Are they agents of the Venezuelan government?
Well, all and none of the above, depending on who is asking for what reason.
This is legal nihilism and Schmittian Decisionism. The administration has declared itself unbound by law altogether. All that matters is calling it a violation, collecting evidence, and when political powers shift, holding the relevant parties to account. Under a non-nihilistic/decisionist legal framework, there will be no shortage of chargeable offenses.
That body politic remains, for now, grounded in voters. The number of calls Congressmen receive in the coming days about this issue will determine whether it's taken seriously.
> the debate isn't about whether war crimes were committed. The debate is whether war crime law is relevant
First step in any court opinion is the establishment of juridiction. That's important here.
Even in this thread, we have folks arguing war crime statute doesn't apply. That appears to be false. It's an example of why debating and establishing that this law is relevant in the popular discourse is important.
> Are they a stateless vessel? Are they narco-terrorists? Are they drug smugglers? Are they foreign invaders? Are they agents of the Venezuelan government?
Another reason to focus on U.S. law. I don't believe these distinctions matter under it.
Part of the mechanism to make this possible is dropping the full weight of the DOJ and other three letter agencies down hard on anybody who dares to point out the illegality of many of the actions here.
eg: Pentagon Is Investigating a Member Of Congress Who Criticized Trump
is essentially direct retribution against elected members, former military members who merely state that serving troops are required to follow the law and the constitution first as a priority.
This wastes the time, money, and resources of those prepared to state the emperor has no clothes and serves as a dire warning to any other that might think to stand up.
> How is it possible that a president of a country can close the airspace of another country?
Threat of violence. Nobody is dumb enough to test the patience of the country with Eagles and Raptors.
> How can the extrajudicial killings of (over 80 by now!) alleged drug traffickers without any charges or trials be justified or accepted?
It's really simple.
Drug traffickers are so rich and organized they are in fact parallel governments. They are parasite governments inside the "official" ones. They have territory. They have armies. They have laws. They have tribunals. They even have goddamn taxes. It's middle ages tier barbarity. It's like a secession but without actually seceding.
Trump's administration is simply engaging a belligerent government that refuses to respect its laws and treaties and insists on engaging in covert infiltration and drug sale operations on US soil.
Nuking drug boats out of existence is the correct course of action.
> I'm convinced at some point in the future U.S. citizens will have to learn what war means.
It's because of Trump that they don't have to learn what war means. They should be thanking Trump and his troops for their service.
In my country police can't engage in a single operation against the continent spanning organized drug gangs without judges busting their balls every single step of the way while at the same time releasing drug traffickers from prison and even giving back their seized drug money.
How do you think it feels to wake up one day and read a newspaper saying the drug gangs dominate a quarter of your country's territory? There's speculation that the drug gangs control judges, politicians. Can you fathom what it must be like to take in this information when you're married and planning to have children?
Americans should be worshipping Trump right now. They have no idea how privileged they are. Some of us are not so lucky. Some of us live in countries where at any point in time organized crime gangs can come to your house and spray paint a message saying you have 24 hours to leave or be killed. They've emptied entire towns this way. Americans will never experience that and they should thank god for it. They have professional soldiers waging literal war against these barbarians so they don't have to.
What would the U.S. do if China builds military infrastructure in Canada (in cooperation with Canada), so that China could destroy major cities and U.S. military infrastructure within seconds?
The U.S. would argue that this constitutes an existential threat to the homeland security of the United States.
This is a valid argument, but why does this not apply equally to Russia?
Isn't it an existential threat to Russia if NATO builds military infrastructure in Ukraine or Georgia? Yes, Russia communicated this clearly since at least 2008 at the Munich Security Conference. The West/NATO didn't listen and here we are...
Except for the fact that none of the above was actually happening in Ukraine. Can you even name the specific military infrastructure in Ukraine you are talking about?
Yes, also in Guantanamo Bay, very expensive! And in Abu Ghraib, very very expensive! And these mean "drug transport boats" in the Caribbean, very very expensive to just kill them without charge or trial.
These sanctions a major reason for the protest, so they are largely legitimate. To archive regime change, mix in (paid) violent protesters with AK's and Molotov Cocktails and add a Truth Social Post like
> If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP
there is your regime change!