Richard Steiner in Raw Story :
President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about potential military action in Venezuela is indeed about drugs, but not cocaine. It is about a far more dangerous drug that former President George W. Bushadmitted (in his 2006 State of the Union address) the US is addicted to.
Oil.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world — 300 billion barrels — even larger than reserves in Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends may imagine that by deposing President Nicolás Maduro and installing a friendly government there, the US would have unlimited access to this huge oil reserve, which is five times larger than the proven reserves in the US.
Never mind the fact that for any hope of future climate stability, most of this oil needs to stay right where it is: in the ground.
We’ve seen this tragic play before. The Bush administration justified its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq with the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which, as it turned out, it didn’t.
As US Central Command commander General John Abizaid admitted about the Iraq War at the time: “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.”
The invasion killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, and destabilized the broader Middle East region for years.
And now here we go again. A similar pretext — this time “drug interdiction” — is being used to justify a potential US invasion and regime change in Venezuela. But this is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on.
Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has been released from a US prison, according to online records of federal inmates, after he received a pardon from US President Donald Trump for drug charges.
The records show Hernández was released from the high security facility of USP Hazelton in West Virginia on Monday.
Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine to the US, and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, was critical of the pardon, saying Sunday on social media, “Why would we pardon [Hernandez] and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States? Lock up every drug runner! Don’t understand why he is being pardoned.”
“This is shocking,” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, said of the pardon on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
“He was convicted in a federal court in the United States,” said Kaine, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “One of the bits of evidence was his statement that was picked up by those near to him that he wanted to shove drugs up the nose of gringos and flood the United States with cocaine, more than 400 tons. He was the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever been subject to a conviction in U.S. courts, and less than one year into his sentence, President Trump is pardoning him, suggesting that President Trump cares nothing about narcotrafficking. Suggesting possibly that pardons are now for sale by this White House.”
Miss direction, foreign threat, and don’t worry about the corrupt wannabe dictator screwing you, the nation and the world.