Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

When the US ‘puts Maduro on trial,’ the world also puts the US under scrutiny

Global Times – January 6, 2026

On Monday local time, a highly anticipated international meeting and an equally high-profile so-called “trial” unfolded on the same day in New York, the US. Inside the UN headquarters in Manhattan, the Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss the heightened tensions triggered by US military actions against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The UN secretary-general, multiple Security Council members, and representatives from many countries all stressed the imperative of adhering to the UN Charter and opposing the use of force to resolve international disputes. This cross-regional, cross-alignment consensus underscores a fundamental point: defending international law is not an “interest choice” of any single country, but a basic consensus of the international community.

If Washington seeks to intimidate and deter others through the public spectacle of humiliating a foreign head of state, it has clearly underestimated both the shared consensus and the bottom lines of the international community. From any perspective, US actions lack both legitimacy and legality. Such blatant invasion and abduction flagrantly violate all core norms and fundamental principles enshrined in the UN Charter. Under whatever pretext – without Security Council authorization and in the absence of conditions for legitimate self-defense – the use of military force against a sovereign UN member state, including the abduction of its head of state, constitutes outright aggression. Subsequent justifications by the US government only amount to an obvious attempt to cover up the truth: elevating domestic “judicial” accusations – based on tenuous or even false evidences – above international law, and substituting unilateral military actions for multilateral diplomatic mechanisms. In essence, this is unilateral hegemonic behavior that fundamentally challenges, and even negates, the universal binding force of international law.

What such practices undermine is the institutional foundation of the international system. Sovereign equality, non-interference in internal affairs, and the prohibition of the threat or use of force are the pillars upon which the post-WWII international order rests. If certain countries are allowed to decide, based on their own judgments, “who is guilty, who should be punished, and how punishment should be carried out,” international law will be reduced to a selectively applied tool, and the collective security mechanism established by the UN Charter will be hollowed out. As many representatives pointed out at the Security Council meeting, this issue concerns not only the sovereignty and security of a single state, but also whether international law still retains authority and predictability.

Historical experience has repeatedly shown that replacing rules with sheer power doesn’t bring lasting stability. The overwhelming majority of countries are unwilling to return to a Hobbesian international jungle governed by the law of the strong preying on the weak.

Since the end of the Cold War, instances of bypassing the UN and relying on unilateral military actions to address complex political problems have been far from rare. The results have often been prolonged regional turmoil, breakdowns in national governance, and worsening humanitarian crises. The price paid by the international community has been extremely heavy. The hard-won peaceful environment in Latin America and the Caribbean today should likewise not be undermined by unilateralism and power politics.

The US’ brazen military actions against Venezuela, followed by threats toward Colombia, Cuba, and other countries, once again warn the world that imperialist thinking and hegemonic practices remain the most destructive forces undermining global peace and stability. The United Nations is the core of the current international system, and international law is the fundamental norm governing international relations.

The more turbulent and uncertain the global situation becomes, the more necessary it is to return to the UN framework and manage differences through political solutions such as dialogue, negotiation and mediation to prevent escalation. When Maduro was put on trial, the US was also standing in the dock of the international community. Any action that weakens the authority of the United Nations or denies the binding force of international law will ultimately backfire on the hegemon itself.

No country can act as the international police, nor can any country claim to be the international judge. The international community does not need hegemonic politics based on “might is right,” nor does it require an “imperial order” that places itself above other nations. Only by adhering to true multilateralism and upholding international law, as well as the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, can the international system avoid descending into a jungle logic where the strong prey on the weak, allowing the world to move toward a more stable and just direction.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Don-roe Doctrine? A close look at a 200‑year scourge across Latin America under US’ shadow

Global Times – January 6, 2026

The US’ sudden military operation against Venezuela and the forcible seizure of the country’s president has dominated headlines worldwide since Saturday. The operation is viewed by global media and observers as a real-life example of the Monroe Doctrine in action, under which the Trump Administration claims that the Western Hemisphere is its sphere of influence.

Focus on the Monroe Doctrine intensified further after US President Donald Trump invoked the doctrine to defend the strike on Venezuela at a press conference on Saturday amid mounting international condemnation. “All the way back, it dates back to the Monroe Doctrine,” Trump stated at the press conference, according to a Sunday report by ABC News. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve surpassed it by a long shot. They’re calling it the ‘Don-roe Doctrine’ now,” he added.

Trump’s version of Monroe Doctrine, centered on “America First,” is a geopolitical strategy for the US to impose hegemonic control over the Western Hemisphere. Its core objective is to reconsolidate Latin America as America’s “backyard” through exclusive cooperation, extract regional resources, and ultimately serve US economic interests and consolidate its global hegemony, Xu Yanran, an associate professor at the School of International Relations, Renmin University of China, told the Global Times.

At a press conference on Monday, when asked for response to the sphere of influence concept – the Monroe Doctrine, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian reiterated China’s stance to “oppose hegemony and power politics.”

What exactly is the Monroe Doctrine? What role has it played in shaping US-Latin America relations over the past 200 years? And what does the doctrine’s resurgence mean for the region and the world? To answer these questions, the Global Times has launched a two-part series to decode the doctrine – a scourge that has haunted Latin America for 200 years – and to expose the US’ long-standing interventionist schemes in various fields across the region. In the first installment, we examine the doctrine’s historical evolution, draw comparisons between the Trump and original versions, and explore its potential implications for both the region and the wider world.

Shadow over the Western Hemisphere

The Monroe Doctrine was articulated by President James Monroe in 1823 to oppose European interference in Latin America. In the early 1900s, former US president Theodore Roosevelt expanded the doctrine to justify military intervention across the region. As a result, US Marines were sent into Santo Domingo in 1904, Nicaragua in 1911, and Haiti in 1915, according to an article on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration.

In addition to direct intervention, the US also undertook dollar diplomacy – supposedly replacing bullets for dollars – aimed at expanding US financial capital in Latin America and fostering regional dependency on the US. The imposition of Panamanian independence and the construction of the canal are prominent examples of this policy, as are the numerous armed interventions in Central America, according to a paper released in 2020 by International Organisations Research Journal published by the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia.

With these practices, the Monroe Doctrine, originally designed to prevent other major world powers from meddling in Latin America, evolved into a pretext for the US to turn the region into its so-called “backyard.”

More grievously, in the aftermath of World War II, the US leveraged the Central Intelligence Agency for decades to infiltrate and meddle in the political affairs of Latin American nations. This trapped some countries in prolonged political instability and social deprivation, gravely derailing their paths toward modernization, Sun Yanfeng, director of Latin American research at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.

One notable example occurred in December 1989, when the US invaded Panama, overthrowing Manuel Antonio Noriega’s regime and seeking long-term control over the Panama Canal. Noriega surrendered to the US authorities on January 3, 1990, the same date of the forcible seizure of Maduro.

While the US continues to pursue its “America First” agenda under the banner of the Monroe Doctrine, people across Latin America have gradually awakened. Resistance against US aggression, intervention, economic colonization and ideological control has steadily grown in the region since the 1990s after a number of anti-US left-wing forces successively came to power in several Latin American countries. At the same time, more Latin American countries have sought to pursue autonomous diplomatic policies and actively expand cooperation with both regional partners and countries beyond the hemisphere, opening up new space for their own development, according to a paper published on the Journal of Latin American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in April 2020.

It is against this backdrop that the Monroe Doctrine was widely described by experts and politicians as outdated. The US administration also appeared to acknowledge the shift. In November 2013 during a speech at the Organization of American States, former secretary of state John Kerry said that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” according to Fox News.

However, the Monroe Doctrine began to re-emerge at the forefront of the US policy agenda during Donald Trump’s first term, as Washington sought ways to address mounting domestic pressure and external challenges, according to another paper released in October 2025 by the Institute of Latin America Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

During the Biden administration, policy directions and agenda priorities hinted at the emergence of a new Monroe Doctrine. Following the inauguration of Trump’s second term, this new version has surged back into prominence and entered a phase of full-scale implementation, the paper said.

‘Far more radical’

In the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump administration vowed to enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, according to a document released on the White House website.

The core goal of the shift is to secure US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere amid the country’s declining power and to build a US-led regional order that excludes non-regional players, Sun said.

To achieve its goal in the Western Hemisphere, the Trump administration has sought to remove Venezuela, a standard-bearer of the anti-US camp in the Western Hemisphere and “a thorn in the US side,” according to Sun.

On the other hand, this year coincides with both the US midterm elections and the country’s 250th anniversary. Plagued by domestic political struggles, the Trump administration is in urgent need of a high-profile political achievement to strengthen its position, Sun said.

Another reason behind the shift is the Trump administration’s perception of a growing “threat” as Latin American countries, especially major ones, are opening up their economies not only to the US but to a broader range of partners, and in some cases forming competitive ties with the US, according to Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Therefore, the US does not hesitate to employ coercive means, even overt military force, to expand its economic control over Latin America, and this is the core of the so-called Don-roe Doctrine, Lü said.

He noted that the Don-roe Doctrine is notably characterized by the primacy of “might makes right,” a guiding principle rooted in the era of colonialism.

“Compared with the original Monroe Doctrine, Trump’s version is far more radical. It has shifted from ‘defense’ to ‘offense,’ proactively interfering in the internal affairs of Latin American countries through hegemonic means and even directly violating the interests of sovereign states,” Xu explained to the Global Times.

Against global trends

According to Reuters, Trump claimed at a Saturday press conference that his administration would “run” Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” which experts contacted by the Global Times said is clearly illegal.

After the forcible seizure of Maduro, the Trump administration also took jabs at other Latin American leaders, including Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, according to The New York Times.

While the Trump-version Monroe Doctrine may appear to be a strategic pivot in which the US is shifting the focus of its security strategy to the Western Hemisphere, the underlying intent of great-power competition is actually growing stronger.

Pan Deng, director of the Latin America and Caribbean Region Law Center of China University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times that the Venezuela incident marks a major shift in US policy toward Latin America – moving away from relative neglect over the years and back onto a path of high-profile intervention and coercive pressure.

In fact, the two Trump administrations have launched a series of targeted operations to “take down Latin American countries one by one.” On the political front, the first Trump administration placed Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the subsequent sanctions inflicted a severe blow to Cuba’s economy.

Economic weapons have also been wielded frequently to repeatedly threaten to impose additional tariffs on Latin American countries. In terms of plundering regional resources, seizing strategic assets and even territorial expansion, the Trump administration has repeatedly made public threats to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” since returning back to the White House.

The US may have announced the end of the Monroe Doctrine, but the fact is, for the past more than 200 years, hegemonism and power politics, which is intrinsic in the Doctrine, is far from being abandoned, Lin Jian made the remarks at another press conference in August 2024, responding to protest in several Latin American countries against US interference in their internal affairs.

The US’s hegemonism and power politics runs counter to the unstoppable historical trend of Latin American countries staying independent and seeking strength through unity. Such approaches will win no support and be consigned to the dustbin of history, Lin noted.

Sun told the Global Times that while the US is once again attempting to extend its “long arm” into Latin America, the region is no longer what it once was. In recent years, Latin American countries have worked to strengthen unity and weather shared challenges. They have actively seized opportunities arising from the development of the Global South and expanded cooperation with countries in Asia and Africa.

During the seventh summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in 2023, the bloc released the Declaration of Buenos Aires, sending a strong message in favor of regional cooperation and integration, and in opposition to foreign interference.

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, also warned a probable spillover effect of the resurgence of Monroe Doctrine from Latin American to the other regions, which could trigger greater global instability and deliver a subversive blow to the international order and established rules.

However, at the same time, it may also generate a sense of urgency that pushes more countries to strengthen solidarity, coordination, and cooperation. This applies not only to Global South nations, but also to other countries that may similarly intensify efforts to uphold multilateralism, safeguard peace, and defend international law and rules, Li said.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Brazil’s Ambassador to the OAS Denounces US Military Action Against Venezuela as a Global Threat

teleSUR – January 6, 2026

During an address to the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS), Benoni Belli, Brazil’s ambassador to the organization, described the United States’ military action against Venezuela as “a very serious attack against Venezuela’s sovereignty and a threat to the entire international community.”

The Brazilian diplomat warned that the bombings of Venezuelan territory and the kidnapping of its president represent an unacceptable violation of international law. “The current situation is grave and evokes times we thought were behind us, which are once again devastating Latin America and the Caribbean,” Belli stated.

Belli rejected the logic that “the ends justify the means,” arguing that such reasoning lacks legitimacy and allows the strongest powers to impose their will on sovereign nations. “These acts open the possibility that the strongest will define what is just or unjust, disregarding national sovereignty,” he emphasized.

The ambassador’s statement highlights the geopolitical implications of a unilateral military intervention, and warned that it undermines multilateralism and fosters a global order based on the law of the strongest.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

CDC SHRINKS ROUTINE CHILDHOOD VACCINE SCHEDULE BY ~55 DOSES

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH | FOCAL POINTS | January 5, 2026

Today, the CDC formally adopted a revised childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, following a Presidential Memorandum directing alignment with international best practices.

This marks the largest rollback of routine childhood vaccination in U.S. history.

After reviewing peer-country schedules and the scientific evidence underlying them, federal health leadership acknowledged that we are hyper-vaccinating our children.

The result is a dramatically smaller routine childhood vaccine schedule, cutting approximately 55 routine doses.

This is a major victory — even as serious safety concerns remain for the vaccines that continue to be recommended.

The Key Change: ~55 Routine Doses Eliminated

Previous U.S. routine schedule (2024)

    • 84–88 routine vaccine doses
    • Targeting 17 diseases
    • (18 if RSV monoclonal antibody is included)

New CDC routine schedule (2026)

    • ~30 routine doses
    • Targeting 10–11 diseases
    • Based on international consensus

Net change: approximately 54–58 routine doses removed, commonly summarized as ~55 routine doses.

Importantly, this reduction applies only to vaccines previously labeled “routine for all children.” No vaccines were banned or removed from availability.

What Was Removed from the Routine Schedule

The following vaccines are no longer recommended for all children by default:

  • COVID-19
  • Influenza
  • Hepatitis A
  • Hepatitis B (including removal of the universal birth dose if the mother is HBsAg-negative)
  • Rotavirus
  • Meningococcal ACWY
  • Meningococcal B

These vaccines account for nearly the entire ~55-dose reduction.

What Remains Routine

The CDC now limits routine childhood vaccination to the following vaccines:

  • Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR)
  • Diphtheria
  • Tetanus
  • Pertussis
  • Polio
  • Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib)
  • Pneumococcal disease
  • Varicella (chickenpox)
  • Human Papillomavirus (HPV), reduced from two doses to one

This is still not “safe by default”

These vaccines remain:

  • Insufficiently studied for long-term outcomes
  • Untested in placebo-controlled trials
  • Never evaluated as a cumulative schedule
  • Inducers of over 20 chronic diseases

Adverse events such as febrile seizures, severe neurological injury including autism, ADHD, tics, autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, skin and gut disorders, ear infections, and a long list of other chronic diseases have been documented across multiple vaccines on this list.

Reducing the schedule does not equal proving safety. It simply reduces exposure. Nonetheless, that reduction alone is quite meaningful.

Where Those Vaccines Went

Non-consensus vaccines were reclassified, not banned:

Shared Clinical Decision-Making

  • COVID-19
  • Influenza
  • Hepatitis A
  • Hepatitis B
  • Rotavirus
  • Meningococcal ACWY
  • Meningococcal B

High-Risk Groups Only

  • RSV monoclonal antibody
  • Hepatitis A (travel, outbreaks, liver disease)
  • Hepatitis B (HBsAg-positive or unknown maternal status)
  • Dengue
  • Meningococcal vaccines for defined risk groups

All remain available and fully covered by insurance. However, given entrenched institutional habits and ideological adherence to maximal vaccination, many clinicians are likely to continue promoting shared clinical decision-making vaccines as de facto routine unless families are informed and assertive.

Why This Is Still a Massive Win

For decades, the childhood vaccine schedule expanded without:

  • Schedule-level safety trials
  • Long-term outcome data
  • Meaningful public debate
  • Informed consent

This decision reverses that trajectory. It:

  • Shrinks routine exposure dramatically
  • Restores parental agency
  • Forces future decisions to confront risk-benefit reality

Most importantly, it breaks the false premise that “more vaccines is always better.”

Conclusion

The CDC has eliminated every non-consensus vaccine from the routine childhood schedule, cutting routine exposure by approximately 55 doses—an implicit admission that the safety of the expanded schedule was never adequately established.

This decision does not end the problem. The vaccines that remain routinely recommended are still largely untested in long-term, placebo-controlled trials, are administered during critical periods of neurodevelopment, and continue to pose serious safety concerns. As a result, a substantial number of autism cases and other chronic conditions will continue to occur.

However, by sharply reducing cumulative exposure during early childhood, this change marks the first credible step toward reversing the trajectory. The burden of neurodevelopmental injury should begin to decline—not disappear, but diminish.

Even with its limitations, this action represents the most consequential course correction in U.S. pediatric vaccination policy in modern history. It breaks the assumption that an ever-expanding schedule is inherently safe, restores proportionality, and opens the door to long-overdue accountability, transparency, and real safety science.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Pakistan, the Gulf, and the high cost of Zionist alignment

By Junaid S. Ahmad | MEMO | January 6, 2026

Geopolitics is most dangerous not when it erupts, but when it reorganises quietly — when the ground shifts beneath familiar alliances while elites continue to speak the language of yesterday. The Gulf today is in precisely such a moment. What once masqueraded as a coherent bloc has fractured into rival power models, incompatible strategic visions, and diverging relationships to empire, Israel, and popular legitimacy. And Pakistan, true to form, is responding not with strategic intelligence but with institutional reflex — confusing obedience with balance and habit with foresight.

The rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is no longer a matter of speculation or diplomatic gossip. It is an open contradiction — political, military, and infrastructural. Yemen has exposed it. Israel has radicalised it. The United States, particularly under Trumpism, has weaponised it. And Pakistan’s ruling elite — military and civilian alike — has chosen to drift toward the most toxic pole of this fracture while reassuring itself that it is merely being “pragmatic.” It is not. It is being complicit.

Two Gulf projects, one moral abyss 

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are still lazily grouped together by analysts who mistake shared authoritarianism for shared strategy. This is intellectual malpractice. The two monarchies are pursuing fundamentally different regional projects.

Saudi Arabia’s current posture — hardly virtuous, often cynical, and deeply reactionary — nevertheless reflects a begrudging recognition of reality. After years of disastrous interventionism, Riyadh wants consolidation. It wants borders quieted, fires contained, and regional fragmentation slowed. Its outreach to Iran, cautious engagement with the
Houthis, and growing hostility to separatist militias are not gestures of enlightenment but acts of self-preservation. Endless chaos undermines Saudi ambitions at home.

The Emirati project is the opposite — and far more dangerous. Abu Dhabi does not seek order through states; it seeks domination through fragments. Ports, islands, militias, mercenaries, logistics corridors, surveillance hubs — these are its tools. Sovereignty is irrelevant. Fragmentation is not a failure; it is a business model.

If Saudi Arabia is a reactionary status-quo power, the UAE is a hyperactive destabiliser — an empire of nodes, happy to burn regions so long as trade flows and leverage compounds.

Yemen: Where the lie finally died

Yemen is where the fiction of Gulf unity collapsed beyond repair. What began as a joint intervention has devolved into a struggle over whether Yemen will exist at all as a state. The House of Saud — bloodied, embarrassed, and exposed — now insists on a unified Yemeni authority capable of enforcing borders and agreements. The UAE has invested
instead in carving out a southern enclave: separatist militias, port control, island bases, and economic chokeholds.

For Riyadh, this is existential. A fragmented Yemen exports instability directly into Saudi territory and sabotages any negotiated settlement with the Houthis. For Abu Dhabi, fragmentation is leverage — control of chokepoints matters more than Yemen’s survival as a polity.

That Saudi Arabia has now openly bombed weapons shipments linked to UAE-backed forces and issued public warnings is extraordinary. Gulf disputes are traditionally smothered in silence. When they go kinetic and public, it signals not a spat but a structural rupture. Pakistan’s establishment sees this — and chooses denial.

Israel: The cancer at the core

To understand the Emirati recklessness, one must confront the real axis around which it revolves: Apartheid, genocidal Israel.

The Abraham Accords were not peace agreements; they were an integration pact into Zionist regional supremacy. Israel does not merely occupy Palestine; it exports a model — militarised impunity, surveillance capitalism, permanent war dressed as security. The UAE did not normalize with Israel reluctantly. It embraced Israel as a force multiplier.

Israel provides Abu Dhabi with access to Washington’s coercive machinery, advanced surveillance, cyberwarfare, and a propaganda ecosystem that converts mass death into “stability.” In return, the UAE provides geography, ports, islands, mercenaries, and political insulation — doing Israel’s dirty work where Tel Aviv prefers not to appear.

Sudan. Somaliland. Socotra. Cyprus. The Red Sea. These are not isolated projects; they are components of a Zionist–Emirati expansion strategy designed to insulate Israel from economic pressure and accountability while strangling any resistance corridor before it matures.

Israel is the disease. The UAE is its most enthusiastic carrier.

Pakistan’s elite: Zionism in uniform and suits 

Pakistan’s tragedy is not that it lacks options. It is that its ruling elite lacks dignity.

Rather than reassess its position amid this fracture, Pakistan’s military–civilian elite clings to the rhetoric of “balance” while deepening structural entanglement with the Emirati–Israeli axis. Ports, airports, logistics terminals, military-linked corporations — these are not neutral investments. They are instruments of alignment.

Pakistan’s generals and their civilian accessories imagine they are playing geopolitics. In reality, they are being used as infrastructure — cheap, deniable, disposable. Their behaviour is not naïveté. It is covert Zionism: collaboration without confession, obedience without ideological honesty. They mouth solidarity with Palestine while embedding Pakistan’s economy and security apparatus deeper into a regional order built to protect Israel from consequences. This is not pragmatism. It is moral and strategic bankruptcy.

Venezuela: When empire drops the mask 

The illusion that empire prefers subtlety should have died long ago. Venezuela put the lie to it.

When sanctions failed and proxy pressure proved insufficient, the United States escalated —directly. US special forces were involved in a scandalous operation that culminated in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. This was not deniable proxy warfare. It was naked imperial contempt for sovereignty.

And what happens if Washington’s decapitation move fails at complete regime change in Caracas? Silence. Zero accountability. Empire simply moves on.

This is the future Pakistan’s elite is courting. When alignment fails to deliver stability, the costs will not be borne by Washington, Tel Aviv, or Abu Dhabi. They will be borne by Pakistan. Empire does not protect collaborators. It discards them.

Saudi Arabia: A lesser evil, still an evil

Saudi Arabia deserves no absolution. The House of Saud remains a reactionary monarchy, structurally hostile to popular sovereignty and deeply entangled with empire. Its version of “stability” is still oppression — merely quieter than the Emirati inferno.

Yet the difference matters. Saudi Arabia understands that Zionist expansionism generates perpetual instability. The UAE celebrates it. Riyadh conceals its servitude; Abu Dhabi flaunts it.

Pakistan’s elite has chosen to tilt slightly more towards the louder master.

Trumpism: Empire without shame

Hovering over this landscape is Trumpism — the ideological nakedness of empire. Trump dispenses with liberal hypocrisy entirely. Loyalty is transactional. Morality is a joke. Strongmen are preferred to institutions. Israel is sacred. Everyone else is expendable.

The UAE fits this worldview perfectly: ruthless, efficient, unburdened by public opinion. Pakistan’s rulers mistake proximity to this axis for relevance. In truth, it entrenches their subordination.

When things go wrong — as they inevitably will — Trumpism will shrug. Pakistan will bleed.

The reckoning Pakistan is avoiding

The Gulf is not merely fracturing; it is sorting. States will be forced to choose — between sovereignty and fragmentation, between justice and normalisation, between dignity and managed submission.

Pakistan’s establishment has already chosen. It just lacks the courage to admit it. History will not judge Pakistan for failing to be the Mafia Don of West Asia. It will judge it for failing to recognise a moral and strategic crossroads when it stood directly upon it.

The UAE will continue to burn regions in service of Zionism. Israel will continue its genocidal project. The United States will continue to kidnap, sanction, and discard. Saudi Arabia will continue to pretend restraint equals virtue.

And Pakistan — unless it breaks from habit — will continue confusing servitude for strategy.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Recession-Hit Europe to Harm Own People by Giving Ukraine €800 Billion – Orban

Sputnik – 06.01.2026

Europe, which is currently in recession, will harm its own population if it provides Ukraine with the €800 billion demanded by the country, and European citizens will begin to resist such a policy, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said.

“Ukraine is asking for €800 billion over the next decade while Europe is in recession. Those who pay this price are harming their own people, and societies will eventually push back against policies that destroy living standards,” Orban was quoted as saying on the social network X by Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs.

On January 3, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said that Ukraine would need $800 billion over the next 10 years for recovery and economic growth. According to her, Ukraine expects to secure these funds through grants, loans, and private investment.

Ukraine’s 2026 budget was adopted with a record deficit. According to Verkhovna Rada lawmaker Dmytro Razumkov, funds—including for military salaries and weapons—could begin to run out as early as February. At the same time, official Kiev expects to “patch budget holes” with aid from Western partners, which has been gradually declining.

Ending the fighting and reducing the size of Ukraine’s military could provide relief, a point repeatedly raised by Russia. However, the Ukrainian authorities continue to ignore calls for peace, despite common sense and a lack of funds, including for maintaining the armed forces.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Britain’s Secret Role In Yugoslavia’s Destruction

By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | January 6, 2026

December 23rd marked the 35th anniversary of an independence referendum in Slovenia, then a Yugoslav republic. In all, 88.5% of registered voters – 95.7% of participants – said “da” to secession. The plebiscite prompted Ljubljana’s formal declaration of independence, and ensuing Ten Day War between Slovene territorial defence forces and the Yugoslav federal army. This was the spark that triggered bitter, bloody interethnic conflicts throughout Yugoslavia over the subsequent decade, and the multiethnic socialist federation’s ultimate destruction.

In May 2000, Britain’s Observer exposed how in the Ten Day War’s leadup, London secretly supplied Slovenia with tactical military communications equipment worth millions, to assist Ljubljana’s impending battle against the Yugoslav military. The disclosure elicited outcry, as London was officially at the time committed to preserving Yugoslavia, leading international efforts to prevent the country descending into fractious civil wars. The clandestine provision was at direct odds with this public-stated policy, which included unbending support for an arms embargo on the region.

Responding to the news, former British Foreign Secretary David Owen, who served as the EU’s lead peace negotiator during the Bosnian war, said he was “surprised” London covertly undermined her formal commitment to keeping Yugoslavia “together”. He nonetheless downplayed the assistance, noting what Britain supplied “was not aggressive” – “radios not guns”. Owen therefore argued the shipment “sails close to the border but does not cross it.” By contrast, the Observer reported the communications equipment “played a vital role” in Slovenia’s victory over Yugoslav forces.

This was because Ljubljana won the Ten Day War not via conventional military means, but a wide-ranging, devastatingly effective international propaganda campaign. In physical terms, the brief conflict consisted exclusively of minor skirmishes, and was largely bloodless, with just 44 Yugoslav soldiers and 18 Slovene territorials killed. One would not have known this from contemporary Western media reporting though, which relentlessly portrayed Slovenia as fighting countless grand military engagements against Belgrade’s barbarous invaders, and pluckily prevailing.

British military communications equipment greatly facilitated this informational onslaught. The psychological battlefield’s centrality to Ljubljana’s successful independence struggle had a resounding impact on Slovenia’s fellow breakaway Yugoslav republics. Engendering maximum international sympathy while demonising Belgrade became a core component of Albanian Kosovar, Bosniak and Croat war strategies. In Sarajevo, secessionist authorities deliberately immiserated the local population to create emotionally impactful images for global broadcast. Meanwhile, its military routinely carried out false flags, including targeting civilians with sniper fire. As Canadian UN peacekeepers on-the-ground directly observed:

“The [Bosniaks] are not above firing on their own people or UN areas and then claiming the Serbs are the guilty party in order to gain further Western sympathy. The [Bosniaks] often site their artillery extremely close to UN buildings and sensitive areas such as hospitals in the hope that Serb counter-bombardment fire will hit these sites under the gaze of the international media.”

Ljubljana’s triumph left an enduring impression upon the British too. In multiple proxy conflicts since, London has taken the lead on psychological warfare, in particular atrocity propaganda, vilifying official enemies and justifying intervention and regime change. Since February 2022, a secret Ministry of Defence-created military and intelligence cell, Project Alchemy, has endeavoured to “keep Ukraine fighting at all costs.” Fundamental to this effort are “information operations” designed to convince Western citizens, and Ukrainians themselves, Kiev can somehow defeat Russia, by grossly distorting reality on-the-ground.

‘Quite Incredible’

A memory-holed July 1991 report from now-defunct British newspaper The European – “Lies Win Balkan War Of Words” – lays out in forensic detail how Slovenia’s propaganda war was fought and won. The operation’s “nerve-centre” was “an underground conference complex deep below the streets of Ljubljana.” Here, dozens of Slovene Information Ministry apparatchiks “worked tirelessly” to provide over 1,000 foreign journalists with a relentless barrage of information about the conflict – particularly Yugoslav war crimes, and Slovene military victories – supposedly taking place above ground.

Wild figures on reported “tanks hit, shots fired, prisoners taken” by Ljubljana were supplied hourly. Meanwhile, the Slovenes struck up a chummy rapport with their overseas guests, portraying themselves “as clean-limbed, tanned church-goers who only wanted to live peacefully and democratically in their Alpine idyll of mountains, lakes and meadows.” They claimed to be under attack by “ruthless Communists… dirty, unshaven brutes who dropped cluster bombs on innocent civilians… [and] sought to inflict [their] intolerant religious fanaticism and alphabet of squiggly lines on Europe.”

Ljubljana “needed a bloody, dramatic conflict to ensure the world did not lose interest” in their independence crusade. Thus, “they showered the media with details of battles that had often never taken place,” frequently “enlivening the day” with lurid, often unfalsifiable assertions, such as Belgrade landing “squads of special troops in plain clothes” across the country “to terrorise the population,” or plotting to target a local nuclear power plant and create a Chernobyl-style disaster. Journalists dutifully amplified these dubious claims as fact internationally.

Such was the deluge, “it was possible to report the war without ever venturing above ground” – “but, for those who did venture into the sunlight, the bunker war often seemed a fantasy.” For example, Western news outlets widely covered a purportedly “major battle” at Jezersko, a municipality near Austria. When The European visited the area subsequently, “greatly surprised” local Slovene militiamen instead described a brief tussle with a few Yugoslav soldiers over a borderpost in which “no one had been hurt.”

Throughout the Ten Day War, the Western-backed separatist government of neighbouring Croatia was “carefully analysing” Ljubljana’s informational offensive. They concluded the conflict’s “decisive engagements, which virtually guaranteed Slovenia’s independence, took place in the pages of the foreign media and, even more important, in the news bulletins of the major television networks.” Zagreb duly launched its own “propaganda blitz”. Croat officials were instructed “to hold twice-daily press conferences, which should be as colourful and dramatic as possible,” while Western journalists were given tours by soldiers:

“Everywhere, in town halls, hotel foyers and crouching nervously behind roadblocks, Croat mayors, police chiefs and militia officers… hold press conferences or hand out neatly-typed news bulletins to tell the world of the latest atrocities by Serbian extremists and of unprovoked attacks by the [Yugoslav] army… The Croats’ strategy today is clear. They are bombarding the world with information, which is usually so petty it seems it must be true.”

For example, Croatia’s state media agency Hina pumped out “extraordinarily detailed accounts of the fighting allegedly taking place in the countryside,” with an emphasis on “trivial” incidents. Typically, it was “impossible to check most of these reports precisely because the clashes were so minor that, even if they happened, they left no mark.” This inconsequential, unverifiable cavalcade was occasionally interspersed with “quite incredible allegations”, such as Belgrade having flooded the republic with “hired assassins” drawn from the ranks of Romania’s notorious Communist-era Securitate.

‘Managed Understanding’

The “grotesque caricatures” of Yugoslav forces, and Serbs more generally, as uniquely bloodthirsty monsters peddled by “brilliant” propagandists in Ljubljana and Zagreb took “hold of the public imagination in the West”, transforming “complex” interethnic struggles “into a straightforward battle between the forces of light (Slovenes and Croats) and darkness (Serbs).” This fraudulent dichotomy was exploited even more perniciously during the Bosnian civil war, and subsequent Kosovo ‘crisis’, during which atrocity propaganda served to justify and sustain NATO’s criminal 78-day-long bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

An impactful staged photo, Croatia, Christmas 1992

The European concluded by noting reliance on psychological manipulation to win wars created a “major problem”. Namely, while “a daily publicity blitz of exaggerations and lies may win international support… it will do nothing to heal the divisions which are ripping the country apart.” Locking-in overseas sympathy made Western-backed leaders in the former Yugoslavia less willing to accept negotiated settlements, and keep brutal internecine battles grinding on, safe in the knowledge further carnage only strengthened their position, in information warfare terms.

Notably, a key propaganda strategy for Croats and Slovenes, per The European, was to portray Yugoslav forces “as incompetent and thuggish.” An identical disinformation dynamic played out during the first 18 months of the Ukraine proxy war. As a November 2023 NATO paper on “Humour In Online Information Warfare” revealed, the military alliance and its Kiev puppets specifically sought to weaponise “humour and mockery”, emphasising “Russian failures” and “Ukrainian determination” in media reporting and online, from the conflict’s inception.

These efforts augmented “the responsiveness and impact” of Ukraine’s “information campaigns,” proving “instrumental” in Kiev securing “US-made F-16 combat aircraft” in August 2023, among other Western arms shipments. The NATO paper makes clear weaponisation of mockery is a long-running objective for the alliance, citing a 2017 study, “Stratcom Laughs”, which outlines methods of exploiting “humour” as a military “communications tool”. Four years later, an official Ukrainian government website entry boasted of how such methods can “influence your opinion”:

“How does propagandistic humor work? Relieves tension, makes perception less critical. Uses common contexts to convey messages with which the audience agrees. Simplifies everything to the ‘obvious’. Creates clear groups: strong and intelligent ‘we’ and clumsy and stupid ‘they’. Of course, the audience associates itself with the former and begins to despise the latter. Simplified managed understanding is easily disseminated by the audience and creates the necessary social context for propagandists.”

Atrocity propaganda has also played a crucial role in prolonging the unwinnable quagmire at unsustainable economic, human, and material cost. In April 2022, British intelligence exploited the ever-mysterious Bucha incident to sabotage fruitful peace talks between Kiev and Moscow, framing the apparent killing of innocent civilians in the town as somehow genocidal. At the time, a US Defense Intelligence Agency apparatchik lamented how the “Bucha Effect” had “led to frozen negotiations and a skewed view of the war” – apparently unaware this was London’s precise objective.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Behind the DOJ’s politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created ‘network’ and coerced star witness

The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader is a political rant that relies on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness

By Max Blumenthal | The Grayzone | January 5, 2026

The January 3 US military raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores was followed by the Department of Justice’s release of its superseding indictment of the two abductees as well as their son, Nicolasito Maduro, and two close political allies: former Minister of Justice Ramon Chacin and ex-Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello. The DOJ has also thrown Tren De Aragua (TDA) cartel leader Hector “Niño” Guerrero into the mix of defendants, situating him at the heart of its narrative.

The indictment amounts to a 25 page rant accusing Maduro and Flores of a conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States,” relying heavily on testimony from coerced witnesses about alleged shipments that largely took place outside US jurisdiction. It accuses Maduro of “having partnered with narco-terrorists” like TDA, ignoring a recent US intelligence assessment that concluded he had no control over the Venezuelan gang. Finally, the prosecutors stacked the indictment by charging Maduro with “possession of machine guns,” a laughable offense which could easily be applied to hundreds of thousands of gun-loving Americans under an antiquated 1934 law.

DOJ prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine exports to the US. At one point, they describe “tons” of cocaine; at another, they refer to the shipment of “thousands of tons,” an astronomical figure that could hypothetically generate hundreds of billions in revenue. At no point did they mention fentanyl, the drug responsible for the overdose deaths of close to 50,000 Americans in 2024. In fact, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment issued under Trump’s watch this year scarcely mentioned Venezuela.

By resorting to vague, deliberately expansive language larded with subjective terms like “corrupt” and “terrorism,” the DOJ has constructed a political narrative against Maduro in place of a concrete legal case. While repeatedly referring to Maduro as the “de facto… illegitimate ruler of the country,” the DOJ fails to demonstrate that he is not de jure illegitimate under Venezuelan law, and will therefore be unable to bypass established international legal precedent granting immunity to heads of state.

Further, the indictment relies on transparently unreliable, coerced witnesses like Hugo “Pollo” Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general who has cut a secret plea deal to reduce his sentence for drug trafficking by supplying dirt on Maduro. Carvajal was said to be a key figure in the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” drug network which the DOJ claims was run by Maduro. If and when he appears to testify against the abducted Venezuelan leader, the American public could learn that the “cartel” was founded not by the deposed Venezuelan president or one of his allies, but by the CIA to traffic drugs into US cities.

As sloppy and politicized as the DOJ’s indictment might be, it has enabled Trump to frame his lawless “Donroe Doctrine” as an aggressive policy of legal enforcement, emboldening the US president to levy further threats to abduct or bump off heads of state who stand in the way of his rapacious agenda. This appears to be the real purpose of the imperial courtroom spectacle to come.

Weaponizing the “narco-terror” hoax

The bulk of the case against Maduro rests on the accusation that the defendants “engaged in… drug trafficking, including in partnership with narco-terrorist groups.” According to the DOJ, Maduro conspired with TDA, as well as the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels to traffic drugs between 2003 and 2011. However, these cartels were not designated by the Trump administration as Foreign Terrorist Organizations until February 2025, a move obviously designed to justify Maduro’s kidnapping and juice up his indictment.

In its bid to convict Maduro, the DOJ will undoubtedly struggle to overcome the conclusion reached in an April 7, 2025 memo by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that the Venezuelan leader did not control TDA, which he effectively dismantled through a massive 2023 military-police raid on the Tocorón prison that served as the gang’s base of operations. A report in the State Department-funded outlet InSight Crime also complicates the DOJ’s case, finding that “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela.”

In fact, many of the supposed crimes for which Maduro is charged took place outside the borders and jurisdiction of the United States. The DOJ alleges, for instance, that in September 2013, “Venezuelan officials dispatched approximately 1.3 tons of cocaine on a commercial flight from the Maiquetia Airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.”

In 2018, five British citizens were convicted in a French court for orchestrating the drug shipment with help from gang members from Colombia and Italy – but not Venezuela. At the time of the incident, Maduro’s government acknowledged corrupt lower level Venezuelan officials had allowed the drugs to pass through airport security. Caracas ultimately arrested 25 people, including members of the military and an Air France manager – a salient fact omitted from the DOJ indictment.

The evidence of Maduro’s involvement in the scandal, according to the DOJ, was that the drug shipment took place “mere months after [Maduro] succeeded to the Venezuelan presidency.” No other proof is offered to demonstrate his culpability.

The indictment goes on to allege Maduro “facilitated the movement of private planes under diplomatic cover” to avoid law enforcement scrutiny as they landed in Mexico. Citing coerced testimony from a Venezuelan government defector, it accuses Diosdado Cabello of coordinating a shipment of 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC-9 jet to Mexico. None of these claims should hold water in a US court.

As public defender and legal analyst Eliza Orlins explained, “Flights that occur wholly within Venezuela do not cross U.S. airspace, do not implicate U.S. customs territory, and do not, standing alone, violate U.S. law. The indictment attempts to bootstrap these domestic movements into U.S. criminal jurisdiction by asserting that the cocaine involved was ultimately destined for the United States. Intent does almost all the work here.”

Because most of the specific incidents cited in the indictment occurred within Mexico under Presidents Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Pena Nieto, the DOJ inadvertently implicates these three pro-US administrations, who shaped their drug policies in coordination with Washington. In fact, the top cop during the first two of these governments, former Federal Intelligence Agency chief Genaro García Luna, was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 for presiding over a multi-million dollar conspiracy with the Sinaloa cartel. Former US ambassador to Mexico Robert Jacobson acknowledged that the US knew all about Garcia Luna’s cartel ties, but insisted, “we had to work with him.”

The Honduran double standard

The DOJ also implicates the pro-US government of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, referring to Honduras as a “transshipment” point “in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them.” Hernandez was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 of trafficking over 400 tons of drugs to the US, but received a pardon this December from President Donald Trump following a lobbying campaign by top Trump donors seeking business in the deregulated crypto haven of Próspera off the coast of Honduras.

During his January 3 press conference announcing the abduction of Maduro and his wife, Trump aggressively defended his decision to pardon Hernandez, claiming the Honduran ex-president been “persecuted very unfairly.” However, the same DOJ prosecutor who authored the original 2020 indictment of Maduro, Trump loyalist Emil Bove, was responsible for the indictment of Hernandez. In contrast to the case against Maduro, the Hernandez indictment contained concrete evidence of his collaboration with major transnational cartels, including video and photographic exhibits, as Anya Parampil and Alexander Rubinstein detailed for The Grayzone.

Hernandez pleaded his case to Trump in a 2025 letter claiming he’d been subjected to a “rigged trial” and convicted “based on the uncorroborated statements of convicted drug traffickers.”

His questionable claim could also apply to the DOJ’s prosecution of Maduro, as many of the most dramatic allegations contained in his indictment are sourced to a convicted drug trafficker who struck a secret deal with US prosecutors to reduce his own sentence in exchange for testimony against Maduro.

He is former Venezuelan Gen. Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal.

Coerced “star witness” strikes secret deal with US prosecutors

The head of military intelligence under the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez from 2004 to 2011, Carvajal is cited seven times in the January 3 DOJ indictment as a witness to alleged criminal acts by Maduro and his inner circle. Carvajal was first arrested in 2014 in Aruba on drug running charges, but was returned to Venezuela to the chagrin of US authorities. In 2017, as he faced a pair of indictments in the US, the general suddenly turned on Maduro, denouncing him as a dictator. He had openly endorsed the regime change project of US-controlled “interim president” Juan Guaido in 2019, fashioning himself as a courageous defector while proffering his supposed knowledge of the Venezuelan deep state to Washington.

That same year, as Carvajal sought asylum in Spain, the US formally demanded that Madrid him over. Now facing the prospect of extradition, he delivered a series of tell-all interviews to legacy outlets like the New York Times, doing his best to legitimize virtually every charge the Trump administration sought to weaponize against Maduro.

Then-Senator Marco Rubio could not contain his excitement about the prospect of squeezing the Chavista insider for testimony in a future case against Maduro. Carvajal “will soon be coming to the US to provide important information about the #MaduroRegime,” Rubio tweeted on April 12, 2019. “Bad day for the #MaduroCrimeFamily.”

It was not until 2023 that Carvajal was finally extradited and placed on trial in the Southern District court of New York. After he pleaded guilty to “narco-terrorism” this June, the Miami Herald reported that he had struck a plea deal which would grant him “a considerable sentence reduction if he provides ‘substantial assistance’ to US investigations.”

Carvajal’s still-secret plea deal gives away the game he’d played since he first emerged as a defector. His allegations against Maduro had been delivered under duress, all designed to satisfy his would-be jailers in the US. He has since indulged one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories by alleging in a June 2025 letter to the US president that Maduro manipulated Venezuela’s Smartmatic voting systems to rig the 2020 US presidential election in favor of Biden.

Carvajal’s shameless pandering to Trump and secret plea deal should obliterate his credibility as a witness against Maduro.

In its January 3 indictment of Maduro, the DOJ claimed Carvajal and Diosdado Cabello “worked with other members of the Venezuelan regime” to “coordinate the shipment” of 5.5 tons of cocaine from Simon Bolivar International Airport to Campeche, Mexico in a private jet in 2006. This incident remains the source of intense intrigue, as the ownership of the DC-9 jet by two shadowy American companies points in the direction of US intelligence.

While details of potential covert US government involvement in the 2006 drug shipment remain murky, it is an established fact that the CIA founded and operated the “Cartel of the Suns” which the DOJ now accuses Maduro, Cabello and other top Venezuelan officials of controlling.

Cartel of the Suns: created by the CIA, weaponized by the DOJ

In the original indictment of Maduro, the DOJ explicitly accused Maduro of leading a narco-trafficking cartel called “Cartel of the Suns,” referencing it over 30 times.

The revised DOJ indictment of Maduro unsealed on January 3 states, “Starting in or about 1999, Venezuela became a safe haven for drug traffickers willing to pay for protection and support corrupt Venezuelan civilian and military officials, who operated outside the reach of Colombian law enforcement and armed forces bolstered by United States anti-narcotics assistance.”

It continues: “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns.”

The informal network of corrupt military officials was in fact established by the CIA under pro-US Venezuelan governments during the 1980’s and ‘90’s. Americans were introduced to this inconvenient truth not by some dissident muckraker, but by the New York Times, and by Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes exposé broadcast in 1993.

Three years earlier, US Customs officials in Miami had intercepted a shipment of 1000 pounds of pure cocaine from Venezuela. But they were soon told by higher-ups in the US government the shipments had been approved by Langley. According to the Times, the CIA sought to allow the cocaine to “enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.”

“I really take great exception to the fact that 1000 kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money,” then-DEA attache to Venezuela Annabelle Grimm remarked to 60 Minutes. “I found that particularly appalling.”

To organize the shipments from Venezuela, the CIA recruited generals from the Venezuelan National Guard who were trained by the US. Because officers in the National Guard wore patches on their uniforms bearing the symbol of a sun, the informal drug network was branded as “The Cartel of the Suns.”

In the years after the CIA-run cartel was exposed in US media, it disappeared, only to be revived when the US government began hounding Gen. Carvajal, who may soon appear as its key witness against Maduro. While corruption is still present in the Venezuelan military, there is little evidence of anything resembling a Cartel of the Suns in its ranks.

As Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told CNN, “Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan authorities in drug trafficking.”

A former senior US official echoed Gunson, describing Cartel of the Suns as “a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela. It doesn’t have the hierarchy or command-and-control structure of a traditional cartel.”

The official told CNN that the DEA or Defense Intelligence Agency had supplied Trump with a “purely political” assessment of the cartel to support his assault on Venezuela.

Discovery granted to the defense in the trial of Maduro and Flores risks severely embarrassing the US government by extracting further evidence of CIA drug running. This may be why the DOJ softened its language about the Cartel of the Suns, referring to it in the January 3 indictment as a mere “patronage network” rather than as a cohesive criminal syndicate, and mentioning it only twice.

During his first appearance in court earlier that day, the kidnapped Venezuelan leader was only able to speak for a brief moment. “I am innocent. I am a decent man. I am President…” Maduro pleaded before being cut off by his lawyer.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Real Counter to US Nabbing Maduro: Quit Buying American Arms

Sputnik – 06.01.2026

On January 3, the US launched a massive attack on Venezuela, capturing Maduro and his wife and taking them to New York. US President Donald Trump announced that Maduro and Flores would face trial for allegedly being involved in “narco-terrorism” and posing a threat, including to the US.

The Global Majority in Latin America, Africa, and Asia should hold the United States to account by stopping purchases of US weapons, including F-16s, F-35s, and halting collaboration with companies like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon, former UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas told Sputnik.

“US businesses are vulnerable,” he explained.

De Zayas was shocked by “the brazenness” of the US kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, which comes “in total impunity, and I do not see the ‘good guys’—Canada, the UK, the Europeans—coming out in defense of Venezuela and international law,” the ex-UN expert stressed.

He condemned the abduction of Maduro as a US “assault on civilization” and “retrogression in the idea of international peace and security.”

De Zayas pointed to an array of precedents pertaining to the US “assault on international law,” including the fact that George H.W. Bush bombed Panama in 1989 and “had President Noriega arrested and subjected to a show trial.”

Also, Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, destroying the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, while George W. Bush and the Coalition of the Willing invaded Iraq in 2003, which led to the death of about one million Iraqis.

Additionally, Barack Obama orchestrated the 2014 coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the expert recalled.

“No one was ever held accountable” for these actions, de Zayas concluded.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Prof. Marandi on Iran & Venezuela: What’s Next?

TMJ News Network | January 5, 2026

Professor Mohammad Marandi joins TMJ News to break down the latest developments in Iran and Venezuela, unpacking how economic protests, sanctions, and media narratives are being weaponized once again to push long-standing U.S.-Israeli regime change agendas.

January 6, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment