Thursday, September 18, 2025
C. Punch: The Doha Assassination Plot, Emergency Summit and Trump's Double-Cross:
September 15, 2025
The Doha Assassination Plot, Emergency Summit, and Trump’s Double-Cross
The Israeli air raid on Qatar delivers a sharp warning to other countries in the region: what is the value of a military alliance with the U.S. if the supposed protector decides which threats to block and which to permit? Image source: X screenshot.
Last week’s failed assassination attempt of the Palestinian negotiating team in Doha, Qatar, raises critical questions that extend far beyond the attack itself. The crux of the problem lies in three interconnected issues: the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in targeting individuals, the failure or deliberate negligence of the U.S.-led air defense system, and Qatar’s vulnerable position as a host to both a major U.S. base and the ceasefire negotiations.
The use of AI will be the topic of a future analysis. Meanwhile, the raid on Qatar did not happen in isolation. The skies over Doha are monitored by the American Air Base in Al Udeid, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. This base is not a marginal outpost; it is the forward headquarters for U.S. Central Command, USCENTCOM, overseeing U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East.
In theory, nothing enters Qatari airspace or nearby region without being detected by the advanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) system, which provides air cover for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE, along with Jordan. IAMD architecture is integrated into the U.S. command-and-control network and operated by USCENTCOM from the U.S. base in Qatar.
Israeli jets violated the same airspace that is ostensibly protected under the IAMD defense umbrella. The more than a dozen Israeli jets traveled more than 2000 KM without raising an alarm or triggering the IAMD air defense. CENTCOM’s decision not to activate, or failure to activate IAMD, a system largely paid for by the GCC, raises two critical questions where each scenario demands accountability: was it a deliberate choice that left Qatar exposed, or was it a catastrophic system failure.
The first possibility assumes the U.S. military was fully aware of the approaching Israeli aircraft and chose to stand down. This decision could not have been made by local commanders alone. Allowing a foreign military to penetrate protected skies where the largest U.S. base is located would have required authorization from the highest levels of the U.S. government. In this case, Washington effectively greenlit the operation, sacrificing its ally’s sovereignty and the lives of the Palestinian negotiators.
The second possibility is even more frightening: IAMD did not detect the foreign aircrafts at all. If true, this exposes a blatant vulnerability at the very center of America’s regional security architecture. How could the largest and most advanced military base in the Middle East fail to notice hostile jets entering its immediate airspace? Such a failure would undermine the very justification for the base’s existence and call into question the credibility of IAMD and U.S. security guarantees to defend regional participants.
For Qatar, the message is obvious. Despite hosting more than 10,000 U.S. troops and spending billions to maintain and support the base, its skies are not safe. Hosting an American base does not guarantee protection, worse, the Air Base may provide a false guard or act as a gatekeeper that serves other U.S. ally’s interests first and foremost, even at the expense of its host country.
If the skies above Doha are not defended by IAMD and Al Udeid Air Base, what is it really protecting, then? Israel?
To date, IAMD has been activated twice, and only to protect Israel, a country that is not a party of IAMD system: first, defending Israel against Iran’s retaliation in April 2024; and second, to thwart Iran’s barrage of missiles at Al Udeid Air Base following the joint Israeli/U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israeli attack on Doha showed that the American security umbrella over Qatar is porous and intentionally compromised. Failing to own up to America’s failure to detect and stop the attack against a “major ally,” Trump offered empty promises that this “would never happen again.” This, of course, was his administration’s way of evading the real question: why would the U.S. base, built and financed by Qatar, sit silent while American-made Israeli jets bombarded a residential area next door?
On Thursday, September 11, 2025, the U.S. answer came clear in New York. The Trump administration stopped the UN Security Council (UNSC) from voting on a resolution condemning the Israeli attack on Doha. In its place, the UNSC issued a routine press statement merely admonishing the raid. Rather than demanding a binding resolution, Qatar and its media spun the useless statement as a major diplomatic victory.
Such a statement is a non-binding press note, and not a legally significant resolution. A resolution requires a formal vote and carries legal weight, whereas a press release is merely a statement read by the Council president. Dressing up a press note as a “resolution” appears to be a deliberate attempt to shield the Trump administration from embarrassment and to obscure its tacit support for Israel’s raid. In accepting a meager press statement, Qatar chose to protect Trump from having to cast a definitive vote, rather than forcing the U.S. to reveal its true stance on Israel’s actions.
Beyond the immediate geopolitics, the Israeli air raid on Qatar delivers a sharp warning to other countries in the region: what is the value of a military alliance with the U.S. if the supposed protector decides which threats to block and which to permit? The reality is clear, Washington has chosen to prioritize the interests of its subsidized ally, Israel, with more than $17.9 billion in the last two years alone, over the very host nation that bankrolls the American military base with $10 billion.
Who knows which nation Washington will elevate next, and at whose expense? This is the risk of such alliances where host countries left naked the moment America decides another ally’s interests outweigh their own.
Will the emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha this week rise to meet this new reality? Or will it descend into Act II of the UNSC farce with a new toothless declaration, and hand Trump yet another free pass to double-cross his allies?
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
The Truth and Fiction Regarding US Military Aggression toward Venezuela.
September 18, 2025
The Truth and Fiction Regarding US Military Aggression toward Venezuela
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
On September 2, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio separately reported that a U.S. attack on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast had destroyed illegal drugs on board and killed 11 passengers. Trump showed a video on social media displaying the boat’s fiery destruction.
He alleged the victims were members of the Tren de Aragua drug-dealing and terrorist gang. Analyst Vijay Prashad characterizes the group as criminals rather than narco-traffickers.
For weeks, U.S. naval vessels with 4,500 marines aboard, a nuclear-powered submarine, and F-35 stealth aircraft had been patrolling in nearby Caribbean waters.
Commentators denounced the illegality of attack without a declaration of war. These were summary executions, they claimed. No one was captured. Criminal proceedings were lacking.
La Jornada journalist Carlos Fazio suggests the attack possibly did not happen, this on the basis of no available information on the boat’s location or home port, and confusion about its destination. Venezuelan officials attributed the video to artificial intelligence.
On September 12, troops from a U.S. destroyer boarded a Venezuelan tuna fishing vessel where they harassed nine crew members for eight hours. The action occurred in one of the country’s “exclusive economic zone[s].” Venezuela’ s defense minister on September 14 denounced U.S. reconnaissance and intelligence flights along the coast. The next day, Trump announced that three “confirmed narco-terrorists from Venezuela” were killed in a U.S. attack on another vessel.
Actualities
The military build-up and the attacks are as real as the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; European powers were told to back off from South and Central America. The Doctrine became license for U.S. intervention throughout the region, and in Venezuela now.
It’s true: the U.S. government has interests, among them: access to Venezuela’s oil deposits that are the greatest in the world, overcoming competition from China for resources and trade, and seeing the disappearance of Venezuela’s socialist government. Another area of truth concerns arrangements coming out of historical experience that shape the U.S. government’s actions. The United States acts according to a script.
U.S. political leaders know their kind of economy always has to expand. Historically, they and leaders in other developed countries have sought to overcome shortages of the raw materials, fuel sources, and cheap labor they need so as to be able to expand production, and make profits. They’ve done so by plundering poor countries of the world.
It’s not easy. Working and marginalized people, at home and abroad, deprived and oppressed, rise up in opposition and, worse, do it together. This kind of tension has continued ever since the onset of the industrial revolution. Tensions mounted after Venezuela’s change-oriented Bolivarian government came to power in 1999.
The stage was set. The capitalist, debt-ridden U.S. government faces internal crises, has to deal with newly-strong rival states, and tries to adjust to a failing neoliberal system. It lashes out. Venezuela, with oil and a government representing “socialism of the 21st century” – as propounded by former president Hugo Chávez – is a ready target for U.S. imperialism bent on recovering.
The U.S. government may be falling back on the Monroe Doctrine. According to Politico, U.S. officials “are proposing to shift the US military posture away from a focus on China, instead prioritizing alleged threats in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Fakery
Myth-making is no stranger to the politics of change. The U.S. raised the cry of anticommunism after World War II and then war on terrorism. Now as the U.S. war machine goes to Venezuela and elsewhere in the region, the agenda is fight against narco-terrorism.
Current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, object of a $50 million bounty for his capture, becomes narco-terrorist-in-chief. U.S. officials say Venezuela’s government operates a drug cartel called the “Cartel de los Soles.” Pino Arlacchire, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) regards that entity as “a creature of Trumpian imagination.” UNODC’s 2025 report declared Venezuela to be “a marginal player in the great theater of international drug trafficking.”
Most of the cocaine (and methamphetamine) consumed in the United States and Europe flows up the Pacific coast and across Central America. A lot of cocaine goes to Europe in Ecuadorian banana boats. Only five percent of cocaine arriving in the United States passes through Venezuela. The most prominent producing and trafficking countries are Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, all close U.S. allies at one or another time.
And contradictions
The United States itself is a great facilitator of the current narco-trafficking system. U.S. Americans are by far the world’s champion users of illegal drugs. The United States might have mounted a well-resourced, comprehensive, and effective offensive against drug use and addiction, but did not.
The “war on drugs” announced by President Nixon in 1971 concentrated on inner city users during the Reagan era – the better to oppress ethnic minorities – and, later, on drug-traffickers abroad. Beginning in 2000, U.S. Plan Colombia, the drug war’s crown jewel, represented a militarized U.S. effort costing $10 billion ostensibly to reduce that country’s cocaine production. The U.S. government used Plan Colombia to undermine FARC leftist insurgents.
According to the Harvard International Review in 2024, “[Coca] “plantations are again quickly spreading” in Colombia. The report is damning: “For decades, Latin America has remained a hub for the illicit drug market … and drug production continues to increase” – despite the long U.S. drug war.
Uncomfortable truths
A big portion of the profits from narco-trafficking in the Western Hemisphere remain in the United States, serving as incentive to import more. The vastness of the U.S. trade is clear from penalties imposed on U.S. banks caught laundering drug money. There was the $3 billion judgment against TD bank in 2024, $1.9 billion imposed on HSBC Bank in 2012, and, earlier, $160 million paid by Wachovia-Wells Fargo.
A convicted trafficker told an interviewer about delivering “billions of dollars worth (sic) of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines to their US and Canadian wholesale clients.” He reported that, “Heading south, … we just had the money put on tractor trailers and had it driven it across the border. We never lost a dollar.” The total “sent back to Mexico … [over a decade] was probably more than US$3.5 billion.”
Weapons exported from the United States under the eyes of authorities benefits the drug cartels. Of guns confiscated in Mexico and across the Caribbean, 70% and 80% of them, respectively, came from the United States. Activist John Lindsay-Poland asks, “Why would we be arming the very people that we say we are fighting?”
The U.S. government itself, the CIA in particular, has been a big-time dealer in drugs:
• Under CIA auspices, heroin was produced in and exported from the “Golden Triangle” area of Burma, Thailand, and Laos during the Vietnam War.
• CIA-facilitated exports of crack cocaine to Los Angeles in the 1980s helped pay for the U.S. Contra war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
• Prior to the Taliban taking power in 2000, the CIA helped Afghanistan become the world’s top supplier of heroin. Heroin and poppy production flourished again between 2003 and 2021, while the U.S. was in charge, and disappeared with the Taliban’s return.
A major loose end remains, the problem of simultaneously opposing U.S. imperialism that would block progressive change in Venezuela and reacting to the perceived failings of that government’s program. President Maduro has indeed compromised with business owners, negotiated with the United States, backed away from some worker protections, and attempted to destroy Venezuela’s Communist Party, despite that party’s long support for the Bolivarian Revolution.
A joint statement from many of the world’s Communist and workers’ parties issued on September 5, and accessible here, illustrates the dilemma. It does succeed in prioritizing condemnation of U.S. “eagerness to exercise full economic, political, and military dominance in the region.”
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Friday, September 12, 2025
NEO: Peotests in Indonesia : Deaths, Lies and Videos
Protests in Indonesia: Death, Lies and Videos
September 12, 2025
There is reason to believe that unfriendly external forces are trying to sow “controllable chaos” in the country.
Timeline of events
From August 25 to August 29, mass protests took place in Jakarta and other cities in Indonesia. They were sparked by a demonstration in front of the parliament building against high salaries and housing allowances for parliamentarians. Now the protest agenda has expanded to include a variety of economic issues. The most serious protests swept through the cities after a man died after being struck by a police car at protests in Jakarta on August 28. He turned out to be a 21-year-old taxi driver.
The protesters were silenced only after the army joined in restoring order on August 29, operating carefully, but effectively. Now, after the protests, huge amounts of rubbish, rubble, and burnt items are being cleaned up in the cities. The transport infrastructure of Jakarta alone requires repairs that will take at least a week.
An unpeaceful protest
It is now safe to say that, from the very beginning, on August 25, the protests very quickly turned violent. The protesters attacked the police, vandalized various objects and threw things at passing cars, smashed a street surveillance camera etc. At that time, the police detained 351 people (155 adults and 196 minors, whose extensive participation became an important tool for coordinating the protests). Seven of the detainees were entirely under the influence of drugs.
Legitimate questions arise: if the protesters allegedly opposed specific economic issues, then why did they smash infrastructure, burn public transport stops, break windows, damage walls with graffiti? It was not a peaceful protest, but a textbook example of “controlled chaos”. The protests also targeted police stations and municipal authorities in Jakarta, Bandung, Makassar, Yogyakarta, Medan and other cities, as well as suburbs. Even the resort-filled Bali was affected, and there tear gas was used against the thundering crowd.
It was not a peaceful protest, but a textbook example of “controlled chaos”
These events were very clearly staged, taking place simultaneously in different places – as if on command – and in waves. The protesters smashed, set fire to, attacked the houses of parliamentarians, looted and vandalized the residence of the finance minister. Stones, sticks, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails were used against the police. At least three employees of the municipal parliament in Makassar were killed in an arson attack on the building, and several more were seriously injured and in critical condition. The protesters (whom certain media outlets persistently refer to as “students”) used Molotov cocktails, which were thrown through the windows. What a terrifyingly familiar style… Who made them, who taught them how to do it? And then, as in other places, the building was looted and everything the looters could possibly snatch disappeared from the charred building, including – no matter how wild it may sound – parts of the air conditioners.
À la color revolution
It can be noted that the protesters are well coordinated, and there are more experienced instructors among them. Everyone is conveniently and continuously shooting videos, and some of the posters are in English (probably so that Western TV channels can pick them up right away). In short, directions were given online, and during interrogations detainees admit that they learned about where to attack and where there is an opportunity to steal from information online. They constantly try to frame the police – a classic move. The protesters were taught to practically throw themselves at the guards’ feet and with Indonesian flags in their hands. Why were they carrying them if they are protesting against the state, against their country? But no, that is the way it is supposed to be, that is how they were taught so it could be shown on Western TV channels later. And, as usual, the instructors threw young people with inexperienced minds filled with misinformation, students and underage teenagers, onto the barricades. It looks absurd when they try to talk about “police reform” and the like on social media, even though they are clueless about public administration and politics due to their age and lack of education. The police blocked minors wherever they could. The online channels that gathered them have already been identified.
Against this background, a sea of affiliated pseudo-researchers and unscrupulous media outlets can be expected to cry out in unison, as if they had not heard about looters, arson and the dead, but sympathize with the protests and put forward their “demands” to President Prabowo Subianto. Some Western information and analytical resources even openly justified the attacks, and yet they play the same footage, quoting individual “students” and an Indonesian stand-up comedian, who, it turns out, is also “protesting”. Some Indonesian actors, directors and producers were quick to speak out for the protests and post relevant posts on Western social networks. Show business, as it often happens, is the first to show its rotting colors along with unscrupulous media. They are not with the state, but instead choose those who kill, rob, destroy everything in their path and masterfully send the crowd to face tear gas and water cannons.
Meanwhile, they are trying to present the taxi driver as an “innocent” victim, and a whole information campaign has been launched in the media. Everything is exaggerated, and the style is wholly recognizable. Now they claim that he was allegedly not a protester, which begs the question: what else would he have been doing there, in the midst of the demonstrators, when the police began to gather and disperse them? “Human rights activists”, what do you think? Atnike Nova Sigiro, a member of the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission, says that the police should not defend themselves from the madding crowd at the protests, but show “politeness and care”. I would like to ask if she is in her right mind. Maybe we should also give coffee with milk to the protesters? But the media is echoing her words. She is not saying anything about the innocent people who died horribly in the fire in Makassar. She should go there and look at their disfigured corpses, and only then make comments. Alas, nobody remembers them, and only the mayor of Makassar came to the hospital to see the wounded.
* * *
So far, the Indonesian state is holding its own. Also, in response to recent events, the government has already demanded that social networks operating in Indonesia open local representative offices and moderate content due to the widespread spread of misinformation. This is an important measure. Indonesia is a regional power and one of the leaders of the Global South, and will most certainly defend its right to independently determine its path for development, along with foreign and domestic policy. It would also be wise to also learn from one’s own and others’ mistakes to become stronger to withstand the turmoil of the modern world.
Ksenia Muratshina, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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