\n<\/p>\n
White House\u2019s Susie wiles appears to contradict the official narrative portraying the attacks as an antidrug campaign.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the United States military\u2019s attacks on alleged drug boats around Latin America aim to ultimately topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.<\/p>\n In comments published by Vanity Fair magazine on Tuesday, Wiles appeared to contradict the Donald Trump administration\u2019s stated rationale behind the bombing campaign \u2013 combating drugs.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n \u201cHe [Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,\u201d Wiles was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n Vanity Fair released a lengthy profile on Wiles on Tuesday, hours after the Pentagon announced three more boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that it said killed eight people.<\/p>\n \u201cSo not a war on the cartels. It\u2019s regime change,\u201d Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to Wiles\u2019s comments. \u201cEither way, totally illegal and nonsensical.\u201d<\/p>\n The US administration has been intensifying attacks on vessels as it ramps up its military presence near Venezuela, raising speculations that Washington may be plotting another regime change war against Maduro\u2019s left-wing government.<\/p>\n Trump has repeatedly asserted over the past months that the Venezuelan president\u2019s \u201cdays are numbered\u201d.<\/p>\n Last week, US forces raided and seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, a move that Caracas denounced as \u201cinternational piracy\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump \u2013 who recently pardoned the right-wing former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker \u2013 has portrayed the boat strikes and the push against Maduro as an anti-narcotics campaign.<\/p>\n Legal experts say the targeting of vessels in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific \u2013 which has killed more than 90 people \u2013\u00a0 likely violates US and international law and amounts to extrajudicial executions.<\/p>\n The Pentagon has only provided grainy footage as evidence that the boats it has targeted were carrying drugs, while describing the victims as \u201cnarco-terrorists\u201d.<\/p>\n The US has been designating drug-trafficking organisations as \u201cterrorist\u201d groups, but UN experts have rejected that label as justification for the deadly bombardment.<\/p>\n \u201cThese attacks do not appear to have been conducted within the context of national self-defence, an international or non-international armed conflict, nor against individuals posing an imminent threat to life, thus violating fundamental international human rights law prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of life,\u201d the experts said in a report last month.<\/p>\n \u201cUnprovoked attacks and killings on international waters also violate international maritime laws.\u201d<\/p>\n In October, Trump joked that people are no longer going fishing near the Venezuelan coast due to the US attacks.<\/p>\n Washington has had tense\u00a0relations with Caracas since the rise of Hugo Chavez, Maduro\u2019s late predecessor, in the early 2000s.\u00a0The oil-rich South American country has been under heavy US sanctions for years.<\/p>\n Trump, who received the newly established FIFA Peace Prize earlier this month, has campaigned against more US wars and portrayed himself as a peace president.<\/p>\n But his administration has been escalating against Venezuela and issuing threats to Colombia, which is led by another left-wing government under President Gustavo Petro.<\/p>\n The US president has refused to rule out a ground invasion of Venezuela. He has also declared the country\u2019s airspace closed \u201cin its entirety\u201d.<\/p>\n Last week, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, emphasising the need to establish US \u201cpreeminence\u201d in the Americas.<\/p>\n Maduro has accused the US of creating a \u201cpretext\u201d for war, expressing openness to diplomacy with Washington while rejecting what he called a \u201cslave\u2019s peace\u201d.<\/p>\n Prominent Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year, has promised to privatise the country\u2019s oil sector and open it up to investment should Maduro lose power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n White House\u2019s Susie wiles appears to contradict the official narrative portraying the attacks as an antidrug campaign. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the United States military\u2019s attacks on alleged drug boats around Latin America aim to ultimately topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. In comments published by Vanity Fair magazine on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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