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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The U.S. is continuing to blow up boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, despite growing international condemnation. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the U.S. had struck a boat in the Caribbean, killing three people. He alleged they were narcotraffickers, but once again offered no proof. U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk recently denounced the U.S. extrajudicial killings. In recent months, the U.S. has blown up 17 boats and one submarine.
This comes as The New York Times reports the Trump administration is considering launching airstrikes on Venezuela or even assassinating the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Times reports one idea floated involves the U.S. sending Army’s Delta Force or the Navy SEAL Team 6 to try to capture or kill Maduro.
We’re joined right now by Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, co-author of a new piece in The Nation headlined “Trump’s Gunboat Diplomacy” and another piece in Foreign Policy headlined “With Military Buildup Against Venezuela, the U.S. Eyes Cuba as Well.”
Peter Kornbluh, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you in the studio. Let’s talk about the U.S. — I mean, this New York Times exposé. You also wrote about it, the U.S. intention to assassinate another president of another country.
PETER KORNBLUH: That’s right. It’s one of the most extraordinary kind of open discussions of assassinating a foreign leader that I think we’ve ever experienced. It comes 50 years this month after the Church Committee, the famous Senate committee, went ahead and exposed the reality that the CIA had been going around trying to assassinate foreign leaders. And at that point, it was a scandal, 50 years ago. And today we have a situation where, openly, the president of the United States and his team are trying to come up with a legal rationale for basically neutralizing, liquidating, assassinating a foreign leader, in this case, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. And it’s an extraordinary turn of circumstances. It’s something we have to talk about. The cynical interpretation of the murder of these boat crews in the Caribbean is basically that the Trump administration is sending a signal to Maduro that he is next. And we are committing wanton criminal acts of assassination in the Caribbean, innocent people, who haven’t been found guilty of anything, and kind of setting the stage for an attack on Caracas itself in an attempt to take out its leader.
AMY GOODMAN: You write in the Foreign Policy piece about the military buildup against Venezuela, “With 10 naval vessels and 10,000 troops already deployed to the Caribbean — the largest military buildup there since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — and a carrier strike group led by the USS Gerald R.