Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

Why is Trump doing this? He wanted to be Duterte: Trump regularly praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and said he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Duterte’s government was, in fact, carrying out summary executions of suspected drug dealers. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for his drug war.

Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

In a memo promising legal immunity for those who kill alleged drug traffickers, the Trump administration floated an unusual legal theory.

By Nick Turse | November 14 2025, 12:28 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/11/14/boat-strikes-immunity-legality-tru
mp/

The Trump administration is promising legal cover for military personnel who carry out lethal attacks on the alleged drug smugglers in the waters surrounding Latin America.

Amid mounting questions from senior military and civilian lawyers about the legality of proposed strikes on civilian boats, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel this summer produced a classified opinion intended to shield service members up and down the chain of command from prosecution, according to three government officials.

The legal theory advanced in the finding, two sources said, differs from some of President Donald Trump’s public statements on the killings. It claims that narcotics on the boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the U.S.

One senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, blasted the opinion. “I don’t know what’s more insane – that the ‘President of Peace’ is starting an illegal war or that he’s giving a get out of jail free card to the U.S. military,” said the official, referencing President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed moniker. “Hopefully they realize there’s no immunity for war crimes. Nor is there a statute of limitations.”

The Trump administration continues to keep the OLC memo from the American people but, this week, finally allowed members of Congress and their staffs to read the document. On Wednesday, just 20 copies were made available in a secure room, causing delays among lawmakers and staffers who have been waiting months to understand the legal reasoning underpinning the attacks.

On Thursday evening, War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the campaign of attacks is called Operation Southern Spear. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and Southern Command, “this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” he wrote on X. Southern Spear kicked off earlier this year as part of the Navy’s next-generation effort to use small robot interceptor boats and vertical take-off and landing drones to conduct counternarcotics operations.

The military has carried out 20 known attacks, destroying 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 80 civilians. The most recent attack, on a vessel in the Caribbean on Monday, first reported by CBS on Thursday, reportedly killed four people. Following most of the attacks, Hegseth or Trump have claimed that the victims belonged to an unspecified designated terrorist organization, or DTO.

A list of DTOs, consisting of Latin American cartels and criminal organizations, is attached to the OLC opinion which claims that attacks on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific are lawful and that personnel involved are immune from prosecution.

“The strikes were ordered consistent with the laws of armed conflict, and as such are lawful orders. Military personnel are legally obligated to follow lawful orders and, as such, are not subject to prosecution for following lawful orders,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept.

Experts in the law

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Tucker Exposes Trump Would-Be Assassin Thomas Crooks' Social Media History, The FBI Coverup, And More Strangeness

Friday, Nov 14, 2025 - 08:20 AM

Tucker Carlson has just released a deep dive into Donald Trump's attempted assassin, Thomas Crooks - who both the Biden and the Trump FBI have been very quiet about since the July 13, 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In late September, Carlson's team received an anonymous tip from someone who said they had gained access to some of Crooks' online accounts, which he found using 'tools commonly used by private investigators' after obtaining Crooks' phone number and gmail address from public documents. He then traced that to two encrypted foreign email accounts (bcook[at]mailfence.com and americangamer[at]gmx.com). He also had a snapchat account, a Venmo, Zelle and PayPal account among several others.

"It turns out that Crooks was hardly an online ghost," Carlson reports. "And yet, federal investigators lied and told us there was no trace of him online."

The source was able to obtain all materials from Crooks' deactivated YouTube account - which includes his search history, watch history, and 737 public comments.

When Carlson's team asked the FBI why they hadn't shared this information with the public, the agency replied by asking if they could verify the authenticity of the shooter's account.

What did Crooks say?

The comments by Crooks were posted between 2019 and 2020, when he was between 15 and 17-years-old. "They show two things," Carlson explains. "First, that Thomas Crooks was not some secretive lone wolf who never warned anyone that he was planning on violence. Just the opposite. Years before he showed up in Butler, Crooks was leaving a detailed digital trail of violent threats - including calls for assassinations and political violence. Second - they show a man who started out as a radical Trump supporter, whose views on the President transformed - changed completely, during Covid. The FBI lied about that fact, and that Crooks was a right-winger."

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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tucker-reveals-trump-attempted-ass
assin-thomas-crooks-social-media-history-fbi-coverup

Sounds like someone here, dunnit?

You've left quite a record here, SECOND. You really should be more careful about letting all that righteous hate leak out like that.

Also, the winds of NOT change: The FBI continues to be squirrelly, secretive, and politicized. Kash Patel... WTF???

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Originally posted by second:
Why is Trump doing this? He wanted to be Duterte: Trump regularly praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and said he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Duterte’s government was, in fact, carrying out summary executions of suspected drug dealers. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for his drug war.

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IMHO there's no justification for striking civilian boats and killing "suspects". This reminds me very much of how GWB tortured (so to speak) the law and pressured his then legal council to OK rendition and torture. Bush did his utmost to make the most use of "enemy combatant" category and find an external American-controlled location (originally they were going to use ships at sea but settled on Gitmo) to avoid American, foreign, and international law.

The only mitigating aspect of Trump's behavior is that it's just a few dozen people killed, not hundreds of thousands, like Hillary/Obama, Bill, and GWB did.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Originally posted by second:
MAGA would be so upset if an email came out that proved Trump helped Epstein cover up the systematic rape of children.

Oh, that happened this morning and they don’t care?

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No it didn't happen.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The only mitigating aspect of Trump's behavior is that it's just a few dozen people killed, not hundreds of thousands, like Hillary/Obama, Bill, and GWB did.

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Already hundreds of thousands have died thanks to Trump! It will be millions in the next 3 years: The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands

The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

Film by Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong
Text by Atul Gawande
November 5, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-shutd
own-of-usaid-has-already-killed-hundreds-of-thousands

. . . An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

Many of the leaders voiced trepidation about what the incoming Administration might bring, but I struck a sanguine note. U.S.A.I.D., I pointed out, had more than sixty years of solid bipartisan backing. Trump had advanced significant parts of the agency’s work in his first term. He had personally pledged to end H.I.V. as a public-health threat by 2030. The incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had been a vocal supporter of the bureau. There would be isolated partisan skirmishes—over diversity initiatives, abortion-related policies, and the like—but more than ninety-five per cent of our bureau’s work had never been under contention.

Clearly, I lacked imagination. Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. Secretary Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the agency. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court did anything to stop it.

We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact.
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_m
inutes&order=asc

The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

The Administration, for its part, has denied causing widespread harm, even as it has made the scale of the damage harder to measure—halting data monitoring and dismissing the inspectors general who might have documented it. This is common in cases of public man-made death. During Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, the Chinese government released no accurate mortality data. Observers abroad understood that a hunger crisis was under way when China began importing grain, but the scale of the catastrophe was not known until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the first reliable census allowed historians to calculate that between twenty-three and thirty million people had died.

A fuller accounting of the fallout from U.S.A.I.D.’s shutdown will probably have to await analysis of the United Nations’ 2025 mortality statistics, which likely won’t appear until 2027. But there are other ways to glimpse the scale of the harm. With a documentary team that includes both American and local journalists, I have been following what has hap

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by second:
MAGA would be so upset if an email came out that proved Trump helped Epstein cover up the systematic rape of children.

Oh, that happened this morning and they don’t care?

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No it didn't happen.

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Trump's lawyer proves it did happen. The proof is not an admission of guilt. Instead, it's a firehose of falsehoods spoken in court:

The New Epstein Emails Humiliate One Trump Official More Than Most

This is only Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s latest embarrassment by the Epstein scandal.

By Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern | Nov 14, 2025 2:24 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/new-epstein-emails-trump-h
umiliation-todd-blanche.html

House Democrats released a batch of emails on Wednesday that suggest President Donald Trump was aware of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes and did nothing to report them. The messages, sent by Epstein to his associates—including chief accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell—contradict the White House’s claims that Trump had no real relationship with Epstein and was ignorant of his criminal offenses. They also seem to discredit Maxwell’s recent testimony to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who solicited her suspiciously rosy account of Trump’s role this past summer.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern spoke about Blanche’s latest embarrassment by the Epstein scandal, as well as his dangerous counteroffensive against the legitimacy of the judiciary. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—who has been signing off willy-nilly on the Justice Department’s fabrications in court—got pantsed by this email dump. There’s no other word for it. On so many levels, this is just devastating for him. Can you lay out the lies and fabrications and cover-ups?

Mark Joseph Stern: So Blanche interviewed Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in July as part of an effort to exonerate Trump from the Epstein affair. A week later, she was transferred to a minimum-security prison, reportedly with special approval by the Trump administration, where she gets extraordinary privileges like customized meals, playtime with puppies, unlimited toilet paper, special access to guests with computers. It all looked a lot like a quid pro quo. During that interview, Maxwell did what Blanche wanted her to do, which was to claim that Trump and Epstein weren’t close friends at all, and Trump didn’t know anything about Epstein’s sex crimes. The Justice Department then publicly released the interview.

I think the new emails just flatly contradict Maxwell’s account to Blanche. They suggest that Trump knew about Epstein’s abuses but did nothing to expose them. For instance, Epstein wrote: “Trump knew of” the investigation into his crimes “and came to my house many times during that period.” He told the journalist Michael Wolff that “of course” Trump “knew about the girls.” And he told Maxwell that Trump was “the dog that hasn’t barked” because he evidently did not tell investigators about Epstein’s misconduct despite spending “hours” at Epstein’s house with one of his victims.

The upshot here is that Trump knew something; he probably knew a lot. And he could have said what he knew to law enforcement, but he stayed silent instead. That cannot be squared with what Maxwell told Blanche, and Blanche then told to the public. Of course, Blanche is Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, and he’s used to spinning fables to protect Trump. But when you’re deputy attorney general, and your client is supposed to be the American people, you’re expected to adhere to a higher standard. That expectation has clearly gone out the window. And whatever credibility Blanche may have had with the courts—and even just the American people—should be gone after this email dump.

There was another Blanche infraction this week that is, in many ways, equa

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