After the US cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961, the British embassy in Havana functioned as a proxy for US covert action and intelligence gathering against Castro’s government.

British operations, undertaken by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), were designed to delegitimise Cuba’s promotion of wealth distribution and to support US attempts to overthrow Castro.

The IRD, a cold war propaganda unit, sought to censure key Cuban officials and even plotted to spread homophobic rumours about Fidel’s second in command and brother, Raúl Castro.

Newly-released British files also show that during the 1970s, the IRD produced forged documents in an attempt to attack Cuba’s anti-apartheid campaigns in Africa.

[...]

While the US effort to overthrow Castro is infamous, very little is known about British operations in Cuba.

In August 1962, Leslie Boas, Britain’s regional information officer for Latin America based in Caracas, Venezuela, circulated a report on the leading political personalities in Cuba. “Having read the report”, Boas noted, “it has occurred to me that we could make effective use of some of the information it contains for propaganda purposes”.

He continued: “We could put out, in a completely unattributable fashion, a leaflet entitled ‘Personalities of the Cuban Revolution’ in which the more dubious aspects of the leading figures in the Cuban scene would be highlighted”.

The IRD was asked to “do some research” in order to produce additional “ammunition” on Castro’s aides.

To this end, senior IRD official Rosemary Allott suggested the unit “might include suitable stories circulating in Cuba (I heard one in Havana – since forgotten – on Raul Castro as a homosexual). In fact we might ask Havana for other purposes to send us all counter-revolutionary jokes and stories”.

[...]

In March 1962, shortly after the US initiated Operation Mongoose, a British embassy official in Washington wrote to the Foreign Office in London about a meeting with the US State Department and “our Friends”, a reference to the CIA.

“They would… be very grateful for facts on what is going on in Cuba which they can use in their propaganda and any suggestions the Embassy in Havana may have on useful topics and themes”, the British embassy official noted.

In a document marked Top Secret, Foreign Office official Robert Marrett noted that: “It seems to me to be a sound idea that our Embassy in Cuba should also assist the Americans discreetly by supplying anti-Castro material”.

By June 1962, an operation to send “useful items to the Americans for propaganda purposes” had been “approved by the Foreign Office”.

More than 2,000 Britons served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the Gaza genocide, it can be revealed.

The information was obtained by Declassified via a Freedom of Information request issued to the IDF by lawyer Elad Man from the NGO Hatzlacha.

The data outlines the number of people with dual and multiple nationalities who were IDF service members as of March 2025.

It shows how 1,686 British-Israelis and a further 383 people with British, Israeli, and another nationality served in the IDF amid the annihilation of Gaza.

They were among over 50,000 IDF soldiers with Israeli and at least one other nationality.

The largest cohorts come from the US, Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

Prior to this, data was only available on the number of Britons without Israeli citizenship serving in the IDF, so-called lone soldiers, a figure that was as low as 54. The revelation that far more UK passport holders served in the IDF will raise serious legal questions for the British authorities, which have thus far failed to prosecute any citizens returning home after fighting in Gaza.

Paul Heron, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), told Declassified: “There must be no impunity where credible evidence links British nationals to grave breaches of international law.

“The UK has clear duties to prevent genocide and avoid assisting unlawful military action.

“Where dual nationals have served in units implicated in atrocities, the authorities must investigate promptly and, where the evidence meets the threshold, pursue arrest and prosecution like any other serious crime”.

Declassified contributor Hamza Yusuf previously exposed how Britons were serving in some of Israel’s “craziest” combat units in Gaza where they viewed Palestinian fighters as “rats” and “animals”. Among the Britons identified by Yusuf was Levi Simon, who was seen “rummaging through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women forced to flee their homes” in Gaza.

Another was master sergeant Sam Sank from London, who filmed himself fighting in Gaza between December 2023 and January 2024. Sank had told The Times that “based on the number of his friends in the IDF, which includes a Scot in his own small unit, [he] believes there are hundreds, if not thousands, more Britons fighting in Israel.” His estimates match with the data Hatzlacha has now obtained from Israeli authorities.

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.

[...]

As I told the commission, “US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.”

From the testimony given to the hearing:

What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds — from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties — is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

These are not aberrations — these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.

Video of the statement can also be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Cu7uMFfFpIk?t=1995

U.S. Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.

Three months after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.

The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”

But the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the United States government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.

[...]

Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.

Three former U.S. officials said that the descriptions were unusually graphic and would have commanded the attention of senior U.S. officials had the message been widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.

It would have also deepened scrutiny of a National Security Memorandum, issued by Biden that month, which conditioned the supply of U.S. intelligence and weapons on Israel’s compliance with international law, they said.

"While cables weren't the only means of providing humanitarian information ... they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” said Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID.

The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem oversaw the language and distribution of most of the cables about Gaza, including those from other embassies in the region.

One former senior official said Lew and Hallett often told USAID leadership that the cables included information that had been widely reported in the media.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and representatives for former President Joe Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the fact that the cables never reached upper leadership of the U.S. government.

Already, completely unrelated to the protests, US citizens have been detained in raids and had the validity of their proffered birth certificates denied. Native Americans have been held for days — used, in part, as leverage to force tribal governments to open their territories to the agency. This is not an exaggeration: in the besieged city, anyone who does not look white enough (and white in just the right way) must carry their proof of citizenship with them at all times, lest they risk being detained and abducted. This is, nearly word for word, the scenario that was prophesied by “radical leftists” at the advent of agencies like Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE, following the passage of the Patriot Act by a bipartisan coalition during the War on Terror. It was at this same time that the National Security Agency (NSA) gained new, wide-ranging powers. The first interagency operation to target “violent transnational gangs” was initiated in 2005 under Bush, and prefigures much of the language still used today. But the new security state was a joint effort. In fact, although initiated under a Republican administration, it was the Democrats who built these out into working agencies and vastly expanded their powers.

Both ICE and the DHS were rapidly expanded under Obama, who oversaw the largest surge in deportations and a major build-out of deportation camps, constructed in part through a $1 billion no-bid deal with private prison contractor Core Civic (at the time Corrections Corporation of America).5 In fact, Johnathan Ross, the agent who murdered Good, was hired into the agency at the height of this Obama-era deportation wave. The same years saw an expansion of NSA data centers, including the groundbreaking ceremony for the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center in Utah, which is perhaps the core of modern mass surveillance infrastructure.6 Similarly, it was the Obama administration that signed the first deals with Palantir to track cross-border crime, establishing the foundation for the firm’s now longstanding collaboration with ICE.7 Today, the company has been contracted to construct an app “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address…”8 These were the same years when calls to “abolish ICE” first gained traction, alongside calls to roll back NSA surveillance programs and dismantle Homeland Security. Needless to say, these demands were dismissed by Democrats and Republicans alike as nothing more than the shrill complaints of stubbornly unrealistic radicals. Now, we face precisely the “reality” we were promised.

[...]

This all leaves little hope for a judicial response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Shortly after the killing of Good, Ross was evacuated from the scene, which was cleared with no logging of evidence or investigation. Similarly, other agencies were prohibited from securing the scene of Pretti’s murder. The Department of Justice has pursued no charges, nor have city or state officials. The regime has maintained that Ross and all its other mercenaries have blanket immunity. They have repeated outright lies about the killing of Pretti, immediately disproven by numerous videos. At this point, as with any police murder, charges will only be filed in any of these killings if there are mass mobilizations of sufficient scale and intensity. Peaceful parades, even if enormous in size or costumed as a “general strike” (yet which shuts down not one major employer in the city), have no path toward achieving this. At this point, there is simply no imaginable mechanism through which parades performing protest for the sake of winning political attention might encourage anyone in power to even bring these matters to trial. Assaults on enemy property, hard blockades, and strike activity might force such an outcome, as the riots did in the case of George Floyd several years prior. In this case, however, even a trial and a conviction could easily be nullified through presidential pardon and, if the January 6th cases are any indication, there is every indication that the executive would pursue it. The state can no longer be trusted to deliver even an imitation of justice. Liberals are left to weep, whipping their blistered backs in futile acts of penitence hoping to regain the attention of their delinquent god. Eventually, their boils burst and the plague takes them like the rest.

Already, completely unrelated to the protests, US citizens have been detained in raids and had the validity of their proffered birth certificates denied. Native Americans have been held for days — used, in part, as leverage to force tribal governments to open their territories to the agency. This is not an exaggeration: in the besieged city, anyone who does not look white enough (and white in just the right way) must carry their proof of citizenship with them at all times, lest they risk being detained and abducted. This is, nearly word for word, the scenario that was prophesied by “radical leftists” at the advent of agencies like Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE, following the passage of the Patriot Act by a bipartisan coalition during the War on Terror. It was at this same time that the National Security Agency (NSA) gained new, wide-ranging powers. The first interagency operation to target “violent transnational gangs” was initiated in 2005 under Bush, and prefigures much of the language still used today. But the new security state was a joint effort. In fact, although initiated under a Republican administration, it was the Democrats who built these out into working agencies and vastly expanded their powers.

Both ICE and the DHS were rapidly expanded under Obama, who oversaw the largest surge in deportations and a major build-out of deportation camps, constructed in part through a $1 billion no-bid deal with private prison contractor Core Civic (at the time Corrections Corporation of America).5 In fact, Johnathan Ross, the agent who murdered Good, was hired into the agency at the height of this Obama-era deportation wave. The same years saw an expansion of NSA data centers, including the groundbreaking ceremony for the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center in Utah, which is perhaps the core of modern mass surveillance infrastructure.6 Similarly, it was the Obama administration that signed the first deals with Palantir to track cross-border crime, establishing the foundation for the firm’s now longstanding collaboration with ICE.7 Today, the company has been contracted to construct an app “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address…”8 These were the same years when calls to “abolish ICE” first gained traction, alongside calls to roll back NSA surveillance programs and dismantle Homeland Security. Needless to say, these demands were dismissed by Democrats and Republicans alike as nothing more than the shrill complaints of stubbornly unrealistic radicals. Now, we face precisely the “reality” we were promised.

[...]

This all leaves little hope for a judicial response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Shortly after the killing of Good, Ross was evacuated from the scene, which was cleared with no logging of evidence or investigation. Similarly, other agencies were prohibited from securing the scene of Pretti’s murder. The Department of Justice has pursued no charges, nor have city or state officials. The regime has maintained that Ross and all its other mercenaries have blanket immunity. They have repeated outright lies about the killing of Pretti, immediately disproven by numerous videos. At this point, as with any police murder, charges will only be filed in any of these killings if there are mass mobilizations of sufficient scale and intensity. Peaceful parades, even if enormous in size or costumed as a “general strike” (yet which shuts down not one major employer in the city), have no path toward achieving this. At this point, there is simply no imaginable mechanism through which parades performing protest for the sake of winning political attention might encourage anyone in power to even bring these matters to trial. Assaults on enemy property, hard blockades, and strike activity might force such an outcome, as the riots did in the case of George Floyd several years prior. In this case, however, even a trial and a conviction could easily be nullified through presidential pardon and, if the January 6th cases are any indication, there is every indication that the executive would pursue it. The state can no longer be trusted to deliver even an imitation of justice. Liberals are left to weep, whipping their blistered backs in futile acts of penitence hoping to regain the attention of their delinquent god. Eventually, their boils burst and the plague takes them like the rest.

“Living Hell” follows on B’Tselem’s August 2024 report “Welcome to Hell.” Building on the extensive research and analysis carried out for the previous report, it provides updated figures and new testimonies from 21 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent months, and draws on data from other Israeli and international human rights organizations. The updated information indicates that Israeli prisons continue to function as a network of torture camps for Palestinians, with the systematic abuse even more extensive than before. This includes physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care, all of which has led to numerous deaths. Some witnesses also described undergoing or witnessing sexual violence and abuse. The transformation of prisons into a network of torture camps is part of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society, aimed at dismantling the Palestinian collective.

See also: Audit Finds Palestinian Inmates Face Starvation and Beatings in Israeli Prisons | Conditions have severely deteriorated since the start of the war in Gaza, according to Israeli public defenders report

Palestinians in Israeli jails face ‘conditions unfit for human beings,’ state agency says | The Public Defender’s Office finds widespread abuses against Palestinian detainees, including systematic violence, food deprivation, medical neglect, and insanitary conditions

Inspectors from the Public Defense Office who visited four prisons in 2024 documented seeing skeletal prisoners and witnessing physical evidence of beatings and medical neglect on the bodies of prisoners they interviewed.

The reports were made public after a year-long legal battle by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which filed a freedom of information request to gain access to the documents, after the Justice Ministry refused to release them.

The inspectors described the conditions in one prison they visited as “not fit to hold human beings,” and said of another that their findings showed “unnecessary and unjustified violence against prisoners” carried out “on a regular basis and on numerous occasions.”

‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail | Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

Hey Mark, quick question, would you be willing to be specific about the things you "avoided calling out"? Might it have any relevance to literally everything the US has done as its foreign policy? Would that apply to any recent genocides you might have avoided calling out? Or the meek statement on the abduction of Maduro?

Trump really has just revealed so much. Now the liberals are admitting what should have been obvious.

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on diminished institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.

And it is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.

Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness.

We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield it together. Which brings me back to Havel. What would it mean for middle powers to “live in truth”?

It means naming reality. Stop invoking the “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.

It means acting consistently. Apply the same standards to allies and rivals.

When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window. It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it is dismantling, create institutions and agreements that function as described.

And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government’s priority. Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy. Countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

The most important context here is that while America was a large net importer of petroleum products in the early 2000s, today it is a major producer. Back in early 2003, the U.S. was importing about 10 million barrels each day, and that figure had been on an upward trajectory since the early 1980s—lending credence to the oil argument with respect to Iraq. But since the advent of fracking technology, America has become the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, and a large net petroleum exporter, to the tune of about 3.3 million barrels per day as of October last year.

The price of oil, about $58 at time of writing, is already dangerously low for American fracking companies, whose investments typically pencil out with prices at $60 per barrel or above. More oil on global markets means those prices would drop even lower, crushing the economics of drilling even further. The U.S. oil industry needs Trump to swoop in and add another few million barrels a day of production like it needs a hole in the head.

When oil executives have been asked point-blank about their interest in Venezuela, they were notably noncommittal. “We’d have to see what the economics look like,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil. “It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments,” a ConocoPhillips spokesperson added.

[...]

The characteristics of Venezuelan oil also make this quite unlikely. Its reserves—which were likely overstated by Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, by the way—are very viscous and sulfur-laden; much like Canadian tar sands, the product is so gloopy that you have to cut it with some kind of solvent to get it to flow in a pipe. This makes Venezuelan crude lucrative for refiners but not so much for oil companies to pull from the ground. In short, it’s expensive to drill, transport, and refine, just like the fracked oil that is barely turning a profit right now.

Moreover, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is also in ruins, thanks to decades of chronic mismanagement and American sanctions. Industry experts report that it would take perhaps a decade of heavy investment totaling $100 billion to bring it back to where it was in the early ’90s. Now, some American refineries were built to handle Venezuelan oil, but that capacity is now partly occupied by Canadian crude, and again, refining more would come at the expense of the industry as a whole.

Over the long term, the looming collapse in oil demand makes a yearslong investment in Venezuelan oil rigs and pipelines highly risky. While the EV transition has partly stalled out in America thanks to Trump, much of the rest of the world is charging ahead. Fully one-quarter of all cars sold in the world last year were EVs. In China, the largest single car market in the world, more than half of cars sold were EVs in 2025—a nearly tenfold increase in just five years.

[...]

Fuel for cars and trucks makes up the overwhelming majority of oil use. EVs have already taken a large bite out of oil demand—on the order of a million barrels a day—and that is going to increase very quickly. It follows that any investment into repairing Venezuela’s rotten oil infrastructure is highly likely to be worthless by the time it’s finished a decade hence.

Now, I don’t doubt that oil companies—and Trump-aligned business titans in general—will attempt to profit from this move. They can monetize the “proven” reserves in Venezuela by touting it as a potential revenue generator. Some refining companies, particularly Chevron, which has been operating in Venezuela for around a century, might make a bit of money out of it. Some oil executives, who tend to be in the class of rich people boiling their brains in right-wing propaganda, might even have supported the attack. But the American oil sector as a whole will not benefit, and neither will the American people. If I had to guess, very little additional oil will get drilled at all.

If there’s one consistent theme in the history of Donald Trump’s business career, it’s that he sucks at business. He’s a stupid, domineering brute who compulsively rips off everyone he interacts with, with the possible exception of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s career in casinos and real estate ended in repeated bankruptcy. He didn’t even maximize the profit from the real estate empire he inherited from his father. So it comes as no surprise that he thinks about imperialist conquest like some 14th-century steppe warlord. It’s been more than a century since wars for plunder made any economic sense, but for Trump to realize that, he would have to be capable of rational thought.

Also bonus reading on incompetent and money addicted Venezuelan opposition and the plots to oust Maduro:

https://prospect.org/2025/11/26/30-billion-dollar-identity-theft-of-venezuela/

It’s perhaps little wonder that a community of expats that concocts such plots would almost universally cheer on the draconian economic sanctions that directly caused the vast majority of Venezuela’s suffering during Trump’s first term. The suffering was presaged during the Obama years by a campaign of agitation for the government to simultaneously default on, and the global financial community to boycott buying, its so-called “Hunger Bonds,” on the “theory” that every penny the government paid in interest to foreign creditors was a penny not being used to feed a starving child.

The campaign was logically ridiculous, since feeding its citizens required Venezuela to access international credit markets to sell oil and buy flour, and defaulting on its obligations would make that more expensive and difficult. But never mind reality: Starting in 2016, the “Hunger Bonds” crowd staged astroturf shaming operations to taunt institutions that purchased them or even included them in emerging market indexes. More recently, during the October IMF meetings someone hired a billboard truck to drive around a hotel that was hosting a cocktail party for the hedge fund Greylock Capital Management. “GREYLOCK CAPITAL FEAST: Enablers of Maduro’s Tyrannical Dictatorship,” one side blared. “Greylock: Where Ethics Default. Your activities enable the narco-terrorist regime. HAVE YOU NO SHAME?”

The most important context here is that while America was a large net importer of petroleum products in the early 2000s, today it is a major producer. Back in early 2003, the U.S. was importing about 10 million barrels each day, and that figure had been on an upward trajectory since the early 1980s—lending credence to the oil argument with respect to Iraq. But since the advent of fracking technology, America has become the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, and a large net petroleum exporter, to the tune of about 3.3 million barrels per day as of October last year.

The price of oil, about $58 at time of writing, is already dangerously low for American fracking companies, whose investments typically pencil out with prices at $60 per barrel or above. More oil on global markets means those prices would drop even lower, crushing the economics of drilling even further. The U.S. oil industry needs Trump to swoop in and add another few million barrels a day of production like it needs a hole in the head.

When oil executives have been asked point-blank about their interest in Venezuela, they were notably noncommittal. “We’d have to see what the economics look like,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil. “It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments,” a ConocoPhillips spokesperson added.

[...]

The characteristics of Venezuelan oil also make this quite unlikely. Its reserves—which were likely overstated by Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, by the way—are very viscous and sulfur-laden; much like Canadian tar sands, the product is so gloopy that you have to cut it with some kind of solvent to get it to flow in a pipe. This makes Venezuelan crude lucrative for refiners but not so much for oil companies to pull from the ground. In short, it’s expensive to drill, transport, and refine, just like the fracked oil that is barely turning a profit right now.

Moreover, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is also in ruins, thanks to decades of chronic mismanagement and American sanctions. Industry experts report that it would take perhaps a decade of heavy investment totaling $100 billion to bring it back to where it was in the early ’90s. Now, some American refineries were built to handle Venezuelan oil, but that capacity is now partly occupied by Canadian crude, and again, refining more would come at the expense of the industry as a whole.

Over the long term, the looming collapse in oil demand makes a yearslong investment in Venezuelan oil rigs and pipelines highly risky. While the EV transition has partly stalled out in America thanks to Trump, much of the rest of the world is charging ahead. Fully one-quarter of all cars sold in the world last year were EVs. In China, the largest single car market in the world, more than half of cars sold were EVs in 2025—a nearly tenfold increase in just five years.

[...]

Fuel for cars and trucks makes up the overwhelming majority of oil use. EVs have already taken a large bite out of oil demand—on the order of a million barrels a day—and that is going to increase very quickly. It follows that any investment into repairing Venezuela’s rotten oil infrastructure is highly likely to be worthless by the time it’s finished a decade hence.

Now, I don’t doubt that oil companies—and Trump-aligned business titans in general—will attempt to profit from this move. They can monetize the “proven” reserves in Venezuela by touting it as a potential revenue generator. Some refining companies, particularly Chevron, which has been operating in Venezuela for around a century, might make a bit of money out of it. Some oil executives, who tend to be in the class of rich people boiling their brains in right-wing propaganda, might even have supported the attack. But the American oil sector as a whole will not benefit, and neither will the American people. If I had to guess, very little additional oil will get drilled at all.

If there’s one consistent theme in the history of Donald Trump’s business career, it’s that he sucks at business. He’s a stupid, domineering brute who compulsively rips off everyone he interacts with, with the possible exception of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s career in casinos and real estate ended in repeated bankruptcy. He didn’t even maximize the profit from the real estate empire he inherited from his father. So it comes as no surprise that he thinks about imperialist conquest like some 14th-century steppe warlord. It’s been more than a century since wars for plunder made any economic sense, but for Trump to realize that, he would have to be capable of rational thought.

Also bonus reading on incompetent and money addicted Venezuelan opposition and the plots to oust Maduro:

https://prospect.org/2025/11/26/30-billion-dollar-identity-theft-of-venezuela/

It’s perhaps little wonder that a community of expats that concocts such plots would almost universally cheer on the draconian economic sanctions that directly caused the vast majority of Venezuela’s suffering during Trump’s first term. The suffering was presaged during the Obama years by a campaign of agitation for the government to simultaneously default on, and the global financial community to boycott buying, its so-called “Hunger Bonds,” on the “theory” that every penny the government paid in interest to foreign creditors was a penny not being used to feed a starving child.

The campaign was logically ridiculous, since feeding its citizens required Venezuela to access international credit markets to sell oil and buy flour, and defaulting on its obligations would make that more expensive and difficult. But never mind reality: Starting in 2016, the “Hunger Bonds” crowd staged astroturf shaming operations to taunt institutions that purchased them or even included them in emerging market indexes. More recently, during the October IMF meetings someone hired a billboard truck to drive around a hotel that was hosting a cocktail party for the hedge fund Greylock Capital Management. “GREYLOCK CAPITAL FEAST: Enablers of Maduro’s Tyrannical Dictatorship,” one side blared. “Greylock: Where Ethics Default. Your activities enable the narco-terrorist regime. HAVE YOU NO SHAME?”

In the statement, Martin called the completed report a “comprehensive review of what happened in 2024” and said the party is “already putting our learnings into motion.” The decision that releasing the report would work against the party, Martin suggested, emerged from “conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem.”

But if the report is “comprehensive” in its look at 2024, keeping it secret raises more questions about who specifically inside that “Democratic ecosystem” will benefit from its remaining under wraps.

[...]

There are grounds for thinking the DNC report digs into these problems. According to a DNC official, the analysis found, among other things, that the party didn’t invest sufficiently in innovative digital tools; that its digital ads didn’t reach young voters who no longer engage with broadcast and cable TV; and that Trump—with the help of an ecosystem of right-wing podcasters and influencers—outworked the Democrats in the information wars. Democrats must play catchup in this department, the report found.

It’s good to hear the report concludes this. But it would be nice to know what specifically the party found on this front and precisely how it’s resolving to do better. Any such analysis of advertising and communications failures would seemingly have to look at Future Forward’s role; in fact, over the summer word leaked that Future Forward would come under heavy criticism in the analysis. If so, that will now remain undisclosed.

[...]

Or take the big question about Joe Biden’s age and fitness for a reelection campaign. It’s unclear what the DNC analysis concludes about key decisions made by the Biden campaign’s high command—people like reelection chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior adviser Anita Dunn, who is now an adviser to Future Forward—including the decision to stay in the race too long. That hamstrung Kamala Harris’s ability to get her campaign up and running in time. The lack of a public report may mean accountability falls by the wayside.

Asked directly whether the DNC had decided not to release the report out of concern for how it might impact the reputations of key party players—or whether the DNC faced pressure from key actors to keep its conclusions secret—the DNC official denied this and said the only consideration was what benefits the party. And the official declined to comment on whether Future Forward’s performance and the fate of all the money channeled into it was scrutinized in the report.

NYT reporting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/us/politics/dnc-2024-autopsy-democrats-ken-martin.html

Still, even if it is good politics to stuff the report in a filing cabinet, Democrats may well be avoiding self-examination and a chance for introspection.

The party’s brand still appears deeply damaged in the eyes of many voters. A national poll from Quinnipiac University this week found that only 18 percent of voters approved of how Democrats in Congress were doing their jobs, a record low.

[...]

Some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024. Since the election, it has come out that a former top aide to Mr. Biden, Mike Donilon, received $4 million from the campaign — even though he did not work meaningfully with the Harris campaign after Mr. Biden left the ticket.

“I read about that,” Ms. Harris said of Mr. Donilon’s compensation in an interview last month with The New York Times. “That was before I got there.”

On Oct. 27, 2023, the Israeli army released an animated video claiming to reveal what lay beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It showed underground tunnels, bunkers, and a Hamas command room — all depicted through slick 3D graphics.

“That information is ironclad,” insisted Mark Regev, then-senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during an interview the same day on CNN. “It’s based on Israeli intelligence.”

[...]

But no such base was ever discovered. Moreover, the command room featured in the video was not unique; it had already appeared more than a year earlier in another animation published by the Israeli army, illustrating what it said was a tunnel beneath a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Gaza. The surrounding streets in the “Al-Shifa” video, meanwhile, were populated with storefronts from a commercial 3D asset pack — replete with fictional establishments like “Fabio’s Pizzeria,” “Andre’s Bakery,” and “Revolution Bike Shop.”

The “Al-Shifa” animation would become one of the most notorious examples of Israel’s new wartime communication strategy. It also marked the beginning of an accelerated phase of production within the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit: having published only a handful of 3D visualizations before October 7, the unit has since released dozens of similar videos depicting supposed terror sites in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

[...]

A months-long investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call together with the research collective Viewfinder, the Swiss network SRF, and the Scottish outlet The Ferret analyzed 43 animations produced by the Israeli army since October 7 and found that many contain serious spatial inaccuracies or prefabricated assets — sourced not from classified intelligence but rather from commercial libraries, content creators, and cultural institutions.

Interviews with soldiers involved in the production of these videos further illuminate how the army prioritizes the aesthetic value of the animations over their accuracy, while animators routinely embellish in order to emphasize a supposed threat.

The outcome is a communications campaign that mimics the graphics of forensic reconstructions in pursuit of legitimizing military strikes on civilian infrastructure. And as most of the sites depicted in the army’s animations remain inaccessible to journalists and researchers, and many have been blown up or demolished, Israel’s illustrated allegations effectively defy verification.

[...]

In some cases, the “illustration” goes one step further, with fabricated environments replacing real places. In September 2024, the army published an animation depicting houses in southern Lebanon that it claimed were concealing missiles. Our investigation identified the area that the video zooms in on from a satellite image to be the outskirts of the village of Yater.

Yet a visit to the village last week found that no such buildings or streets exist in this area — and not because they were destroyed by the Israeli army, which bombed only a handful of sites in Yater. Indeed, the houses in the video are entirely fabricated, featuring antennas sourced from at least three unique models in Hubert’s “Antenna Kit” asset pack, which was published to his Patreon in March 2021.

The army published a similar 3D model at the start of its attack on Iran in June, depicting a uranium enrichment site in Natanz. As international media outlets rushed to cover the event, dozens republished the animation in part or in full, including the BBC, CNN, and Sky News. The interior of the facility depicted in the animation includes at least six of Hubert’s 3D assets, collectively replicated over 150 times.

[...]

Experts have compared the aesthetics of the army’s burgeoning animation campaign with the fields of visual and open-source investigations, which are becoming increasingly popular for covering areas where traditional reporting can be difficult.

“I think the visual lexicon of open-source investigation is something that the Israelis have co-opted as a way to try to delegitimize [those investigations] and confuse,” said Elizabeth Breiner, head of programmes at the Forensic Architecture research center at Goldsmiths University of London. “These visuals are open about their status as something in between the real and the imaginary, but the real harm is that they stick with people well beyond the point after which something may have been functionally disproven.”