Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth at December 2 cabinet meeting. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images
U.S. sanctions, violence, threats, and theft are war crimes waged against Venezuela for decades. A scandal about a “double tap” killing should not be the focus of attention.
The first United States SEAL Team 6 air strike on a boat allegedly engaged in Venezuelan drug trafficking took place on September 2, 2025. All 11 people on board were killed. The Trump administration gleefully released video of the attack and exulted in its deadly success. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, bragged that he watched the air strike live and added, “We knew exactly who was in that boat.”
Now, a U.S. aircraft carrier strike force sits off the coast of Venezuela. Trump has declared Venezuela a “no-fly zone,” and U.S. radar systems have been installed in neighboring Trinidad and Tobago. The corporate media are being fed and are dutifully repeating every story that makes the case for military action.
However, the small boat drug trafficking narrative looks less and less plausible as more people pay attention to a casus belli that doesn’t make sense, and of course, that means a new tale has to be concocted. Of course, in typical Donald Trump fashion, he pardoned a former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is a convicted drug dealer, thereby making a mockery of his own claims. After the mysterious pardon was announced, there suddenly appeared an entirely new story courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that Venezuela is working with African jihadists to flood Europe with cocaine. This desperation to sell what the public isn’t buying looks like an impending attack will come sooner rather than later.
Only a handful of congress members have expressed any opposition to the U.S. threats, and most corporate media are playing the role of stenographer, refusing to ask even basic questions about the administration’s claims. There was little in the way of Trump’s invasion until a leaked story appeared in the Washington Post.
According to anonymous sources, Pete Hegseth did not just watch the first attack. After the strike, two survivors were holding on to the burning wreckage, and Hegseth gave the order to kill them too. One of the sources in the Washington Post article said, “The order was to kill everybody.”
Hegseth denied the account, and Trump backed him up. But they didn’t just deny the claim. They also covered up for Hegseth by blaming Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley for the second strike, known as a “double tap.” “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” The supposed defense of Bradley was a classic case of shoving someone under a bus, or in this case under the water.
Having pointed out the criminality of Hegseth and Trump and the rest of the team, it is important to step back and consider the illegality of all U.S. actions against Venezuela. From George W. Bush to Trump 2.0, there has been an unrelenting regime change effort. Barack Obama declared Venezuela to be “... an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and began the sanctions process, which Trump ramped up. U.S. sanctions have killed thousands of people, some 40,000 in just one year of the first Trump term. Biden took up where Trump left off, relaxing none of his sanctions and raising the bounty on the trumped-up drug trafficking charges against president Maduro from $15 million to $25 million. Sanctions violate the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions against targeting civilian populations for collective punishment and are as deadly as air strikes.
But there is more than one double tap used against Venezuela. As a member of a 2023 International People’s Tribunal Against U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, Coercive Economic Measures fact-finding mission to Venezuela, this columnist witnessed firsthand the ways in which millions of people were impacted by sanctions, which are war by other means. Hospitals were deprived of medication and medical equipment. Any and all international financial transactions were denied. Venezuela’s gold sits in London, stolen by the U.S. and the U.K.
Trump is very public when he speaks of taking Venezuela’s oil, but any such threats are a double tap, a planned theft on top of one that has already taken place. While the U.S. was killing people at sea, it also had a hand in stealing Venezuela’s oil revenue by auctioning off Venezuela’s oil company, CITGO, working with the so-called opposition and Canadian mining operation Cristallex and U.S. corporation Conoco-Phillips recouping money they lost when their operations were nationalized.
Venezuela used its oil revenues to benefit its people and the entire region. Its health care system was a model and provided life-saving procedures to thousands of people. Petrocaribe funds helped and still in a limited way help Cuba, which gets its oil supply from Venezuela. Even low-income people in the U.S. received help from a partnership between Venezuela and Citizens Energy. The threat of a good socialist example was too much for the hegemon to bear and the drive to destroy Venezuela goes on. A military attack would be a second tap, the one intended to kill Venezuela’s socialist project once and for all.
It is very important to note that the air strikes on boats in Venezuela and in Colombia are war crimes by definition. Hegseth’s finger pointing at an admiral doesn’t absolve him, Trump, or the admiral. The entire chain of command could be charged. While highly unlikely to happen, the possibility is bad enough to cause the usually swaggering Hegseth to deflect blame. Of course, the court of U.S. public opinion also presents obstacles to the Trump plan of attack. An ordinarily quiescent congress might awaken just enough to throw a wrench into the administration’s plan.
Protesting the continued U.S. violations of Venezuela’s sovereign rights is a necessity. Yet it cannot be done by focusing on the methods used in one air strike versus another or questioning whether Hegseth gave the orders to kill people he had already tried to kill. The movement in defense of Venezuela must be firmly and unambiguously anti-imperialist. The U.S. has no right to decide who runs Venezuela or to declare that its resources will be stolen or that neighboring nations, such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, will become puppet regimes that aid in destabilizing the region.
If the struggle on behalf of the Venezuelan people is not one of unflinching anti-imperialist thought and activity, then the marches and protests and letter writing will be for naught. The double tap on Venezuela did not begin on September 2, and it won’t end without solidarity and a clear understanding of what is at stake if a weakened but still powerful state is allowed to do whatever it wants to the entire world. There was once a domino theory that posited that communism in one country would lead to communism in another. There should be a domino theory of U.S. aggression. In the past 20 years, the U.S. has caused the displacement of 38 million people from Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and always with the seal of approval from congress. Jibes about Hegseth notwithstanding, they would likely do the same regarding Venezuela. An imperialist nation would not do otherwise.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret dot kimberley at blackagendareport dot com.
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