It didn’t take long for the words Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela, and chemical weapons to show up in the same US government national security memo. We’ve examined before various possible ‘justifications’ Washington might use for some kind of future military action on Venezuela, or even a full regime change operation.
From Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, Washington is always looking for some kind of casus belli – even if it has to be manufactured – to sell war to the American people. And now we’re quickly in WMD territory at a moment that unprecedented US Naval power is parked off Venezuela’s coast.
“A classified Justice Department brief authorizing strikes on drug-smuggling boats describes fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat, according to a House member and another person familiar with the memo,” a Friday Wall Street Journal report says.
It cites a lengthy document by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which lays out the legal justification of the Trump administration for continuing military operations in the southern Caribbean with an eye on Venezuela.
Revelation of the classified memo comes less than 12 hours after US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth late in the day Thursday announced a new major US military campaign, dubbed “Operation Southern Spear,” ordered by President Trump.
“Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” the Pentagon chief described. He added “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood – and we will protect it.”
But the chemical weapons angle is unlikely to be very convincing to Congressional leaders, much less the American public:
The main argument in the memo is that President Trump’s designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorists makes them legitimate military targets, asserting that the groups are smuggling drugs to fund deadly and destabilizing actions against the U.S. and its allies, according to lawmakers and others who have read it.
So there are ‘terrorists’ who possess a substance classified as a ‘chemical weapon’. WSJ continues, “The mention of fentanyl is one of many points in the brief, which was drafted over the summer to justify the use of military force against drug traffickers. The legal case for military action doesn’t rest on concerns about chemical-weapons use.”
Still, it’s very questionable whether Venezuela is actually at all involved in the fentanyl trade, as the report notes further:
Venezuela, a base for one of the criminal groups designated as a terrorist organization, has long been a transit route for Colombian cocaine. There is no evidence it produces or traffics fentanyl, which is typically made in Mexico and smuggled over land, experts note.
“It is an incredible stretch,” said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama administrations and first Trump administration said of the memo’s warning about fentanyl.
Fentanyl as a “chemical weapon”…
The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has written that “Fentanyl depresses central nervous system (CNS) and respiratory function. Exposure to fentanyl may be fatal.” It has a potency at least 80 times that of morphine.
Going back several years, the single biggest sources of the world’s fentanyl trade have been consistently identified as China and Mexico. At this point it’s impossible to know, and hasn’t been disclosed, whether any of the some 20 boats blown up by US military action off Latin America since September have been loaded with fentanyl, or in what quantities.
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