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'Media Really Took at Face Value What Trump Said About This Boat and Its Occupants': Janine Jackson ([link removed])



Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR's Alex Main about Trump's Venezuelan boat assault for the September 12, 2025, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

[link removed]


NYT: Trump Administration Says Boat Strike Is Start of Campaign Against Venezuelan Cartels

New York Times (9/3/25 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: The US military struck a small boat in the southern Caribbean September 2, killing 11 people. The next day, the New York Times told readers ([link removed]) , “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

As telling and concerning as that is, it seems it might've been generous in posing it as a question to be asked. In an online exchange, Vice President JD Vance declared ([link removed]) that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” And when someone pointed out that killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians, without any due process, is called a war crime, Vance replied, “I don't give a shit what you call it.”

It does matter what things are called, how they relate to the law as we understand it, and how such an act is responded to. We're joined now by Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research ([link removed]) . Welcome back ([link removed]) to CounterSpin, Alex Main.

Alex Main: Thank you, Janine. Great to be with you.
Politico: Vance defends strike on alleged drug boat: ‘Highest and best use of our military’

Politico (9/6/25 ([link removed]) )

JJ: Reporting on this strike is full of qualifiers. Politico says ([link removed]) it was “against an alleged drug vessel leaving Venezuela, which President Donald Trump said was aimed at the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua group, killing 11 suspected traffickers.” But as the story gets told and retold, qualifiers morph into facts, and it becomes a matter of how else should we kill narco terrorists, if not in international waters?

And you want to say, “Wait, wait, wait. No. We have to first properly understand the events themselves.” So before we get to the pretenses behind it, the uses sure to be made of it, what do we actually know about this strike attack on a boat, that killed 11 people last week?

AM: Yeah, excellent question, and one that still needs to be figured out. And I'm really glad you bring up the fact that from the outset, so much of the media really took at face value what the Trump administration said about this boat and its occupants and its origin, and didn't really seem to question this idea that they were all drug traffickers, that they might be associated with the Tren de Aragua ([link removed]) . And we can talk more about the Tren de Aragua, which is a very nebulous sort of organization indeed.
El Pitazo: CNN: Donald Trump evalúa ataques contra objetivos dentro de Venezuela

El Pitazo (9/6/25 ([link removed]) )

And there was no effort whatsoever made, at least initially ([link removed]) , to try to identify who the victims were, who were these 11 people that were shot in a small boat, that was clearly not a military boat of any kind. There was no indication that these individuals were armed, and all we know about them is what we see from aerial footage that was proudly posted ([link removed]) by President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—just shows this grainy footage of a small boat, with what looks like people inside, and then a big flash of light, and that suggests that the boat was blown up.

And that's really all we had. But, again, you immediately saw a lot of the media just go along with the narrative that was put out there by the Trump administration, and that itself is very problematic.

And to this day, I haven't seen, really, any sort of major media, certainly from the US, make any sort of effort to try to identify the victims. The most I've seen in that regard has been from local media ([link removed]) in Venezuela, where it seems that a small village, where there does seem to be drug trafficking, they had lost eight people from that village, and other people from neighboring villages. I mean, this sort of remains hearsay, but this is the most that I've really seen in terms of any kind of documentation. But I haven't really seen any journalists investigate this, in any depth. And that doesn't seem to be a priority.

JJ: Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the priority, because it's already being thrown into a number of narratives that were preexisting. So let's put it in some context: If we call it a murder, that's one thing. If we call it a military attack, well, those terms are going to affect your understanding. But we do know that it exists in a context of US bullying, essentially, of Venezuela and of President Maduro. I mean, that's the way it's going to be sold.
PBS: WATCH: Patel declines to offer legal justification for Trump administration strikes on Venezuelan boats

AP (via PBS, 9/16/25 ([link removed]) )

AM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the two pieces of this, really. On the one hand, you have what appears to be the next stage of an ongoing drug war—a forever war, really, that the Trump administration has wholeheartedly subscribed to, as have prior administrations for decades now. But where, to date at least, we hadn't seen such an overt, extrajudicial killing that had taken place by the US military, and publicly, proudly displayed, as it has been—without, as you mentioned, any sort of legal justification to this date.

And you do have a number of members of Congress that have been asking ([link removed]) the Trump administration to explain what the legal grounds are for blowing up these people that didn't seem to pose any kind of threat to the United States. They were in the south Caribbean, to begin with, hundreds of miles away from the coast of the US, and seemingly headed for the island of Trinidad, which is one of the islands of the Caribbean that's really the furthest from the coast of the United States. So how could it be plausibly depicted as some kind of a threat? But the administration just hasn't bothered providing a justification. And, of course, no Republicans, with the notable exception of Sen. Rand Paul ([link removed]) , have tried to take the administration to task about that.

JJ: I'm going to bring us back to this expansion of "war on terror" in a second. But in your statement ([link removed]) from CEPR, you referred to a massacre in Honduras that had resonance here that seemed to be a kind of referent. Can you just tell us a little bit about that, and why it made sense for you to connect these things?
CEPR: CEPR Condemns Trump Administration Military Strike on Boat in Southern Caribbean

CEPR (9/5/25 ([link removed]) )

AM: Absolutely. So Honduras is one of the countries that we've followed closely for many years at CEPR, where we monitor the impact of US policy throughout Latin America. And I think it's fair to say that Honduras is one of the countries where the US has had perhaps the most negative impact, along with Venezuela, along with Cuba and a few others. But over the past 15 years or so, certainly with the coup in 2009 ([link removed]) that was really enabled by the US, where the US allowed that coup, an overt military coup against the democratically elected leader, to be successful.

And then, following that, you really had many years of what a lot of Hondurans refer to as a “narco dictatorship,” enormous repression that was going on, an extreme militarization of the country, under the right-wing authoritarian governments that remained in place, really thanks to fraudulent elections, particularly in 2017 ([link removed]) , that ended up being endorsed by successive US administrations.
Extra!: ‘There’s Way Too Much of a History of Lying’

CounterSpin (Extra!, 7/12 ([link removed]) )

But in 2012, you had collaboration, if you want to call it that, a joint operation ([link removed]) involving heavily militarized US DEA agents and a heavily militarized, supposedly elite Honduran police force. And together they carried out an operation in a remote part of Honduras with an Afro-Indigenous population, and had what they called a successful operation in which they killed some drug traffickers that had attacked them during the operation. That's the narrative that they pushed out after the operation took place back in 2012.

But then locals, first of all, were reporting very different things, from what they'd seen on the ground during the operation. And I, along with colleagues who work on Honduras, Annie Bird, Karen Spring, we visited the village of Ahuas, and we interviewed many, many people, and we interviewed also local security officials, and put together a very different picture ([link removed]) of what had happened.

And that involved, first of all, an operation that was led, directed, by the DEA, whereas the DEA had always presented it as a Honduran operation, where they were playing a secondary role. That, first of all. And then, secondly, it became increasingly clear that they had not been attacked in any way, that they shot innocent bystanders, really, that were on a boat that had nothing to do with drug trafficking, that happened to be on the river at that time, and that was perceived as a threat, and then was shot up.

And then it turned out afterwards, and there was a subsequent inspector general review ([link removed] described in today's report,passenger boat at any time.) from both Department of State and Department of Justice inspector generals, which confirmed that the DEA had actually given orders to fire on this boat, where four innocent villagers were killed, others badly injured, a really huge tragedy in this small community in a remote part of Honduras.
NYT: Boat Suspected of Smuggling Drugs Is Said to Have Turned Before U.S. Attacked It

New York Times (9/10/25 ([link removed]) )

And a completely false narrative had been sold by the DEA to the media, to the US Congress. They lied outright about what happened. And, again, this inspector general review—which took years to come out, thanks to all the stonewalling that came from the DEA and the State Department during those years—well, that did finally confirm what we heard from people on the ground during our investigation, which was that the DEA was entirely responsible for this mission, and ultimately responsible for the deaths of these innocent people, who were shot up with a machine gun, essentially.

And we're seeing such big parallels now. In fact, it's just been revealed that the video, that was heavily edited and was then posted by President Trump and by Secretary Rubio, that editing, what it didn't show—according to sources ([link removed]) , apparently within the military, that spoke to the New York Times—is that the boat was shot at repeatedly. The boat had turned around, and headed in the other direction. So if it wasn't bad enough that this boat had been shot up without any clear justification, it's becoming clear that the boat had actually turned away and was heading in the opposite direction, thereby not posing, really, any kind of threat whatsoever, if ever it had posed a threat.

JJ: I maintain that when reporters took the expression “war on terror” out of quotation marks, something important was lost. We have laws against drug trafficking, against drug dealing, and even against drug use, and they just don't include killing people without judge or jury. That's why we call them "laws."

This action, along with other actions we could talk about, seems to be a further step in this ever fungible rationale. Now we're going to call crime, or drug crime, “terrorism,” and make it subject to the actions that unleashes. This seems to be, just in terms of public information and public understanding, a further creep of this very nebulous and concerning framework.
Extra!: Remote-Controlled Reporting on Remote-Controlled War

Extra! (10/11 ([link removed]) )

AM: Absolutely. And, of course, what we saw last Tuesday, with these extrajudicial killings, is very reminiscent of what we've been seeing in the Middle East for a while, with the drone warfare ([link removed]) —if you want to call it that; I would say more drone assassinations—that have been carried out.

This became a very big thing ([link removed]) during the Obama administration in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia; people were targeted with no sort of due process ([link removed]) . Civilians were killed in the process, all in the name of the "war on terror" and under the AUMF ([link removed]) , the Authorization of Use of Military Force, from 2001 after 9/11, all part of this big "war on terror."

And now we're seeing a similar sort of incident taking place in the Caribbean, but there isn't even an AUMF in this case. Not that it was justified in the Middle East, but they attempted a legal justification; in this case, there is no attempt.

The only thing that we've seen from the Trump administration so far is a letter to Congress ([link removed]) , basically affirming that this fell within Article Two powers of the president to defend the country against imminent attack. As if this little boat in the south of the Caribbean, hundreds of miles from the US—they couldn't even reach the shore of the US—was somehow an imminent threat to the US.
France 24: US targets Venezuela over 'Soles' cartel. Does it exist?

France 24 (8/29/25 ([link removed]) )

And then things started to really heat up, I would say, when, at the end of July, the Department of the Treasury announced ([link removed]) that the Cartel de los Soles is also a specially designated global terrorist organization.

Now, the Cartel de los Soles is sort of nonexistent in terms of the global drug trade. There's no indication that they're really involved in any sort of major drug trafficking. There's no actual indication that they really exist ([link removed]) .

What you have is, basically, this accusation that senior military officials in the Venezuelan government have been involved in drug trafficking, much as you see in many countries, really around Latin America and even other parts of the world, corrupt officials that are paid off by drug traffickers to allow them to ship their drugs through the country, outside of the country, to turn a blind eye to drug-trafficking activities. That's really the extent of it.

And based on that, the Trump administration has created this monster. They depict the Cartel de los Soles as a major transnational cartel, with Maduro at the top, pulling the strings. There's absolutely zero evidence of this.

And then, on top of that, they have increased the bounty ([link removed]) on Maduro's head, information leading to his arrest, to $50 million. And then, of course, the beginning of August, there was this announcement ([link removed]) of a major deployment of US military assets in the south Caribbean to deal with the “narco-terrorist threat.”

So they've been setting the stage for this boat attack for a while. Apparently they want to do more of this. That's certainly what Rubio has said, and Trump has said: There's more where this came from.

JJ: And all the murk around it, and disinformation and misinformation and lack of information—all of that plays a role, particularly as media allow it to slip and slide: “accused of being," "actually are.” And then, of course, well, are there drug dealers in countries whose regimes the US doesn't want to overthrow? Like, why are we looking for the keys under the lamppost? There are a whole lot of questions that are not being asked, big-picture questions about this, that would tie this—“extrajudicial” is a very generous word—killing of people to just the simple desire of this administration to have a new president of Venezuela. And yet we as readers, as news consumers, we’re supposed to see these as separate news events.
FAIR: U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move

FAIR.org (4/18/22 ([link removed]) )

AM: That's right. I mean, this is just the latest chapter in the many, many attempts to bring about regime change in Venezuela from the US. It goes all the way back to at least 2002, when the George W. Bush administration supported a coup ([link removed]) against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez, at the time, that was overturned, essentially thanks to a popular rebellion against the military coup ([link removed]) .

But ever since then, there have been all sorts of attempts. And of course the last big one was in 2019, when then Senator Marco Rubio worked with National Security Advisor John Bolton ([link removed]) to come up with this plan to support a parallel government ([link removed]) in Venezuela, that of Juan Guaido ([link removed]) , from the hardline opposition in Venezuela, to declare him president with very little legal basis, if any, and then to overtly push for a coup to take place.

And it went quite far. And at the time, it looked like they might actually be successful in getting at least a part of the Venezuelan military to rebel against the government.

Had that happened, I think we would've seen a real bloodbath, and probably a prolonged civil conflict in Venezuela, certainly in no one's interest, no matter what you think of Maduro, certainly not in the interest of the people of Venezuela, and not in the interests of the US or any other country in the region that would suffer the consequences of a major war in Venezuela.

But that's what happened. And the media went along ([link removed]) with the narrative back then as well. And it's been a recurrent problem on Venezuela. Facts don't seem to really matter. For a long time, Venezuela was depicted as a dictatorship, despite the fact that you had transparent, competitive elections ([link removed]) there. That was not the case of the last election ([link removed]) , in 2024, and we can talk about that.
CounterSpin: "‘These Are Sanctions Directly Aimed at the Civilian Population’

CounterSpin (4/27/18 ([link removed]) )

But the circumstances, as well, are of a country that's been under siege by the US, through extremely potent sanctions ([link removed]) that have been in place, well, for a very long time. But the particularly potent sanctions came into place under Trump in 2017, during the first administration, again, pushed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio and others, and then really hardened during this last attempt of regime change in 2019, to the point that it really devastated the economy of Venezuela, contributed to massive outmigration of millions of Venezuelans, including many, many to the US, due to the real economic collapse of that country. The economy was in bad shape to begin with. But there's no doubt at all that the US sanctions really made the situation exponentially worse. Basically the worst depression that we've ever seen in the region's history in a country that's not at war.

And so that's the reality of what's happened in Venezuela, and it's one that's really not described, at least not correctly, in the media.

And we see the crisis in Venezuela. There is an ongoing economic crisis, there's a political crisis, and the US's role in that is generally never really talked about by the media. Only occasionally on the margins, maybe at the end of the article, they might mention that there are these very hard-hitting sanctions that have destroyed the economy. Though they're unlikely to mention ([link removed]) that they've destroyed the economy.

JJ: Right. And this strike is not going to necessarily play the role that we might hope, in terms of complicating that understanding of the US role in Venezuela.

Just finally, we understand we're in medias res. It's September 11; we're just learning what we can learn. But what would you be looking for reporters, in terms of basic questions, in terms of bigger questions? What would you hope from US journalism at this point?
Alex Main

Alex Main: "I would've hoped by now that more US journalists would report on the fact that the US is at the brink of war with Venezuela."

AM: I would've hoped by now that more US journalists would report on the fact that the US is at the brink of war with Venezuela, basically through enormous provocation, amassing these warships ([link removed]) close to the Venezuelan coast.

More recently, they've brought in some F-35 stealth fighters that have never been used for counter-narcotics operations, that have been used for major military operations. They're now based in Puerto Rico. ([link removed])

And, of course, this strike against the boat, with all the rhetoric accompanying it, the rhetoric directed at Maduro and his so-called “cartel," certainly is pushing things in the direction of a direct conflict with Venezuela. And there is an anticipation among many, certainly in Venezuela, that the US is soon going to be carrying out strikes in Venezuela. They're now well-equipped to do that, with these fighters based in Puerto Rico.

On the Venezuelan side, they're preparing, basically, for a US invasion. They've militarized the entire coast at this point. They are mobilizing the militias.

And around the region, there are real fears that this is going to blow up. And not necessarily because of an existing plan to strike Venezuela, although many think that there is a plan. But simply because when you deal with this kind of brinkmanship, anything can happen.

Last week, Venezuela, as a response to the strike on the boat that came from Venezuela, with presumably Venezuelan citizens on it, did a flyover with a couple of F-16s over some US Navy ships. And this was, of course, very poorly received by the Trump administration. And the Department of Defense put out a very strong statement ([link removed]) , very threatening towards Maduro, referring to the country's government as a “cartel.”

And, again, we're in the context of this “war on cartels,” this “war on narco-terrorists,” where, according to the Trump administration, the narco-terrorists are running Venezuela today. So, obviously, this creates real fear that things could escalate even more, and that there could be some sort of incident that sets off a direct military conflict with Venezuela. And that would have absolutely terrible consequences for the region, and ultimately for the US as well.

JJ: We've been speaking with Alex Main. He's director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and you can follow their work online at CEPR.net ([link removed]) . Alex Main, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thank you.


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