If you read my articles regularly, you know I'm not a fan of "exclusives" from anonymous sources. Take Venezuela, a topic near and dear to me that I've been covering extensively for months. Every week, I have many people who reach out to me and say, "Why didn't you report on this? Everyone else is."
The truth is that there's a lot of stuff out there that the MSM — and even some more reliable news outlets — report on that never materializes. These stories either turn out to be wrong or taken out of context. And if you know anything about what's happening in the region, a lot of it is kind of easy to debunk without having any sort of "insider" knowledge if you read between the lines.
Until Marco Rubio himself slides into my DMs to drop a geopolitical exclusive, you're most likely not going to hear it from my mouth...or, well, fingers, unless I'm sure it's true.
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I mention all of that to say that some of what I'm going to share here is a "CNN exclusive" from "sources familiar with the matter," so take it with a grain of Caribbean Sea salt. Given how weak the UK has become on pretty much everything else, the claim wouldn't surprise me, but still treat it like a rumor. Even Gustavo Petro, the coked-up clown of Colombia and actual head of state, has bought into it and is using it for his moral grandstanding — and, perhaps to shield his own narco ties — and we don't want to be like him.
According to CNN, the UK "is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal."
Why? Apparently, it doesn't like stopping the flow of narcotics and cartel activity into the United States and Europe via striking drug boats. Here's more from CNN's Natasha Bertrand:
For years, the U.K., which controls a number of territories in the Caribbean where it bases intelligence assets, has helped the U.S. locate vessels suspected of carrying drugs so that the U.S. Coast Guard could interdict them, the sources said. That meant the ships would be stopped, boarded, its crew detained, and drugs seized.
The intelligence was typically sent to Joint Interagency Task Force South, a task force stationed in Florida that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade.
But shortly after the U.S. began launching lethal strikes against the boats in September, however, the U.K. grew concerned that the US might use intelligence provided by the British to select targets. British officials believe the U.S. military strikes, which have killed 76 people, violate international law, the sources said. The intelligence pause began over a month ago, they said.
That's the UK's prerogative, I suppose — if this story is true — but the problem is that interdiction used during previous administrations didn't exactly work.
"The United States has long, for many, many years, established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boats," Rubio said back in early September during a press conference in Mexico City. "And we did that, and it doesn't work. Interdiction doesn't work because these drug cartels, what they do is they know they're gonna lose 2% of their cargo. They bake it into their economics. What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them...under President [Donald] Trump, those days are over."
But back to CNN. Once you get past the "exclusive" part of the article, there's a bunch of stuff written to make Trump look bad, so it starts out looking like "news" (maybe) with a side of agenda. As I said, Colombia's el presidente bought into it, at least. He posted the following on X (translated from Spanish) in response to the CNN story:
Issue the order to all levels of the public security forces' intelligence to suspend the sending of communications and other dealings with U.S. security agencies. Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists. The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.
One thing that makes me pause on it is that when I wrote about Portugal finding the narco-submarine last week, it said that the U.S. and the UK were involved with the operation. But it doesn't matter if the story is true or not. Either way, the UK's weakness or CNN's willingness to print anonymous gossip just helps the cartels.
We can't afford for anyone in the Western world to go soft. The longer we treat these cartels like they're just your average street criminals, the worse they're going to become. From the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa Cartels in Mexico to Nicolás Maduro's Cartel de los Soles in Venezuela, these guys are terrorists. They may not wage war in the traditional sense, but they've been using irregular warfare for decades to destabilize our communities. They commit some of the most heinous and brutal crimes — crimes most people only associate with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. They just don't get the same coverage because, for far too long, Washington, D.C., has treated its own backyard like an afterthought. I'm just one small voice, but I refuse to do that.
As I wrote a few days ago, things are changing in Latin America. Across the region, people are fed up with crime and communism. They crave democracy and an economy that is functional for everyone, and they want to see an end to the organized crime that has taken over their communities and, in some cases, their governments.
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While Petro's out there mouthing off on social media and cozying up to his commie bros, his constituents are tired of his antics, and his own legislature is voting against his ideology. While Mexico is rising up in protest after the death of a popular mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum is doing everything she can to avoid criticizing the cartels that run her country. And don't even get me started on Maduro. Despite his state TV grandstanding, he's so scared and weak because he doesn't have many friends at home or abroad right now.
Update: I'm going to stop right here because as I'm wrapping this up, while Rubio didn't exactly hand me an actual exclusive, he did just do a press conference from Canada where he's attending G7 Foreign Ministers meetings, and a reporter actually asked him about this situation and the striking of drug boats. He said almost word for word for what I did, but I'll let him speak for himself.
"I don't think that the European Union gets to determine what international law is. And they certainly don't get to determine how the United States defends its national security," he said.
Here's more:
The United States is under attack from organized criminal narco-terrorists in our hemisphere and the President is responding in the defense of our country. I do find it interesting that all these countries want us to send and supply, for example, nuclear capable Tomahawk missiles to defend Europe, but when the United States positions aircraft carriers in our hemisphere where we live, somehow that's a problem.
So I would say that the United States is, and this President has made very clear, his job is to protect the United States from threats against the United States and that is what he's doing in this operation.
The reporter followed up by specifically asking about the report on the UK withholding intelligence. Here's Rubio response (emphasis mine):
The United States, there's reasons why we have those assets in the region and that is to collect intelligence and we're actioning on that. Obviously, I won't go any deeper when it comes to intelligence matters. I did see a CNN report yesterday. I'm not gonna go into great detail other than to say that it's a false story, it's a fake story.
And what's happening now is people with a business card that has a government email on it become sources because they don't know, they're not even in the know. So they either have an agenda or they want to make themselves important. And it's been a plague of story after story that's either inaccurate or misleading and that falls in the category of both, that story does. But again, going back. Look, this is a counter-drug operation. The President's ordered it in defense of our country. It continues, it's ongoing. It can stop tomorrow if they stop sending drug boats.
He continued:
The Maduro regime is a narco-terrorist regime, indicted in the southern district of the United States for narco-terrorism. But more importantly, they're also a transshipment organization that allows these groups to operate from their national territory. They allow drugs to be shipped. They openly cooperate with the shipping of these drugs towards the United States and Europe, by the way, so maybe [the Europeans] should be thanking us.
But the bottom line here is that the president is gonna defend the national interests and the national security of the United States, which is under threat by these, by these terrorist organizations.
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Rubio said the CNN story is false, and even if it wasn't, it doesn't matter. We're going to defend our natural interests, which includes eliminating terror threats from our own backyard. The days of the Western Hemisphere — both the good and bad— being a side plot are over under Trump and Rubio.
Here's the entire press conference if you want to watch it.
Friends don't let friends believe MSM stories that only quote anonymous sources. But I can only continue bringing you the truth with your help.
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