Free Republic

Once again, the United States is using lethal force off its shores. In recent weeks, American drones and warships have sunk or disabled a string of speedboats in international waters off Venezuela. Washington says the vessels belonged to narcoterrorist networks tied to the Maduro regime and Tren de Aragua and that they were carrying cocaine and fentanyl precursors bound for the United States. At least 83 alleged traffickers and others are dead. Caracas calls this extrajudicial murder. Human-rights groups call it assassination. Cable-news panels and UN press releases are already rehearsing the same ritual question: Is this legal under international...

Hopkinton Police announced on Saturday that it responded to a one-car motor vehicle accident in the area of 42 Spring Street (Route 138), Hope Valley. When Officers arrived on the scene, they discovered that a pedestrian walking his dogs had been struck by the vehicle. The woman charged in the incident had previously been arrested 100 times. Police said in a statement, “At this time, it is believed that the motor vehicle, driven by 41-year-old Shannon N. Godbout of 332 Canonchet Road, Apt. 203 was traveling eastbound on Spring Street when she left her lane and struck several objects, including...

Jackie Norris, the chairwoman of the Des Moines Public School Board who once served as chief of staff to Michelle Obama, has pulled out of the race for Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat as recommended by her Republican opponent, Rep. Ashley Hinson. Hinson stressed earlier this month that Norris, a champion of DEI, had "lost all shreds of credibility" over the role she played in the hiring of the Des Moines district's former superintendent, a criminal illegal alien who was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Sept 26. Ian Andre Roberts, a native of Guyana, has a lengthy...

Belgium? Really? Of all the places in the world you would not expect to be a cesspool of nearly open corruption, Belgium pretty much tops the list. But there it is. Belgium is basically a narco-state, a top Antwerp judge has warned.https://t.co/zH0fSm2mfR— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) October 27, 2025Like so many things that sound insane when you say them, the claim that Belgium is now more akin to Mexico than a land of peace and chocolates is easy to dismiss as the fever dream of a cranky conspiracy theorist than a reflection of reality. But, according to an Antwerp judge, who published...

President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors. Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US –...

GÜIRIA, Venezuela (AP) — One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver. The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs. President Donald Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged the craft were being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members bound...

There are dangerous drug wars south of the U.S. border. American presidents ceremoniously appoint powerful drug czars to wage war on illicit drugs. President Trump and our secretary of war Pete Hegseth are attacking drug-carrying vessels off the coast of Venezuela. But the crucial question is, why are Americans such a receptive, exploding market for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cannabis?A major cause of America’s drug abuse epidemic is the relentless erosion of our American character structure. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have found our enemy in the war on drugs, and it is US.” The affliction is internal to America,...

In a speech before the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, referencing the war against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill stated, “What is our policy? … To wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime.” The Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz once observed that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” Various political and moral interpretations exist regarding what constitutes a “just war.” That usually depends on one’s point of view. As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. What if there were a country...

"When we declare war is supposed to be done by Congress. It's not supposed to be done willy nilly," Paul addedRepublican Sen. Rand Paul again slammed President Donald Trump over the administration's continued strikes against alleged drug boats off Venezuela, reiterating that any armed conflict should be approved by Congress. Speaking with British journalist Piers Morgan, Paul rejected the administration's claim that the strikes were targeting smugglers carrying different drugs, including fentanyl. "There is no fentanyl made in Venezuela. Not just a little bit, there's none being made. These are outboard boats that, in order for them to get to...

CBS reports an eighth operation in which the US military killed at least two civilians The U.S. military campaign against vessels crewed by civilians allegedly involved in drug trafficking continued Tuesday with a new extrajudicial attack, the eighth reported since September. The novelty this time is that the latest strike took place off the Colombian coast, in the Pacific Ocean, and not, as in previous cases, in the Caribbean Sea. The news was reported Wednesday by CBS, citing two anonymous official sources. Confirmation came shortly thereafter from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that the U.S. military had killed two...

Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no U.S. forces were harmed in the operation. The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics - headed to America to poison our people. Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route. These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!

Chinese gangs are taking advantage of loose marijuana rules in Oklahoma to grow and transport marijuana to other states for sale on the black market, authorities say. Oklahoma narcotics officials told Congress $153 billion worth of marijuana is unaccounted for and likely leaving the state for the black market in other states. As many as 85 percent of licensed grow sites have connections with Chinese owners or operators, according to Mark Woodward, information officer with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. Since 2022, the state has shut down more than 6,000 illegal growing operations. Most U.S. states have made marijuana legally...

President Donald Trump confirmed that the U.S. military carried out another strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug vessel, following his recent announcement that we would wage war against narco-terrorists "poisoning" our citizens.In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump said that, "On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility.""Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage en route to poison Americans," he added. READ MORE:Trump Administration Just Put a Massive...

A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutor offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government. The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other leftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.” The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written...

MAGNA, Utah — Two men have been arrested after allegedly leaving an incendiary device underneath a KSTU News (Fox 13 in Salt Lake City) vehicle and then forcing an evacuation of a Magna neighborhood when the FBI served an overnight warrant on their home. The men, Adeeb Nasir, 58, and Adil Justice Ahmed Nasir, 31, were booked into jail and face multiple charges, including Threat of Terrorism, Possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Possessing Explosive Devices. The device underneath the KSTU vehicle was originally located on Friday and determined to be real. According to officials, the device had been lit...

The U.S. Coast Guard achieved a milestone with the offload of a record 76,140 pounds of illicit narcotics, valued at $473 million, at Port Everglades on Monday. This marks the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history. Coast Guard Cutter Hamilton’s crew offloaded approximately 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana, preventing an estimated 23 million potential lethal doses from reaching the United States.

Now that Republicans have narrow control of the House of Representatives, the GOP is investigating the Biden administration with gusto. Still, Republicans seem not to have noticed one major foreign policy scandal that's hiding in plain sight. As I recently reported , the rising scandal surrounding retired FBI senior official Charles McGonigal is perhaps the worst in the bureau’s history. Multiple sources have told me that McGonigal, while still serving with the FBI as head of counterintelligence in New York, shook down Balkan business people, most of them Albanian, in an audacious political corruption scheme worth many millions of dollars....

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is off his rocker. This weekend residents of Los Angeles waited with bated breath to hear the State of the City Speech from the mayor. Most Angelenos looked forward to seeing the Mayor once again since it had been while: in the wake of a sex scandal he had all but permanently relocated to the Hillary Clinton campaign bus for the last year and a half. Most residents already knew the State of the City: the City of Angels had become a much harder, more violent place what with the recent murder of Jamiel Shaw...

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The U.S. military is stepping up operations in the Gulf of Guinea to enhance security in this strategic and resource-rich region, the commander of U.S. European Command's naval surface combatant warships told the Pentagon Channel. U.S. military engagement along southwestern Africa's Atlantic coast has increased exponentially, Capt. Tom Rowden, commander of Task Force 65, said during a Pentagon interview last week. It's increased from almost no activity in 2004 to 130 "ship days" in 2005 to even more planned ship days this year, he said. The goal is to build long-term relationships that promote greater security and...

This means a major terrorist force was in the final stages of preparation for a catastrophic attack in Toronto. They were thwarted by two flukes, not by our security services. The article “Did we just dodge 9/11 2.0?” responded to revelations appearing in a July 27, 2018 CBC News report. Below is the sentence from that report describing the haul taken from the Danforth shooter’s brother’s home: “Durham Region Police later obtained a search warrant and found 33 firearms, ammunition and more than 40 kilograms of the potentially lethal drug carfentanil.”