Is Any Due Process Needed to Send Immigrants to Lifelong Prison in El Salvador? Trump Continues the Long-Standing Bipartisan Policy of Bombing Yemen
The Trump administration is sending mass numbers of Venezuelan migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador, raising constitutional questions about due process: will Trump repeat Bush's Guantánamo abuses? Then: Trump continues the bipartisan tradition of bombing Yemen.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of mass deportations of those who entered the United States illegally.
to their country of origin but that is not what the Trump administration is now doing in many of these cases they just sent 236 people to El Salvador none of whom is from that country or has anything to do with that country and they did not just send them to El Salvador but sent them to one of the world's worst and most oppressive prisons ones that the El Salvadorans say will likely mean they never leave in other words life in one of the most oppressive prison systems on the planet With no due process at all.
And all of this was done without any due process, meaning Trump officials claim that these people are part of a violent Venezuelan drug gang, but offering no evidence to anyone and thus not allowing these people to contest the accusations before throwing them into a black hole for life.
Something very similar happened with the Bush administration.
They threw people into Guantanamo based on allegations that they were terrorists and assurances that they were terrorists.
In fact, they told us these people weren't just terrorists, but were, quote, the worst of the worst.
Only for the U.S. government itself to end up admitting that many of these people who were put in Guantanamo for years, in fact, were innocent, had no relationship to terrorism at all.
In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that even Guantanamo detainees have the right to contest accusations against them in a federal court.
Now, with these Trump deportations, a federal court already ordered that nobody be deported to El Salvador without a hearing, even ordering that any planes in the air on their way to El Salvador come back.
But the Trump Justice Department argued that the judge lacked any authority to issue such an order and thus ignored it.
All of this leads to the question of whether people can be sent to prison in a foreign country without any due process at all, even if they did enter the country illegally, and whether courts have any role to play in adjudicating who is actually guilty of being a member of a drug gang or a violent gang and thus deserving of that very extreme punishment.
Then the United States government has been actively bombing Yemen for more than a decade.
President Obama worked with Saudi Arabia to wage a full-scale war there against the Houthis.
President Trump's first term saw U.S. bombing in Yemen.
President Biden aggressively and continuously bombed the Houthis in Yemen throughout all of 2024.
And now President Trump, in his second term, just ordered a significant bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which his national security advisor says will be a, quote, sustained bombing campaign.
All of this was done without any congressional approval, let alone any declaration of war.
As friend of the show Michael Tracy put it when this new bombing campaign in Yemen was announced, quote, you will seldom lose money betting on bipartisan continuity in U.S. foreign policy.
We will examine whether this endless bombing of Yemen ever worked previously, what the motives for bombing the Houthis are now, and what the implications are for this continuity in long-standing bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.
In the Middle East, it's especially important given that President Trump implied or outright threatened that the United States would soon strike Iran if their support for the Houthis continued.
Before we get to all that, a few program notes.
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Some of you know the history that I have in journalism, the reason why I went into journalism.
Many of you probably don't.
But just to remind those who know and to tell those who don't.
I was practicing law, constitutional law, in the late 1990s and then into the early 2000s in New York, and I decided that I was going to stop practicing law and become a journalist, start writing about politics, principally in reaction to what I had perceived to be the grave assault on civil liberties,
basic constitutional rights, carried out by the Bush administration, by the Bush-Cheney administration.
In the name of the war on terror.
There were a lot of components to what I thought were the attacks on free speech, but one of the most significant, one of the most egregious, was that the president, very broadly under Article II, claimed the right to exercise virtually unlimited power,
that no court and no one in Congress could limit what he did in his prosecution of the war on terror.
He could ignore congressional statutes, as the Bush administration did when it came to spying on Americans.
And not even courts can issue orders that constrain him in any way.
Essentially, the president has full, untrammeled right to carry out whatever he decides is necessary as part of the war on terror.
And one of the specific steps that the Bush-Cheney administration did, in fact, carry out beyond spying on Americans with no warrant that I found very alarming was Creating a prison camp off of what they thought was American soil in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in Guantanamo,
part of Cuba, to create a prison where people were thrown into basically black holes simply because they were accused by the president or the administration of being terrorists but never actually needing to prove the truth of those accusations.
These people were imprisoned oftentimes for years based solely on the say-so.
Of the administration, they had no opportunity to have lawyers.
They had no opportunity to know what the accusations against them were.
They had no opportunity to contest the charges and accusations that were lodged against them.
And the argument that the Bush administration and its defenders would make when people like me would stand up and say, how do you just throw people into a black hole for eternity without at least giving them an opportunity to show that they did nothing wrong or to contest the...
Accusations that you're making against them, the Bush administration's argument was, oh, don't worry.
Don't worry.
All the people we're putting in Guantanamo are terrorists.
Trust us.
We've labeled them terrorists.
And they're not just terrorists, but these are the worst of the worst terrorists in order to convince everybody not to care about what happened to them, to even be happy about the fact that they were being imprisoned for life with no due process of any kind.
And it was only in 2008 when the Supreme Court said under the Constitution, everybody under the power of the U.S. government has the right to habeas corpus, which is a right guaranteed by the Constitution basically to go into a court and say that you're being wrongfully detained.
And once that happened, it turns out, and even the U.S. government admitted, that not a few people, but many of the people that were detained in Guantanamo We're actually guilty of nothing.
We're innocent.
We're unjustly accused.
Never had anything to do with any terrorist organization.
Sometimes people in their community would tattle on them because they had some grudge and the U.S. military would then pick them up based on these gossipy accusations.
Many times it was mistaken identity.
And again, that's not just me saying that.
That is the U.S. government admitting it.
And that's why there had been...
1,000 people in Guantanamo, and now, 25 years later, there's fewer than 40 because the U.S. government ended up releasing them all, obviously because they believed they were not a threat and admitted that many of them were never a threat,
which is always what will happen if you put power in the hands of any human to censor people, to punish people, to imprison people.
They're often going to get it wrong.
Sometimes, innocently, they have a case of mistaken identity.
They think that the person they're picking up in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Somalia is somebody else that their intelligence tells them is a terrorist, and it turns out they just got the wrong person.
Other times, their intelligence is wrong.
The people that they heard or were told were terrorists or part of a terrorist organization turns out not to have been part of that at all.
And so, had the Supreme Court not ruled, That Guantanamo detainees had the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court and see the evidence against them.
Many of these innocent people would have been held for far more years than they were actually already held in Guantanamo.
There were people that were held there for 10 or 15 years of their life that the U.S. government now acknowledges never had any involvement in a terrorist organization.
And so, to me, the lesson from that And if you go to law school, you study the Constitution, you read the Bill of Rights, due process is central to everything.
The idea that the government cannot punish people without giving them an opportunity for some process to know what the accusations are against them and to disprove them or contest them.
And that was true, said the Supreme Court, even of non-citizens in Guantanamo, because the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo was essentially Under U.S. sovereignty and that anybody under U.S. sovereignty has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights.
It is a document that restricts what the U.S. government can do to anybody.
This is what we went over in the case of Mahmoud Khalil and the general effort to deport green card holders or visa holders from the United States based on their speech.
They have the right to free speech.
They have the right to invoke.
The right of free protest, even though they're not U.S. citizens.
This is 150 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
But it's also true of people who aren't visa holders at all, that don't have any visa, that don't have any green card, such as Guantanamo detainees.
Now, it is true that President Trump campaigned on a promise to initiate a program of mass deportations against people who entered the United States illegally.
Who crossed the border with no approval of the U.S. government, who have no visa, who have no green card, no legal right to be in the United States.
And usually what deportation means is that you take the person who's in your country illegally and you just send them back to the country of origin, whatever country of which they're a citizen.
And in that case, the stakes aren't that high.
I mean, it is for some people who have been in the United States for a long time, but in general, The reason the public ratified that is because people believe that if you enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government has the right to take you and send you back to your country.
You don't go back to prison, you just go back to your country.
What the Trump administration is now doing is much, much different than the way deportation is carried out.
Here from CNN on February 4th, 2025, El Salvador offers to house violent U.S. criminals and deportees of any nationality in an unprecedented deal.
The president of El Salvador has become a kind of darling of the international populist right.
There's a lot of admiration for the way in which he eliminated violent crime by just rounding up.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people and putting them into some of the most repressive prisons.
Again, rounding them up without much due process.
There's obviously a lot of people in those prisons who are violent gang members who deserve to be locked up, and there's people who don't deserve to be locked up, which is what happens when you put people in prison without due process.
And these prisons are designed to keep people forever.
They are about the worst place you could want to be.
Anywhere in the world.
There's a maximum security prison in El Salvador that has been built for gang members who they call terrorists.
That's about the worst place you can want to be.
But the El Salvadoran president has been currying favor with the Trump administration and said, if you need a place to send illegal immigrants when you're deporting them, we don't even care if they have anything to do with El Salvador, if they've ever been to El Salvador, if they're citizens of El Salvador.
Just send them back to us and we will put them into these very repressive prisons and just keep them there.
And that's what the United States government under the Trump administration is now doing.
Not deporting these people in the normal course of deportation.
They're not going back to their country of origin.
Even though in the case of, say, Venezuelans, the Venezuelan government has made very clear they will take back all their deported Illegal immigrants.
They've been taking them back.
We're not sending El Salvadorans back to El Salvador.
We're sending Venezuelans back to El Salvador or any other nationality that the U.S. government decides should be there.
In other words, we're throwing them into a black hole for life without any charges against them, without any due process.
We're knowingly imprisoning people for life with no due process.
Hear from the BBC.
U.S. deports hundreds of Venezuelans despite court order.
Quote, the case raises constitutional questions since under the U.S. system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge's ruling.
Venezuela criticized Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act, saying it, quote, unjustly criminalizes Venezuelan migration and, quote, evokes the darkest episodes in the history of humanity from slavery to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp.
Rights groups condemn Trump, accusing him of using a 227-year-old law to circumvent due process.
Amnesty International USA wrote on X that the deportations are, quote, yet another example of the Trump administration's racist targeting of Venezuelans based on sweeping claims of gang affiliation.
President Bukele, the El Salvadorian president, a Trump ally, wrote that the detainees were immediately transferred to El Salvador's notorious mega-jail, the terrorism confinement center.
The El Salvadoran president said they would be held there, quote, for a period of one year and that it could be renewable, which is what happens.
They send them there for a year, and then they basically automatically renew the imprisonment every year, and basically nobody ever leaves.
El Salvador's second jail is part of Bukele's efforts to crack down on the country's organized crime.
The newly built maximum security facility, which can hold up to 40,000 people, Now, everything that has been said about Trump in terms of his being a threat to democracy,
his being an autocrat, an authoritarian, his being someone who intends to ignore the law and replace it with his will, has been predicated on the notion that Trump will abide by No limits.
And I watched Trump during the first term repeatedly when courts invalidated his actions as unconstitutional, observed those court orders.
I watched as conservatives constantly ran into federal courts in order to invalidate Joe Biden's actions.
Conservatives went into federal court for rulings that his Pressure on social media companies to censor dissent was unconstitutional, that his cancellation of loan guarantees was unconstitutional.
And there was actually an instance where Democrats called on him to ignore a court order, and Biden effectively did that by proceeding with loan cancellations even after the courts said that doing so needed an act of Congress, that Biden didn't have the right to just do that through a regulatory order or executive order.
But in general, Trump...
has abided by judicial orders and he was asked last month whether there was any chance that he would ignore court orders or violate court orders and he said absolutely not I don't violate court orders if the court orders something then that becomes the law and you appeal it that's the solution not to violate it and he was very clear on that now the way in which the White House is trying to justify these deportations back to El Salvador And
simultaneously argue that people being sent there to be imprisoned for life have no right to any hearing, no right to any due process, neither in the United States nor in El Salvador, is because they have invoked, and here you see the White House order from today,
the White House decree on the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
Regarding the invasion of the United States by this Venezuelan gang that they're accusing these people of being a part of.
In other words, they're saying, just like in World War II, just like in World War I, just like in other declared wars, we've declared war.
We have declared war on these Venezuelan drug gangs.
And once the president is waging a war, and the argument is, we've been invaded.
Then, essentially, the courts and the Congress have no right, no role to play whatsoever in anything the president decides to do.
Similar to the Bush-Cheney argument that in the War on Terror, neither courts nor Congress could limit anything that they did.
This was the old law that was used in order during World War II to provide by FDR for the internment of Japanese Americans.
There you see the executive order from February of 1942 authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas.
In general, the internment of Japanese Americans, based on the suspicion that they were threats to our national security, because even though they were Americans, they were of Japanese descent, and therefore likely to be traitors to the United States and side with Japan, is considered one of the most shameful events in American history.
And it's very difficult to...
Argue that no matter what your view of the problem of illegal immigration is, and I think it's a huge problem, and I've talked about the reasons before, and it used to be a left-wing cause.
In fact, when I started doing journalism, it was a Bush-Cheney and Chamber of Commerce goal to create amnesty for people in the country, to open up the borders more because large corporations.
Whom Bush and Cheney served want a massive labor pool, not just of Americans who they have to pay a high wage to, but of people who come into the country illegally who they can pay much less.
And it was corporations and the party that served corporations, the Republican Party, that wanted massive migration into the United States.
And it was the left, people like Bernie Sanders and union leaders and— African-American groups, black groups that opposed this kind of immigration on the grounds that the people who would be harmed would be the American worker, would drive down wages, take away jobs from Americans,
primarily black people, Latinos, who have turned against immigration for that reason.
So, at least I'm not contesting, I don't think many people at this point are contesting, that the flow of millions of people into the United States with no controls or anything else, It poses massive societal problems.
But there is no circumstance under which that can be described as a war in the way that our prior wars that have been declared by Congress have been.
And that's one of the reasons why the judge stepped in here from Politico earlier today.
Federal judge halts deportations after Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act.
Quote, U.S. District Judge James Bosberg on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt efforts to remove those Venezuelan migrants until he has more time to consider whether Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.
The lawsuit brought on behalf of five named Venezuelan immigrants was provisionally turned into a class action, meaning it serves as a block on deportation of all non-citizens in the U.S. custody who are subject to Trump's proclamation invoking the rarely used law.
Two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from an airport in Harlingen, Texas.
During a break in a video hearing Boesberg conducted Saturday for the lawsuit filed by immigration rights advocates.
According to FlightTrack databases, one plane was bound for San Salvador, El Salvador, and the other for Honduras, and they were in the air nearing their destinations as Boesberg issued his order.
He said, the judge did, that there are serious legal questions about Trump's rationale for invoking the 1798 law used only three times in American history by labeling the criminal gang, the Trente de Aragua, the equivalent of a foreign government that
we're at war with now.
Now, anything that the president does that is significant, consequential, certainly things that he does that are readily used in history, Are subject to the question of whether the Constitution permits the President to do that.
That's why, even though it's actually not in the Constitution that judges review the constitutionality of the other branches' acts, the Supreme Court, 200 years ago, said that the only way a Constitution makes sense,
the only way a document makes sense if you impose limits on the President or the Congress, is you have somebody that That adjudicates the question of whether the President or the Congress have exceeded their limits in the Constitution.
If courts don't have the power to do that, if nobody has the power to do that, then the Constitution is worthless.
Which is why in Marbury v.
Madison, the Supreme Court, early in the 19th century, in the 1800s, said that the Supreme Court necessarily has that power to say what the law is.
Otherwise, there's no point in having the law.
And there's a lot of checks on the courts.
The only people who ever get to the court, the federal court, are people who are appointed by the president and then confirmed by the Senate.
So you already have those checks.
But then also the Congress can impeach judges for abusing their power, for acting corruptly with another check on the judiciary.
It's not as though there are no checks on the judiciary.
In fact, Congress has a lot of different ways to...
To rearrange the judiciary, to punish the judiciary.
But if you don't have a judiciary that determines whether or not the government is violating an individual's constitutional right, those constitutional rights are illusory.
They're meaningless.
And yet it does seem in this case that the Trump administration decided to ignore the court order, and they're basically admitting now that they did.
Although they're justifying why they were allowed to.
We hear from Axios on Sunday, quote, exclusive how the White House ignored a judge's orders to turn back deportation flights.
The Trump administration said it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two plane loads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply, two senior officials tell Axios.
The White House welcomes the fight, quote, this is headed to the Supreme Court and we're going to win a senior White House official.
Told Axios.
Now, it is possible they will win.
It's possible the Supreme Court will hold that this is a constitutionally valid invocation of this War Power, of this Alien Enemies Act, as applied to this case.
It's, I think, quite possible that they won't win.
And that's the reason the court ordered an injunction against deportations precisely to have time to determine Whether this power Donald Trump is claiming is being exercised constitutionally and legally.
And no matter how much of a supporter you are of Donald Trump, no matter how much you support the policy that he is enacting, and as I said, this isn't just about deportation of people in the country illegally.
If it were just about deportation and sending people back to their country of origin, the controversy would be far less intense.
These people who are being sent to El Salvador are being sent there purposefully because the El Salvadoran government has said that they will be immediately put into a maximum security prison where effectively they will never leave for life.
And just like in Guantanamo where the government said oh don't worry these people are terrorists and it turned out many of them weren't.
You shouldn't trust the U.S. government when it says, oh, don't worry, we've decided these people are members of a violent drug gang, because undoubtedly they're going to make mistakes and they're going to accuse people falsely of being part of that drug gang and they're going to spend life in prison in some of the worst conditions you can imagine because they were never given even a small opportunity to contest or to prove that the accusations are false or to force the government to prove that they're true.
That's not a way a country works, and it's just...
We accept accusations based on the unproven say-so or assertion of the government.
Here was Trump during the campaign talking about his immigration plan.
To expedite the removals of these savage gangs, and I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Think of that.
1798.
This was put there.
1798.
That's a long time ago, right?
To target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.
Who would have ever thought that a president or a future president would ever have to stand here and say such things?
Who would think that that's even possible to have to do?
So, as is true of most things that Trump is doing, He didn't hide the fact that he intended to do this.
I say most things that Trump is doing because bombing Yemen was something for which he criticized Joe Biden, and now he's doing that, and we'll get to that in a minute.
But Trump is very open about his plan to invoke this old law that has barely been used three times in American history when we were clearly at war.
And that's to his credit, but that doesn't mean that the courts are...
Powerless and play no role in determining whether the invocation of that law is actually permissible under the law itself and under the Constitution.
That's the way our democracy has worked basically from the beginning.
As presidents engage in action, Congress passes laws, and the courts determine whether those actions are constitutional and legal.
And it doesn't make the judiciary supreme because there are a lot of checks on the judiciary still.
Here is the president of El Salvador, President Bukele, who basically mocked our court system.
There was an article from the New York Post, the headline of which was, Federal Judge Orders Deportation Fights Carrying Alleged Venezuelan Gangbangers to Return to the U.S. Blocks Trump from Invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
And President Bukele said, oopsie, too late, with a laughing emoji.
And this was celebrated by Trump supporters, by conservatives, by Elon Musk.
In other words, on one side, you had a president of a foreign country.
And on the other side, you have our American court system.
And the people who claim that they are adherents of an America first worldview were applauding a foreign leader for mocking our courts, for basically saying, oh, look, we violated your Court order, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Now, I just want to emphasize one more time, because I know that there are people who are thinking that, well, look, these people entered the country illegally, and therefore we have the right to do to them whatever we want to do to them,
even throw them in life in prison forever with not even a whiff of due process.
Due process is for American citizens.
Going back to 1886, The Supreme Court had a case, the title of which was Yikwu versus Hopkins.
And a citizen of China that was in the United States, in California, had been prosecuted and convicted.
And he claimed that this conviction was obtained in violation of numerous protections and guarantees of the Bill of Rights.
And the Supreme Court had to determine Whether as a non-citizen on U.S. soil, the Bill of Rights applied to him.
And this is what the court said, quote, the rights of the petitioners as affected by the proceeding of which they complain are not less because they are aliens and subjects of the emperor of China.
They are not less.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.
It says, "Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
These provisions are universal in their application to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction."
Without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality.
And the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.
The question we have to consider and decide in these cases, therefore, are to be treated as involving the rights of every citizen of the United States equally with those of strangers and aliens who now invoke the jurisdiction of the court.
And the court invalidated this conviction on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment.
And if you go and look at the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, any of the amendments, the Fifth Amendment, the protections against self-incrimination, and the Six, and the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, you will see that none of them is confined solely to citizens.
They are restrictions on what the U.S. government can do to people, whether they're in the United States as citizens, as green card holders, as visa holders, or even illegally.
With no rights to be in the United States.
That has been the law, not because some recent liberal court invented it, but going back to the 19th century, more than 100 years ago, that has been the law, and it has never been disturbed.
Hear from the New York Times in 2008, the case I was telling you about, the U.S. Supreme Court backs Guantanamo's prisoners' rights to appeal.
Quote, foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in the United States court.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.
Quote, the laws and constitution are designed to survive and remain in force even in extraordinary times.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Supreme Court.
The reason it was a 5-4 decision is not because four of the judges ruled that Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they're noncitizens.
That was not their ruling.
All nine of the justices agreed that the detainee status as noncitizens does not preclude their right to invoke constitutional rights.
The argument of the Bush administration was We know there's 125 years of Supreme Court precedent that says that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody within our jurisdiction, but this is Guantanamo Bay.
We purposely built the prison outside of the United States to avoid this, and the United States is not the sovereign power of Cuba.
Cuba is the sovereign power of Cuba, so our conduct in Cuba is not subject.
To the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the orders of the court.
And that was what the court decided on and split on five to four.
They said five of the justices said, yes, Guantanamo Bay is part of U.S. soil.
In Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. government is sovereign.
And therefore, the detainees there have a right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court and argue that they're being unlawfully or unjustly detained.
One of the dissenters Of this decision was Antonin Scalia, who wrote a scathing dissent about what the majority said.
But even Scalia acknowledged what I just said, which is that noncitizens, and again, people in Guantanamo obviously aren't green card holders.
They're not in the United States on a student visa or a work visa.
They're taken to Guantanamo by the United States government.
And even Scalia, in his dissent, quoted a Supreme Court president to acknowledge the following, quote, The territorial jurisdiction that gave the judiciary power to act.
And his argument was because Guantanamo detainees are not within the jurisdiction of the United States territory, they can't invoke constitutional rights like habeas corpus.
But everybody agreed that anyone inside the United States has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights.
And even deportations traditionally have been done.
By going to a court and proving the person is in the United States illegally.
Because without that, the government could just make mistakes or act maliciously and deport people who are in the United States legally.
You have to have a check on any punishment, but particularly, as I said, it's less compelling when you're just sending the person back to their country of origin to throw them into the black hole in El Salvador, a country they have no connection to, never aren't from.
You cannot put human beings and life in prison without giving them some hearing, some kind of trial to prove that they really are members of violent drug gangs.
Certainly a lot of them are, but some of them aren't.
And again, I use the Analogy of what happened with Guantanamo.
Hear from the CBC, March of 2009.
Most Guantanamo detainees are innocent, says ex-Bush official.
Quote, many detainees locked up in the Guantanamo Bay were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces, unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday.
Quote, there are still innocent people there.
Republican Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Associated Press, quote, some have been there six or seven years.
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP had learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo were innocent,
but nonetheless held them in hopes they could provide information from a, quote,
It did not matter if the detainee were innocent.
Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance, Wilkerson wrote.
He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather, quote, sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate, quote, who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
Okay.
And that was very much the climate after 9-11, was who cares about legal niceties?
Who cares about constitutional limits?
Just pick them all up, kill them all, without the slightest regard for whether or not we really know that they're innocent or members of a terrorist organization.
And we were assured by the Bush government over and over and over That the only people in Guantanamo were terrorists.
They had done all the necessary vetting to determine that.
And that they weren't just terrorists, but they were the worst of the worst.
And it turns out that so much of that was untrue.
And the U.S. government has been admitting that over and over ever since.
Hear from NBC News in October of 2016.
U.S. releases Mohamedou Old Salih, the author of the Guantanamo Diary.
He had expressed loyalty to the group in the early 1990s,
but his lawyers say that that was when he fought with anti-communist Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
And his story was made into a film where Jodie Foster played his lawyer.
Guantanamo Diaries was a best-selling book about his time in Guantanamo.
And we interviewed Mohamedou back in 2021.
There you see it on the screen when System Update was in its sort of preliminary form.
I had met him in Amsterdam, where he is now living.
That is a case where the U.S. government acknowledged that he, in fact, had no ties to al-Qaeda and released him for that reason.
And that has been happening over and over for the last 25 years.
Now, one of the things that has been making me somewhat sick, going back to the first Trump administration, Is that the precise people who did what I'm describing in the Bush-Cheney administration, who pioneered these radical articles of executive two theories of power that the president is unlimited and can't be constrained by courts or Congress as part of the war on terror,
that he has the right to put people in prison with no due process, have now morphed into never-Trump people, and they're constantly criticizing Trump and even depicting him as some unique evil.
For doing exactly what they did and were advocating and implemented less than 20 years ago.
Here's Bill Kristol on X. So we're hitting a crisis point with the apparent evasion of court orders on deportation and immigration, plus shutting down agencies, canceling grants, and firing civil servants contrary to law, and claims from DOJ that Article II of the Constitution enables autocracy.
His fellow Bush-Chainy Miocan, David Frum, said much the same, quote, the president of El Salvador tweeted a sly joke about his part in a cross-border conspiracy to enable a U.S. president to defy a U.S. court order.
Incredible to imagine the MAGA storm if Zelensky had done such a thing.
Trump has been steering for some time toward open defiance of the courts and now we're arrived.
Among the many questions, sooner or later, El Salvador will present the United States with a bill for its cost of holding U.S. deportees in defiance of U.S. court orders.
Will the Republican Congress pay El Salvador to help Trump break the law?
Yeah.
Now, again, these are the people, David Frum and Bill Kristol and all these Bush-Cheney operatives who are now heroes of liberal punditry.
Who invented these theories they're now claiming are the hallmark of autocracy?
Here is one of the articles I wrote when I first started my blog in late 20, in 2005.
This was January of 2006, less than two months after I started writing.
And the title of the article was An Ideology of Lawlessness.
And it basically described how these theories of Article II executive power Had been invented out of whole cloth to say that presidents had the power to do whatever they want and nobody, not courts or Congress,
could scrutinize it, limit it in any way.
The presidents had the right to ignore congressional statutes.
So if Congress passes a law saying you're not allowed to eavesdrop on American citizens without getting a warrant first from the FISA court.
Bush and Cheney violated that.
They spied on Americans without getting those warrants.
And afterward, their argument was, well, we have the right to.
We were prosecuting the war on terror, and Congress has no power to limit anything we can do.
And same with the courts.
And the notorious memorandum that not just created that theory but implemented it was this one from John Yoo, who was an assistant attorney general within the Justice Department.
And the memo that he wrote in September...
Of 2001, September 25th, 2001, so maybe it was 11 days or two weeks after the 9 /11 attacks.
The title of it was "The President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations Against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them."
And this was the text of what he wrote.
Quote, In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the president's authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11th incidents.
Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response.
Those decisions under our Constitution are for the president alone to make.
Thank you.
I found that theory incredibly authoritarian and alarming back then.
I do not think the founders envisioned a country where a president in any circumstance could act.
With whatever powers he wants in violation of people's constitutional rights, and neither the courts nor the Congress could stop him, including in war, where it is true the president's powers are at their apex.
But the question here, of course, is the United States really at war in the sense that we've always understood that.
With Venezuelan drug gangs, these are criminal gangs.
They're not a government.
They're not a country.
We're not at war with Venezuelan drug gangs.
Or at least that's certainly a significant question for the courts to decide before Trump starts rounding people up and throwing them into holes in El Salvador.
It's not just never Trump, Bush, Cheney, operatives who are condemning what they've done.
There's a lot of Democrats and liberals acting as if violating a court order is the one red line that a president can't cross without destroying the entire constitutional order.
Even though, as I said, President Biden did that, arguably did that, I think did do that, when he ignored the court order on student loan cancellations.
And there are prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were urging Biden to ignore and violate the court order on the ground that it had no legitimacy.
Not to appeal it, but to just ignore it.
Here's what she said on CNN in April of 2023.
There has been thought, I believe, given to this.
Senator Ron Wyden has already issued statements, for example, advising what we should do in a situation like this, which I concur, which is that I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling.
I think that we, you know, the courts have the legitimacy and they rely on the legitimacy of their rulings.
And what they are currently doing is engaged in an unprecedented and dramatic erosion of the legitimacy of the courts.
It is the justices themselves through the deeply partisan and unfounded nature of these rulings that are undermining their own enforcement.
So you're saying the Biden administration should ignore this court, but what does that look like?
What does that actually mean?
The interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement.
And it is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling.
But is that...
I mean, that is exactly, to the letter, to the word, the argument of the Trump White House and the Trump administration for why they're allowed to ignore court orders that they regard as invalid or illegitimate, which is basically, look...
The only reason that we even have a Supreme Court that we allow a judiciary to have their orders honored is because their orders are legitimate.
But as soon as they start issuing illegitimate orders, said AOC and a lot of Democrats at the time, the president not only has the right, but basically the duty to ignore them because you don't go around abiding by illegitimate judicial rulings.
And that's exactly the argument of the Trump administration now, and was the Bush administration back then, too.
Which is, if we deem any act or any check from any other branch to be illegitimate, including courts, we're just going to ignore them.
Because court orders, there's no enforcement unless you agree to have it enforced.
And we shouldn't agree to be bound.
By court rulings that we consider illegitimate.
And that's exactly what the Trump administration is arguing in court right now, which is, yeah, we did not turn our plane around, even though you ordered us to do so.
In part, they're saying because it wasn't a written order, it was an oral order.
And having studied law, having practiced law, I can tell you that nobody ever thought that orders of the court were invalid until they were put in writing.
A lot of judges issue a lot of orders orally, and they're considered to be orders.
But the bigger argument of the Trump administration is the same one AOC marshalled there, which is, we'll obey court orders when the courts are acting within their legitimate power.
But since we don't think courts have the right to order us to turn planes around, then we ignore that.
And we're happy to, and we think we're right to.
I think it's incumbent upon Americans.
Remember when the Constitutional Convention was held and Benjamin Franklin came out and a woman on the street in Philadelphia asked him, what is it that you created there?
He said, a republic if you can keep it.
They understood that despite the fact that central to their whole design was checks and balances, never allowing one branch to get too powerful, never allowing one branch to operate, Without checks.
That they were counting on every branch always trying to increase their power at the expense of the other, and in this internal conflict there would be a balance.
But Congress has basically abdicated its role because they are controlled by Republicans, and even without that they're basically unwilling to exercise their power when it comes to things like their power to declare war.
The president Constantly involves the U.S. in military conflict without congressional authorization.
Congress does nothing about it.
And in many ways, the Supreme Court defers a great deal to executive power.
I do think that ignoring court orders is a line that shouldn't be crossed.
I thought that when Biden did it and when liberals were calling for it, and I certainly think that's true now.
And I also think that We can allow human power to be exercised even in a significant way as long as there's some check and limit on it.
And even when it comes to people who enter the country illegally, we should not be sending people to prison for life without any chance whatsoever for them to Contest the accusations against them for them to be able to demonstrate that what they're being accused of is an error.
Because it is certainly going to be the case that a lot of these are an error.
And since it's not just deportation, but now you're talking about imprisonment for life in El Salvador, a country they have no connection to, the need for due process is even greater.
And I understand that people want illegal immigrants out of the United States.
But they are still human beings, and we should not empower the U.S. government to be able to imprison people for life without having some sort of hearing in court to determine whether or not that power is being exercised justly.
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At this point, it's basically Virtually a tradition, like a rite of presidential passage, that every new administration starts bombing Yemen, the Houthis in Yemen.
There was bombing by the Bush administration in a limited way as part of the war on terror in Yemen.
President Obama escalated it significantly.
He escalated the bombing of alleged terror targets through drones and often attacked the Houthis in Yemen, but he also Worked with Saudi Arabia, which waged full all-out war against the Houthis in Yemen.
They regarded them as an arm or an extension of Iranian power, a proxy of Iran, and therefore Saudi Arabia and their competition with Iran.
Viewed the Houthis controlling Yemen as their enemy.
And the Obama administration worked with the Saudis, provided them with all kinds of weapons, provided them with intelligence about where to strike.
And the Saudis waged a barbaric war against...
The Houthis in Yemen, creating what all human rights groups recognize was the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
Yemen is the poorest country in the world.
And the war that Saudi Arabia, with the help of the Obama administration, brought to Yemen made all of those humanitarian challenges much, much worse, including mass starvation throughout Yemen.
In the first Trump presidency, there was bombing of The Houthis in Yemen.
And then when President Biden got into office, he said he was going to work with Saudi Arabia to stop the war in Yemen.
But after October 7th, when the Houthis began attacking ships in protest of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, Biden ordered continuous bombing.
There were months where there was bombing essentially every day.
Throughout 2024, just constant, never-ending bombing.
Biden ended up dropping 1,000 bombs on Yemen in 2024 alone, and European allies dropped a large number as well in conjunction with the United States.
So the United States has been bombing Yemen, bombing the Houthis for a long, long time.
And the Houthis are probably stronger than they've ever been.
The capabilities that they've developed, including being able to shoot long-range missiles into Israel, which they've done several times, the success they've had in attacking and seizing ships, is their strength is higher than ever,
despite all of that bombing, all of that constant warfare that the United States has been waging in various forms in Yemen, going back to the Bush administration.
And this is something that President Trump criticized Joe Biden for doing during the campaign.
He said, why is the United States bombing Yemen?
That's not the way that you handle things.
And yet, not even two months into office, Trump has restarted and seemingly escalated one of the several different wars we have in the Middle East.
Here from the New York Times on March 15, Trump orders attacks on militant sites in Yemen.
It was the opening salvo in what senior American officials said was a new offensive against the militants and a strong message to Iran as Mr. Trump seeks a nuclear deal with his government.
Air and naval strikes ordered by Mr. Trump hit radars, air defenses, and missile and drone systems
Mr. Trump wants to broker a deal with Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon,
but has left open the possibility of military action if the Iranians rebuff negotiations.
Now, we have seen from Trump that he uses threats of war against other countries in order to achieve the objective of avoiding war.
His theory is that the country has to fear that the United States will attack them or bomb them in order to get them meaningfully at the negotiating table to make concessions.
But when it comes to Iran, a country that Israel has been pushing the United States to attack and bomb for 15 years, you can go back 15 years, and hear Netanyahu warning that Iran was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, that it's the United States' responsibility to go in and attack it.
The Israelis did in fact bomb Iran after Iranians sent ballistic missiles into Israel.
Which was in turn a response to the Israeli bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus and other acts as well.
So there has been a kind of dangerous conflict militarily between Israel and Iran.
Israel considers Iran to be its most significant threat and enemy.
And they've been wanting the United States to go fight that war for them or with them.
Netanyahu urged the United States to go invade Iraq.
And get rid of Saddam Hussein, who he also considered to be one of the worst enemies of Israel.
He did the same in the Obama administration, urging the United States to go launch a dirty war against Bashar al-Assad.
And when it finally succeeded earlier last year, Netanyahu stood up and took credit for it.
So there's a lot of wars that have benefited Israel that the Netanyahu government, the Israelis, have wanted the United States to go and fight for them, or with them.
And Iran has always been the kind of North Star, the ultimate prize in getting the United States to go and wage war on.
And although I do believe that Trump's real goal is to get a nuclear deal with Iran that we had with Iran, but Trump had judged it to be a poor deal and therefore withdrew from it.
when you're bondage
Bombing very aggressively the Houthis, with whom Iran has a relationship, and at the same time threatening Iran that you're going to bomb them if they don't stop working with the Houthis, which they're never going to do.
You're flirting with a real war that could blow up the entire Middle East.
After a campaign that Donald Trump ran, twice now, three times really, pledging to keep the United States out of Middle East wars.
And specifically condemning Biden for bombing Yemen.
Here's what Trump posted on True Social today.
Today, I have ordered the United States military to launch decisive and powerful military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American and other ships, aircrafts, and drones.
To all Houthi terrorists, your time is up and your actions must stop starting today.
If they don't, hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before."
Similar language to what he used when he was threatening Gaza and Hamas.
To Iran, support for the Houthi terrorists must end immediately.
Do not threaten the American people, their president, who has received one of the largest mandates in presidential history, or worldwide shipping lanes.
If you do, beware because America will hold you fully accountable and we won't be nice about it.
The Pentagon released footage of some of the U.S. strikes on Yemen.
You can see some of them here.
That's a pretty heavy and destructive bomb.
The Yemenis claim that at least 32 civilians were killed in these strikes.
The Houthis have made that claim, and there's hospitals and the like that have supported that.
Here is Donald Trump in June of 2023 in an interview with Newsmax describing what he wants to be as president.
Actually, this is an interview with Newsmax, but it's Newsmax broadcasting a Trump speech from June of 2023.
Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine totally settled.
I'll have it done in 24 hours.
I say that, and I would do that.
That's easy compared to some of the things.
I'd get that done in 24 hours.
I know them both.
I know them both.
As the Bible says, blessed are the peacemakers.
See that?
And I will be your peacemaker.
I was your peace spanker.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, I will be your peacemaker.
Less than two months in office, he's massively bombing the Houthis.
And the argument is that the Houthis have been attacking American ships, which was true.
Because the United States was the country under Biden arming and financing the Israeli destruction of Gaza, which the Houthis were trying to protect.
But ever since there's been a ceasefire, those attacks on American ships have stopped.
And the Houthis began attacking ships, Israeli-flagged ships, and said they would continue to do so, not American ones, in protest of the Israeli blockade of all Food and electricity and other humanitarian aid entering Gaza.
And they said, we're going to continue to attack until Israel lets the humanitarian aid into Gaza that the ceasefire deal that they agreed to would be honored.
It would have been much easier for Trump to get the Israelis to simply allow the humanitarian aid in to Gaza.
Instead, we decided to go and bomb the Houthis in order to shield the right of Israel to Block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
We're back into fighting Middle East wars in defense, really, of Israel, given the current posture of what the Houthis have been doing and are saying.
One of the ways that I often defended Trump's foreign policy of the first term was to point out that it was accurate that Trump was the first president in decades to have not involved the United States in a new war.
He inherited some words from Obama, including bombing campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which he escalated, as he promised to do.
But he didn't involve the United States in any new wars.
And Trump himself, in 2024, praised himself for that.
Here on Fox News in January of 2024 is what he said made his first term so commendable.
I think he had very little chaos.
I think most of the chaos was caused by the Democrats constantly going after me.
And remember this.
Remember that with phoning Russia, Russia, Russia.
I mean, if you look at Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, everything was phoning.
The Pfizer warrants, the lying to Congress.
They had chaos.
They were the ones that caused the chaos.
We didn't have chaos.
We got the biggest tax cuts in history, the biggest regulation cuts in history.
I had no wars.
I'm the only president in 72 years.
I didn't have any wars.
I mean, this has been something Trump has been promising and saying and doing.
And again, we're bombing Yemen now.
We restarted our bombing campaign of Yemen and threatening Iran with bombing campaigns as well.
Trump did an interview with Tim Pool in May of 2024.
And here's what he had to say about bombing.
Of other countries, including Yemen.
I look at your policies, I see secure the borders, bring jobs back.
I look at the Democrats and many Republicans, and it's foreign war and foreign expansion.
That's right.
What is that?
I think it's just a failed mentality.
It's crazy.
You can sell problems over a telephone, instead they start dropping bombs.
I see recently they're dropping bombs all over Yemen.
You don't have to do that.
You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.
Viktor Orban of Hungary, you know, the leader, they call him a strong man.
Who cares if he's a strong man or not a strong man?
He's a very powerful guy.
He said the problem the world has is that Donald Trump is no longer president.
When he was president, China didn't play around.
Russia didn't play around.
Nobody played around.
Why do we have to bomb Yemen, asked Trump, when Biden was doing it, with the same justifications?
The Biden administration massively bombed the Houthis.
Based on the rationale that they were attacking American ships.
The difference is that under Biden, they were attacking American ships.
But as I said, once there was a ceasefire in Gaza that Trump deserves credit for having facilitated, the Houthis actually stopped and only began attacking Israeli ships based on their grievance that the Israelis were not letting in.
Humanitarian aid into Gaza as they promised they would.
Hear from the New York Times yesterday.
Quote, They were threatening Israel ships.
They were saying we're not going to attack the United States anymore.
We're not going to attack American ships.
We're going to attack Israeli ships.
And the reason we're doing that is because the Israelis won't allow humanitarian aid food into Gaza.
Or electricity.
So there's no clean drinking water.
And instead of demanding that the Israelis abide by the ceasefire that Trump himself facilitated, he decides to send over Our service members, our military planes and jets, and put them in harm's way to bomb the Houthis instead of getting the Israelis to simply abide by the ceasefire and let that humanitarian aid in.
As I said, we've been bombing Yemen for more than a decade.
Here's the Council on Foreign Relations in September of 2015.
The title is Obama's War of Choice, supporting
Saudi-led air war in Yemen.
Quote, six months ago today, the White House announced U.S. support for the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen via press release.
Quote, President Obama has authorized the provision of logistical and intelligence support to the Gulf Cooperation Council-led military operations.
As is true for all interventions, U.S. officials offered a buffet of justifications and objectives for backing the GCC side in Yemen's chaotic civil war.
Since March 25th, the United States has been providing in-air refueling, combat search and rescue support, including the rescue of two Saudi pilots whose helicopter crashed in the Gulf of Aden.
Detailing 45 intelligence analysts to help advise on target selection and redoubling weapons exports and contractor support to GCC countries.
Since October 2010 alone, the Obama administration has agreed to sell $90.4 billion in weapons to the Gulf Kingdom.
The President Obama would so enthusiastically endorse arming such a brutal authoritarian government is unsurprising since the United States is by far the leading arms dealer with 47% of the world total to what an annual State Department report classifies as the world's,
quote, least democratically governed states.
Those in the lowest kink tile based on Freedom House's political rights ranking and the World Bank's voice and accountability score.
This is why I go crazy.
When people try and claim that U.S. foreign policy is about spreading democracy and combating authoritarianism and tyranny, when we prop up and arm and fund many of the governments, the world's most savage dictators.
But that was back in 2015 when the United States was helping Saudi Arabia wage all-out war on the Houthis.
And as I said, that war resulted in humanitarian catastrophe.
So much so...
The BBC reported in October of 2016, just as Obama was out the door, "Yemen conflict.
The U.S. could be implicated in war crimes."
The U.S. government is concerned it could be implicated in potential war crimes in Yemen because of its support for a Saudi-led coalition air campaign.
Official documents obtained by Reuters news agency external show government lawyers advise the U.S. and might be considered a co-belligerent under international law.
The Obama administration has continued to authorize weapons sales to Saudi Arabia despite the warnings last year.
On Saturday, an airstrike on a funeral hall in Sanaa killed some 140 people.
U.S. President Barack Obama agreed to provide, quote, logistical and intelligence support to the coalition after it intervened in the conflict between forces loyal to Yemen's internationally recognized government and those allied to the rebel Houthi movement in March 2015.
Since then, more than 4,125 civilians have been killed and 7,200 injured, the U.N. says, with airstrikes believed to have caused about 60% of the deaths.
As I said, Biden bombed the crap out of Yemen continuously throughout 2024.
And when he started, the New Republic in January of 2024 noted this, quote, And one of the points it made was that Congressman Ro Khanna of California said Biden's bombing of Yemen With no congressional approval is unconstitutional,
and Congressman Matt Gaetz quote tweeted Congressman Khanna's statement and said, I agree completely, or something along those lines.
So the argument was when Biden started bombing Yemen with no declaration of war from Congress, no authorization from Congress, it was unconstitutional, and now Trump is doing the same thing.
Here's Justin Amash.
The former Republican congressman from Michigan, who turned independent, was a libertarian.
He said on December 21st, 2024, when Biden was still president, quote, I'll say it again.
It is unconstitutional for President Biden to engage in acts of war in Yemen.
It doesn't matter how appropriate you think it is for the U.S. to take on Houthis or terrorists or anyone.
Congress has not authorized war in Yemen.
Engaging in war there is thus unlawful.
This is back in January of 2024 when the strikes that Biden ordered on Yemen started.
It went all throughout 2024.
Just to give you a sense of this, here from October of 2024 is a U.S. State Department of Defense release where they boast, quote, U.S. strikes underground targets in Yemen.
Last Wednesday evening, the Pentagon announced that the United States had deployed B-2 spirit bombers to the Middle East to destroy targets in Yemen.
The target strikes controlled by the Houthis were buried deep underground, said the Pentagon press secretary during a briefing today.
Bye.
And then the New York Times reported in October of 2024, U.S. stealth bombers attack Houthi weapons cache in Yemen.
Air Force B-2 bombers struck five underground weapons facilities in what may be a signal from the Biden administration to Iran.
I don't know.
There have been Pentagon war games about what would happen if we actually did strike Iran.
TUCKER CARLSON NOTED THIS TODAY, THAT ONE OF THE THINGS IRAN WOULD DO IS THEY HAVE FORCES THROUGHOUT THE REGION, AND AT LONG REACH THEY COULD ATTACK U.S. MILITARY BASES THAT THE U.S. STILL HAS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, IN
SYRIA, IN IRAQ, IN OTHER PLACES THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST, INCLUDING IN SEA, AND THAT THERE COULD BE A LOT OF SERVICE MEMBERS WHO DIE.
This is yet another war that the United States is fighting without really any direct interest in doing so given the posture of the Houthis if they're only attacking Israeli ships.
For Israel, primarily to benefit Israel.
AIPAC praised President Trump for bombing the Houthis, not because AIPAC cares about the integrity of international shipping lanes, but because they care about Israel primarily.
And speaking of caring about Israel primarily, Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire also celebrated this bombing of the Houthis.
Here's what he said.
President Trump, by the way, including Iranian responsibility in here is really important because the Houthis could not do this without Iran.
And once again, I hear people who are caterwauling that this is just President Trump wanting war with Iran.
Let's be very clear.
There will be no war with Iran.
Even if the United States were to facilitate an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran does not go to war with the United States because if they did, we would obliterate them in half a second flat.
That is not a thing.
All the people who are telling you that there's a false choice between complete passivity in the face of Iranian aggression and total war boots on the ground in Iran is lying to you.
Full stop.
Lying.
All caps.
L-Y-I-N-G lying to you.
The United States is not putting boots on the ground in Iran.
That is not a thing.
No one wants it.
No one.
The other plausible notion is that targeted strikes could do an enormous amount of damage to the Iranian regime, so they ought to stop while they are behind.
They should stop funding the Houthis.
They should stop their nuclear program.
The Trump administration is taking precisely the correct angle on all of this.
And again, the liars who are telling you that this is designed to lead to war with Iran, please name me the person who wants full-scale, boots on the ground, hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East war with Iran.
Please name the human.
I would love to see you point out the human.
I don't understand Ben Shapiro's definition of war.
I don't think he does either.
You don't have to have hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground in a country in order to be at war with the country.
If you send your air force over a country and start bombing it, bombing multiple sites there, that is an act of war, obviously.
The United States would consider that an act of war if any country did that to the United States.
The Iranians would obviously consider that to be an act of war from the United States.
It would be an act of war under every international law, under any international body, under any understanding of war that has ever existed in all of human history.
So Ben Shapiro's argument, oh, don't worry, we're just going to fight a war, a limited war against Israel's biggest enemy in the Middle East by just dropping bombs on them.
But we're not going to send hundreds of thousands of service members, troops into Iran.
Should offer no assurances at all.
Obviously, Iran would treat that as a war and would react accordingly.
And the idea is, what, they're going to just take it?
Even though they have used...
Military force against American targets in the Middle East before as retaliations because, what, we're going to obliterate them with nuclear bombs?
We're going to drop nuclear weapons on Israel's main enemy in the Middle East?
Once you start talking that way about bombing a major country, and Iran is a major country.
It has serious military power.
It has three times the population of Iraq.
It has a population of 75 million people.
It's a country with a very rich and proud history.
And culture and tradition.
Obviously the risk of war in a way that's unpredictable escalates greatly, including actual shooting between troops.
But just bombing Iran itself is starting a war against Iran.
And Donald Trump has prided himself on the fact that he doesn't start wars.
He doesn't want to start wars in the Middle East in particular.
We've been too involved in wars in the Middle East.
Now, I'm not hitting the panic button about Trump starting a war against Iran because, like I said, this is something that he does.
He threatens these things.
As a negotiating tactic, he said exactly the same thing to Hamas.
If you don't release all the hostages immediately, not even in accordance with the plan, we're going to rain down hell on you of the kind you've never seen before.
We're going to obliterate you.
So far that hasn't happened.
There's a big difference between threatening a war and actually starting one, especially when it comes to Trump.
But Trump is escalating his rhetoric against Iran, and at some point it's going to be a question of his own credibility.
Here's what he posted today.
Let nobody be fooled.
The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from and are created by Iran.
Any further attack or retaliation by the Houthis will be met with great force.
And there is no guarantee that force will stop there.
Iran has played, quote, the innocent victim of rogue terrorists from which they've lost control, but they haven't lost control.
They're dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated military equipment and even so-called intelligence.
Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran, and Iran will be held responsible and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire.
That's an unmistakable explicit threat to go to war with Iran, even if it doesn't entail the sending of huge numbers of U.S. troops to invade Iranian soil.
And again, why?
Why is the United States doing that?
I know there's so many Trump supporters justifying Trump's bombing of the Houthis in Yemen, even though Trump himself criticized Biden for doing exactly the same thing.
And I'd argue Biden had more justification.
Because at the time, the Houthis were actually attacking American ships.
And now they've said they're limiting their attacks to Israeli ships.
Meaning that this bombing campaign is seemingly yet again in protection of Israel and not the United States.
But to threaten Iran in what conceivable way is threatening a war with Iran, or worse, engaging in one, consistent in any meaningful sense with the America First ideology,
with everything Trump has said about avoiding wars.
We're two months in to the Trump presidency, not even.
And we're already bombing a new country massively with the Houthis.
I realize, as I said, we've been bombing the Houthis for a long time under every administration of both parties.
But it had stopped, and Trump rejuvenated it in a way that he promises that it will be a sustained campaign while threatening war with Iran.
There is a real question, and I know this has been taboo for a long time talking about it, about the extent Of influence and control that the Israelis or those loyal to Israel exercise in the United States.
There's a video.
We're going to do a deep dive on the Adelsons.
We did one before the election.
About Sheldon Adelson and Miri Middelson, the billionaire couple.
She's an Israeli American citizen.
He's an American citizen.
Have given more to the Republican Party under Trump.
Not just Trump.
They have sometimes given it to other candidates.
But they're the most important billionaire donors of the Republican Party, and there's video of them where they admit that their number one goal is not the United States, but is Israel.
In fact, Sheldon Adelson served in the military very briefly in the late 1950s, and he said, I served in the military, but unfortunately it was the military of the United States and not the IDF.
I wish it were the IDF.
My wife...
Had the honor and privilege of serving in the IDF.
And our goal is to be good Zionist citizens.
You see the attacks within the very beginning days of the Trump administration on the students who are protesting against Israel when the Trump administration is filled with people who regard protesting Israel as one of the worst,
most offensive things you can do.
Claiming that these are immigration violations just coincidentally against people who protested the Israeli war in Gaza.
There's an American Jewish student today who was expelled by Colombia for participating in these protests.
You have this attack on anti-Israel protesters in the United States going on.
You have bombing of a country or a group of people in Yemen who are only attacking Israeli ships.
Because they're cutting off and blockading humanitarian aid into Gaza, and now the United States is threatening to go to war with Iran, Israel's worst enemy, a war that Israel has always wanted the United States to go to war with.
It's extra ironic, because this is a movement and a president that called itself America First.
But during the campaign, Trump...
Spoke with Mary Adelson there to a group of Republican Israel supporters and said, yes, we're going to make America great again, but we're also going to make Israel great again.
And he talked about how the Adelsons were the most frequent visitors in his first term, that he would constantly give them everything they asked for for Israel.
He'd even give them more than they asked for sometimes, he boasted.
If Trump ends up involving the United States in a real war in the Middle East, After everything he described, after everything he promised, after everything he said about his worldview and objectives and ideology, that really could destroy the Trump presidency single-handedly.
Middle East wars can do that.
And despite all this bombing, the Houthis are stronger than ever.
They've learned how to have a very light presence.
They can disperse their weapons, disperse their forces easily to avoid airstrikes.
They've learned how to do that after 10 years of constant warfare.
From the United States and from Saudi Arabia, from Israel as well.
And there's no objective.
What is the objective?
We've tried to destroy the Houthis for 10 years, and they're able to impede international shipping lanes in the Red Sea and to shoot long-range missiles into Israel.
They seem stronger than ever.
We're just going to keep dropping bombs?
It's like the United States has some sort of obligation to always be at war with someone, to always be bombing someone.
And I hope Donald Trump will understand that a reason for his appeal was that he promised to end these kinds of wars, to end this posture of constantly bombing.
And if Americans understand that the reason we're doing this is not so much for The United States, but more so for Israel, I think the damage to the Trump administration will be even greater still.
And one thing I'm sure of is that whether there's an intention to go to war with Iran or not, these kinds of threats historically have been very dangerous because they often lead to war even when that's not actually the intent.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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