Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Is Any Due Process Needed to Send Immigrants to Lifelong Prison in El Salvador? Trump Continues the Long-Standing Bipartisan Policy of Bombing Yemen
System Update #424
March 19, 2025
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Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of mass deportations of those who entered the United States illegally. 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 sent them to one of the world's worst and most repressive prisons. And all of this was done without any due process. 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. 

The United States government, 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 “sustained bombing campaign.” All of this was done without any Congressional approval, let alone any declaration of war. 

As the friend of the show, Michael Tracey, put it, when this new bombing campaign in Yemen was announced, “You will seldom lose money betting on bipartisan continuity in U.S. foreign policy.” 

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Some of you know the reason why I went into journalism and started writing about politics was principally in reaction to what I had perceived to be the grave assault on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights, carried out by the Bush-Cheney administration, in the name of the War on Terror. 

There were many 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 could issue orders that constrained him in any way. 

Essentially, the president has the full, untrammeled right to carry out whatever he decides is necessary and one of the specific steps that the Bush-Cheney administration did in fact carry out, beyond spying on Americans with no warrants, 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 Guantánamo, 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 and they had no opportunity to contest the charges and accusations that were lodged against them. 

When people like me would stand up and say, “How do you just throw people to 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 Guantánamo 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 turned out, and even the U.S. government admitted, that not a few people, but many of the people that were detained in Guantánamo, were actually guilty of nothing. They were innocent, we're unjustly accused and never had anything to do with any terrorist organizations. 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 a 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 a thousand people in Guantánamo, 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. 

 And so, had the Supreme Court not ruled that Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo. Some people were held there for 10 or 15 years of their lives and the U.S. government now acknowledges never had any involvement in a terrorist organization. 

 If you go to law school and study the Constitution, if 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 the Supreme Court said that even for non-citizens in Guantánamo because the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo was essentially under U.S. sovereignty and that anybody under U.S. sovereignty has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights, which 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 invoke the right of free protest, even though they're not U.S. citizens, which is 150 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. But it's also true of people who aren't visa holders at all, who don't have any visas, who don't have any green cards, such as Guantánamo detainees. 

President Trump indeed campaigned on a promise to initiate a program of mass deportations against people who enter the United States illegally, who cross 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. 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. 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 that people believe that if you enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government has the right to 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 4, 2025:

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The president of El Salvador has become a kind of darling of the international populist right. There's a lot of admiration for how 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 are obviously a lot of people in those prisons who are violent gang members who deserve to be locked up but some people don't deserve to be locked up, which is what happens when you put people in prison without due process. 

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, 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 it 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 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.

 Everything that has been said about Trump in terms of his being a threat to democracy, an autocrat, an authoritarian and 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. I watched Trump during the first term, repeatedly, when courts invalidated his actions as unconstitutional, observe those court orders. I watched as conservatives constantly ran into federal courts 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 and that his cancelation of loan guarantees was unconstitutional. There was actually an instance where Democrats called on him to ignore a court order. Biden effectively did that by proceeding with loan cancelations, even after the courts said that doing so needed an act of Congress and 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 a court order, 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 to El Salvador and simultaneously argue that people being sent there to be in prison 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 can see the White House order from today: “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua” (The White House. March 15, 2025.)

In other words, they're saying, just like in World War II, just like in other declared wars, that we've 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 during World War II by FDR to provide for the internment of Japanese Americans. There you see the executive order from February 1942:

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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; I've talked about the reasons before – it used to be a left-wing cause. When I started doing journalism it was a Bush-Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce’s goal to create amnesty for people in the country, to open up the borders more because large corporations whom Bush and Cheney served wanted 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.

It was corporations and the party that served corporations, the Republican Party, that wanted massive migration in the United States and it was the left – people like Bernie Sanders, union leaders and African American groups – that opposed this kind of immigration because the people who would be harmed would be the American worker. It would drive down wages and take away jobs from Americans, primarily Black people and Latinos. 

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 poses massive societal problems. However, there is no circumstance under which that can be described as a war in the way our prior wars declared by Congress have been. And that's one of the reasons why the judge stepped in.

Here from Politico, earlier today. 

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U.S. District Judge James Boasberg 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 the deportation of all non-citizens in 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 Boasberg conducted Saturday for the lawsuit filed by immigrant-rights advocates. According to flight tracking databases, one plane was bound for San Salvador, El Salvador, and the other for Comayagua, Honduras, and they were in the air nearing their destinations as Boasberg issued his order.

Boasberg said 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 Tren de Aragua the equivalent of a foreign government. (Politico. March 15, 2025.)

 Anything that the president does that is significant and 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 not in the Constitution, 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 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. This is why in Marbury vs. 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. 

There are many checks on the courts. The only people who ever get to the court, the federal court, are people appointed by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. So, you already have those checks. But then, also, Congress can impeach judges for abusing their power and for acting corruptly – another check on the judiciary. It's not as though there are no checks on the judiciary. 

Congress has a lot of different ways 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. 

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. 

Here, from Axios on Sunday:

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The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads 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 that fight. "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win," a senior White House official told Axios. (Axios. March 16, 2025.)

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. 

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 the deportation of people in the country illegally, If it were just about deportations, sending people back to their country of origin, the controversy would be far less intense – the issue is that these people who are being sent to El Salvador are being sent there purposefully because the El Salvadorian government has said that they will be immediately put into a maximum-security prison where effectively they will never leave for life. 

Just like in Guantánamo, 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, 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. 

 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 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. 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. It doesn't make the Judiciary supreme because there are a lot of checks on the judiciary still. 

The reason it was a 5-4 decision is not because four of the judges ruled that Guantánamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they're non-citizens. That was not their ruling. All nine of the justices agreed that the detainee status of non-citizens does not preclude their right to invoke constitutional rights. The argument of the Bush administration was, we know there are 125 years of Supreme Court precedent that says that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody within our jurisdiction, but this is Guantánamo Bay. We purposely built the prison outside of the United States to avoid this. 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. 

Here, from the CBC, March 2009:

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And that was very much the climate after 9/11: who cares about legal niceties, who cares about constitutional limits? Just pick them all up and kill them all without the slightest regard for whether or not we really know that they're innocent or members of a terrorist organization. 

We were assured by the Bush government over and over and over that the only people in Guantánamo were terrorists, they had done all the necessary vetting to determine that. They weren't just terrorists, but they were “the worst of the worst.” It turns out that so much of that was untrue and the U.S. government has been admitting that over and over ever since. 

Here, from NBC News, in October 2016:

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Mohamedou Ould Slahi was sent back to his native Mauritania after 14 years of captivity, during which he was never charged with a crime.

Slahi, 45, was an engineer for technology companies; he was put in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 under suspicion of being a recruiter for al Qaeda. He'd expressed loyalty to the group in the early 1990s, but his lawyers say that was when he fought with anti-Communist mujahideen in Afghanistan. (NBC News. October 17, 2016.)

“Guantánamo Diary” was a best-selling book about his time in Guantánamo, made into a film where Jodie Foster played his lawyer. We interviewed Mohamedou back in 2021. I had met him in Amsterdam where he is now living, but that is a case where the U.S. government acknowledged that he 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. 

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 this radical Article II theory of executive power that the president is unlimited and can't be constrained by a court 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 are constantly criticizing Trump and even depicting him as some unique evil for doing exactly what they did, advocated and implemented less than 20 years ago. 

Here's Bill Kristol on X:

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His fellow Bush-Cheney neocon, David Frum, said much the same:

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Again, these are the people, David Frum and Bill Kristol and all of these Bush-Cheney operatives who are now heroes of liberal punditry, who invented these theories they're now claiming are the hallmarks of autocracy. 

I wrote an article when I first started my blog, An Ideology of Lawlessness, which 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 wanted and nobody, not courts or congress, could scrutinize it, or 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. Afterward, their argument was, well, we had the right to. We were prosecuting the War on Terror and Congress has no power to limit anything we can do. And the same with the courts. 

 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. 

The question here, of course, is if the United States is really at war in the sense that we've always understood that – Venezuelan drug gangs 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 are 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 arguably did that – I think he did do that when he ignored the court order on student loan cancelations – 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.

Video. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN. April 8, 2023

That's exactly the argument of the Trump administration now and was the Bush administration back then too: if we deem any act or any check from any other branch to be illegitimate, including courts, we’re just going to ignore them. We shouldn't agree to be bound by court rulings that we consider illegitimate. 

That's exactly what the Trump administration is arguing in court right now. 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. Many judges issue orders orally and they're considered to be orders, but the bigger argument of the Trump administration is the same one AOC marshaled there, which is, that we'll obey court orders when the courts are acting within their legitimate power and since we don't think courts have the right to order us to turn planes around, then we ignore that, we're happy to and we think we were right too. 

Remember when the constitutional convention was held and Benjamin Franklin came out, 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, 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. 

Congress, however, has 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 red 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. 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 errors. 

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. 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 a 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 in their competition with Iran, viewed the Houthis controlling Yemen as their enemy. 

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. 

During the first Trump presidency, there was a 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 7, 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 a thousand bombs on Yemen in 2024 alone. 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. 

The Houthis are probably stronger than they've ever been, the capabilities that they've developed, including the ability to shoot long-range missiles into Israel, which they've done several times, and the success they've had in attacking and seizing ships. 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 forums 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:

AD_4nXdH4RhbmsHa2i3VZ-FMoz_LmAwGaHDT1I4qUGTYcdTB5I5OJEtdvQC7rMQoMLT2GG_PK3wKAJZ5ehf3jWs1yo3tX2DpKdsVnUn5lRSBC3ErSCLc-m3bP_hkkXDEfo208jp5gnrv5xtHFT0BILqVAyI?key=8GjQGcqj-Yiuf-aRWCuZxnnb

We have seen from Trump that he uses threats of war against other countries 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 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's 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 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 launch a dirty war against Bashar Assad and when it finally succeeded later last year, Netanyahu stood up and took credit for it. 

So, there are a lot of wars that have benefited Israel and 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. 

Although I do believe that Trump's real goal is to get a nuclear deal with Iran that we had with Iran, but Trump judged it to be a poor deal and therefore withdrew from it. When you're 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 yesterday: 

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, aircraft, and drones.

To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS 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!

(Donald Trump, Truth Social. March 15, 2025.) 

The Pentagon released footage of some of the U.S. strikes on Yemen. You can see some of them here. 

Video. US Strikes, Yemen. March 15, 2025.

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 are hospitals and the like that have supported that. 

Here is Donald Trump, in June 2023.

Video. Donald Trump, Newsmax. June 24, 2023.

So, “I will be your peacemaker in less than two months in office.” 

Ever since there's been a cease-fire, those attacks on American ships have stopped and the Houthis began attacking Israeli-flagged ships, not American ones, and said they would continue to do so, in protest of the Israeli blockade of all food, electricity and other humanitarian aid entering Gaza. They said, “We're going to continue to attack until Israel lets the humanitarian aid into Gaza until the cease-fire deal that they agreed to would be honored.” 

It would have been much easier for Trump to get the Israelis to simply allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Instead, we decided to bomb the Houthis to shield the right of Israel to block the 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 wars 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. Trump himself, in 2024, praised himself for that. 

 

I know there are 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. 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? 

There is a real question, and I know this has been taboo for a long time, 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 and Miriam Adelson, the billionaire couple. She's an Israeli American citizen and he's an American citizen who have given more to the Republican Party – they have sometimes given it to other candidates, but they're the most important billionaire donors of the Republican party, and there's a 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 Columbia 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 that, 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. 

It’s extra ironic because this is a movement and a president that called itself “America First.” But during the campaign, Trump spoke with Miriam 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.” 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 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, and 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. 

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 constant bombing. 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. One thing I'm sure of is that whether there's the 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. 

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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

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September 14, 2025

“Welcome home, Charlie.” Sometimes, in the midst of all the online hate being expressed toward Charlie Kirk, there are surprising moments of grace and beauty, like Jeffree Star praising Charlie's willingness to have a “a conversation with everybody. Why did I respect him? Because he knows reality.”

Or like Chris Martin, of Coldplay, who urged a live audience to send love to Charlie Kirk's family. At one point, during Tommy Robinson's massive free speech march in London yesterday, somebody held up a large photo of Charlie Kirk and a group began chanting his name. Thousands of South Koreans held a march celebrating his life. After woke employees at a Michigan Office Depot refused to print posters of Charlie for a memorial, FedEx stepped up and printed them for free. At a rally for Charlie in Rome, people held signs saying, “Debate Shouldn't Kill.” In Prague, students marched silently in his honor. There were additional vigils held in Sydney, Germany, Spain, & Thailand.

I spotted ...

September 14, 2025

Excellent article by Matt Taibbi about the errors media outlets and people have made in their reporting on Charlie's Kirks' views.

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/an-arrest-corrections-and-pure-horror?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=pyuo0

September 13, 2025

Fascinating/horrifying discussion between Tim Dillon and Max Blumenthal on Israeli influence over US government & Charlie Kirk. Max traces Charlie's slow awakening to the truth about Israel over the past few years.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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