Let’s not simply gang up on Kristi Noem, the abundantly ignorant, tirelessly self-promoting and mean-spirited former head of Homeland Security that Donald Trump has just fired.

Yes, she falsely stated, for example, that Renee Good, the unarmed 37-year-old Minneapolis woman who was shot in the head three times by an ICE agent, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism”. And that V.A. nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by her masked police thugs because “This individual impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them”. However, she was vehemently supported in her lies by other administration officials.

Let us not forget that Vice-President J.D. Vance said, in the immediate aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, that her behaviour constituted “an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people”, and that her death was a “tragedy of her own making”. He then added that “The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace…” and “…puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day.” Donald Trump, justifying her murder a bit more cautiously, offered that Good was “very disorderly” before she was killed.

Regarding the subsequent Alex Pretti murder by varyingly incompetent and poorly trained bullies unleashed and sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller justified it by saying that Pretti was an “assasin”. Vice-President Vance reposted Stephen Miller’s claim that Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder” federal agents. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino immediately piled on with his own lie that Pretti had ambushed law enforcement with his gun and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre” them. Donald Trump, keeping to his somewhat more mollifying yet unmistakably defamatory tone, claimed that Pretti “was not an angel”, just like he claimed that Good “was not an angel.”

There are many more disgraceful lies that have been publicly told by Trump, Vance, Miller, and other White House officials about these two killings, and about countless other criminal abuses committed by the masked secret police agents that they command in Minneapolis and across the nation. The Trump administration is clearly promoting a culture of unchecked state lawlessness, misogyny, racial profiling, and bald-faced lying. Kristi Noem’s firing will be a footnote to this ongoing reign of terror.

V.M.

EU internal market commissioner Stéphane Séjourné is the latest high-profile name to express solidarity with Madrid over Trump’s threats to “cut off all dealings with Spain” last night (8:55) over its criticism of the Iran war.

Ocurrió antes en Caracas, ahora en Teherán. EEUU ataca junto a Israel el Estado de Irán y trata de derrocar el régimen teocrático. Pero el asesinato del ayatolá Ali Jameneí poco tiene que ver con un proceso de democratización en el país persa. El interés de Washington reside, en realidad, en los recursos naturales del territorio islámico, que posee una de las mayores reservas de petróleo y gas natural, controla el estrecho de Ormuz –uno de los enclaves críticos en el transporte de hidrocarburos– y tiene en marcha un programa nuclear que Trump y Netanyahu siguen muy de cerca.

During the Gulf War, in February 1991, George H. W. Bush called on the Iraqi people to “take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Coalition aircraft dropped leaflets urging Iraqi civilians and troops to rise up. But when the country’s oppressed Shia and Kurdish populations followed that exhortation, Hussein’s surviving forces crushed them, killing tens of thousands of people, while the United States military stood by and did nothing.