Venezuelan Tanker Seized
Trump says US seizes massive Venezuelan oil tanker as showdown with Maduro erupts into new phase
The move is likely to further strain relations with Nicolás Maduro’s government
By Morgan Phillips
The U.S. has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday, marking a sharp escalation in tensions with Caracas.
“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Large tanker, very large. Largest one ever seized action. And, other things are happening. So you’ll be seeing that later. And you’ll be talking about that later with some other people,” Trump said at the White House.
“It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
The move is likely to further strain relations with Nicolás Maduro’s government, which already is subject to extensive U.S. sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil sector. It comes after U.S. military strikes have targeted alleged narcotraffickers near Venezuela at least 22 times since September, killing 87 people.
The seizure was led by the Coast Guard and supported by the Navy, a U.S. official told the Associated Press.
According to the Venezuelan state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. the tanker Skipper departed Venezuela 2 Dec. with ~2 million barrels of heavy crude. Roughly half of it belonged to the Cuban state-run oil firm Cubametales, planning to sell it to Asian energy brokers.
The seized supertanker is part of a sophisticated network or “shadow fleet” of ships that carry sanctioned oil. They often secure their tracking systems or otherwise disguise their locations. Such tankers have been increasingly employed by traders and shippers dealing with Venezuelan oil since Washington imposed the sanctions on the OPEC country.
Skipper was previously known as the M/T Adisa. Adisa was sanctioned by the U.S. for belonging to the tanker shadow fleet smuggling crude oil on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror groups. Now most of Venezuela’s oil production now goes to China through third-party countries or on shadow tankers.
The operators of more than 30 US-sanctioned oil tankers currently in Venezuela ports are alarmed, with many reconsidering whether to set sail from Venezuelan waters in the coming days as planned, shipping sources said.
Turn off the drugs and oil, and Maduro has nothing left to prop up his regime.
Category: Reality Check, Trump!
Now that pic is the cats meow
Sin loi Maduro….
It seems that Trump is serious about a regime change in Venezuela, at least as serious as the dems are about a regime change here in the US.
Liberal democrats crying about illegal seizure, lack of due process in 3… 2… 1…
There were some interesting conversations about the issue yesterday and they mostly agreed if there was no flag than the seizure was legal. This is mostly true.
“Mostly” true? I don’t see shades of “true”. There is true, and there is false. If there are several facts and one of them is false, the whole pile is now false.
Seizure of a non-flagged vessel is generally legal for a state. Retaining it beyond the original seizure goes into branches depending upon the circumstances.
It’s a slippery slope…..
So if the temp. of the water is down to zero point dipshit then it’s a slippery slope. Do the Coasties use ice skates???
Here ya go Jeff:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-coast-guard-finally-buying-new-icebreakers-ps-090725
Maybe they want in on this.
Hopefully they won’t be enormous pieces of shit like the NSMVs we just built for the nation’s maritime colleges and FEMA use…
Unites States Naval Institude Magazine mentioned that awhile ago. There also is a shortage of ice breaker skippers that know the buisness and takes awhile to train them.
Oily.
I go to bed every night underneath an oil truck so I can wake up oily every morning…
Remind us how many tankers Biden seized….
Instead of using Navy and Coast Guard personnel, perhaps we could draft some Minnesota Somalis. Let them do something that they’re actually good at….
LOL!
All depends on if you want to salvage the cargo or not.
Somalis? They’re just as likely to set the whole thing on fire, create a massive oil spill & pollution, and sink it.
Nah, they got a much safer, more lucrative sort of gig going on now – stealing from Minnesota taxpayers. Minny-soh-tah & Minneapolis is now Minne-dishu. Need more people like, Abdi Iftin, a Somali American who embraced JFK’s Ask not what your country can do for you…
I heard that the demorat pols want to charge Heg and the VP of war crimes. I think they are drug users and getting paid off by the cartels, and of course the pentagon higher ups hate Trump and are keeping a secret on that Doctrine I keep mentioning so all you hear on the radio are the narco boats. How come there wasn’t a peep when Obama and biden did the same thing.
It isn’t that Trump is doing anything different, he is doing it alone. In the past, Congress was briefed on kill lists and felt like they had some oversight even though they didn’t. Trump is simply doing it and then telling everyone he did it. This really annoys politicians because they like to think that they are important.
As much as I oppose the killings I am glad in a way that he is doing it. Hopefully this will result in the repeal of the parts of the Patriot Act that were most unconstitutional. If that happens they will have to go back to sneaking around and hoping that they don’t get caught.
If Congress wouldn’t leak things to the media (and by extension, the enemy), maybe they’d be getting a heads up. 🤷♂️
They are going by the Legitimacy Doctrine which most likely they don’t know it exists and the pentagon peeps that don’t like the Pres. won’t tell him if they know about the Doctrine. Check it out on google. US Naval Acadamy has it.
I checked my copy of the US Constitution and it isn’t in there.
Curious how liberals want to charge conservative politicians and executives for “war crimes” but didn’t object when Obama killed over 500 people across 7 countries when he was in office.
That was different because they say so.
Including some US citizens, some of whom were children.
We had the boarding and search and boarding and salvage parties on the ship and I was on the boarding and salvage party with other snipes. We had a little drill on what we were supposed to do and the gunners mates had Thompson subs and the rest 1911’s and M-1 Carbines. Gunners mate hands me the carbine and me being new asks when I should I use it, and the Gunners Mate says to shoot anyone that gives you a ration of shit on board the ship.
Paint it haze gray and refit for service as a fleet Oiler and UNREP vessel.
USNS Fafo
(Grin)
Isn’t there a process where the crew gets a share of the value of the siezed ship? I believe this was present during the revolutionary and somewhat later.
times.
Letters of Marque and privateers are, sadly, a thing of the past.
Yar.
Imagine if we could manage to get a Letter of Marque and decent ship crewed by TAH privateers…
We had a warrant..Perfectly Legal Seizure…