The United States invaded Venezuela late Friday, in a mission called "Operation Absolute Resolve." The invasion, which resulted in the abduction by Army Delta Force commandos of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, reportedly was the culmination of months of planning. A group of CIA officers, operating clandestinely since August in and around Caracas, gathered intelligence about Maduro's daily movements; meanwhile, the Trump administration manufactured increasing hostilities with Maduro's government, characterized by exaggerations about Venezuela's importance to international drug trade and a series of murderous extrajudicial attacks on defenseless boats in international waters. Finally, having piled up a war force off of Venezuela's coast, the administration waited for a suitable weather window, and struck. The conflict was over in a single night.
Back in September, while the Trump administration was a few months into the groundwork for "Operation Absolute Resolve," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced new restrictions on the freedom and access of reporters working at the Pentagon. The new rules required journalists to sign a pledge not to release information gathered from reporting without the explicit approval of "an appropriate authorizing official." Reporters who refused to sign the pledge would lose credentialed access to the Pentagon. Credentialed access under these conditions—as was pointed out even on Fox News—would be of very little value, reducing professional journalists to administration spokespeople. In October, in a coordinated demonstration, a few dozen Pentagon reporters turned in their credentials and left their posts, having refused to accept Hegseth's terms. A report from the Associated Press said that only the insane One America News Network signed the pledge.
Sunday morning, doing the rounds after the success of "Operation Absolute Resolve," U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio thanked "a number of media outlets" for declining to report leaked information about the attack in advance of its execution. Semafor, citing unnamed sources, reported that those media outlets who sat on the leak include the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both publications declined to talk to Semafor; they also declined to speak with the Associated Press, and ignored emails from Defector.
Hegseth, gloating Saturday about the mission's success, talked up "the coordination, the stealth, the precision" of the operation, "all on display in the middle of the night." This stealth, according to Rubio, would not have been possible had reporters published what they'd learned, and he thus credits the forbearance of these unnamed media outlets with protecting American lives.
Not everyone in the Trump administration agrees with Rubio and Hegseth that stealth was essential to "Operation Absolute Resolve," or was even achieved. "They were waiting for us," insisted no less an authority on the matter than the President himself. "They knew we had many ships out in the sea. We were just sort of waiting. They knew we were coming, so they were in a ready, what's called a ready position. But they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated." These are all boastful lying idiots, and it is distinctly possible that Trump conjured the phrase "ready position" from some half-remembered cable news segment or largely slept-through briefing from an entirely different mission, but he is also capable of saying true things, if only by accident. Certainly his overall depiction of the imbalance of military might rings true: The United States spends annually on defense at least 10 times what is spent by the entirety of South America, and in 2023 spent more than 200 times what was spent by Venezuela. It's telling that in its hour of desperation, Venezuela contracted military support from Cuba, an island nation the size of Arizona, and with the GDP of Iowa.
Sitting on an important leak of this sort is not some new abdication of journalistic duty. There is a longstanding convention in American journalism, not to reveal information about future military operations when there is any reasonable expectation that doing so will increase the risk for American soldiers. But this is armed conflict; actions that encourage the initiation of armed conflict inevitably facilitate death and destruction. Various reports say that at least 80 people died during "Operation Absolute Resolve." Not all the dead were combatants: 45-year-old Yohana Rodríguez Sierra, a civilian and a single mother, was blown up when bombs fell on her home in El Hatillo, which appears to have been targeted due to its proximity to communications infrastructure. The Trump administration has not yet officially released its count of casualties, but clearly they were happy to accept a certain amount of carnage, so long as it was distributed primarily among sleeping Venezuelans. Trump himself boasted Sunday that "there was a lot of death on the other side," compared to just a few minor, non-life-threatening injuries among the American commandos.
Former CNN defense correspondent Barbara Starr told the AP that, in her view, media outlets holding fire on the Venezuela leak is evidence that credentialed, professional journalists can still be trusted to gauge and properly weigh, without Hegseth's heavy-handed oversight, the newsworthiness of sensitive information—that legacy media can "act responsibly, as it always has, to protect troops' lives." Protecting the lives of American troops, in this framing, is a priority that automatically supersedes all others. In this case, the mission was reckless, illegal, and motivated by unalloyed greed. It proudly resumes a legacy of imperialism that a not-insignificant portion of Americans considers abominable. It worsens tensions among competing superpowers, casts a hemisphere into a condition of heightened insecurity, and puts terrifying immediate weight behind Trump's even more deranged-seeming expansionist ambitions. An engaged public might've appreciated a heads-up: The midnight invasion is unpopular among Americans even after its quick success.
Implicit in this tradition is broad agreement between the press and the government about the relative value of human lives. It is also an agreement that was forged under a different definition of warfare. The press in this case was not protecting a platoon of math teachers and plumbers, drafted into service and advancing warily on a heavily fortified hill. Nor were the editors who decided to sit on this scoop looking out for enlisted soldiers dragooned into a dangerous reconnaissance mission in the Iraqi desert. This invasion was carried out by mad-dog Delta Force commandos, professional career killers who have been routinely deployed around the globe to carry out night-time assassinations on behalf of the White House. This is a highly selective unit that makes no room for unwilling or uninformed participants. Anyone who joins Delta Force does so explicitly for the opportunity to break into someone's house at night and shoot them while they sleep.
I don't know who you would have to be to conceive of America as the good guy in this specific conflict, but the common purpose and fellow-feeling of the public that is supposed to undergird the special sanctity granted to the lives of American soldiers is in somewhat short supply nowadays, for obvious reasons. The press seems to be lagging behind this understanding. What deference, ostensibly given on behalf of the American people who value the lives of their fellow citizens, is owed to an assassination squadron acting on direct orders of a President who is simultaneously deploying federal law enforcement and National Guard troops in cities around the country, for the purpose of oppressing, terrorizing, and even killing the people who live there?
Anticipating how Americans might feel about an upcoming military operation, and using that as a basis for deciding whose interests to protect in the handling of a sensitive leak, sounds hard. I also have no idea whether a few hours of warning would've changed a single thing that happened Friday night. I can imagine news of an impending invasion blaring out in Venezuela, and air-raid sirens, and maybe Yohana Rodríguez Sierra and her daughter making it to a bomb shelter or basement. I can also imagine the Trump administration firing missiles at crowded shelters and later declaring that they were full of narco-terrorists. I can imagine an embarrassed and enraged Department of War scrapping the Friday plan for no better reason than to thwart the New York Times; I can also imagine the Trump administration jailing a newspaper editor on charges of treason. They invaded Venezuela, in flagrant contravention of international law; they also invaded Chicago, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. It is not hard at all for me to imagine them invading the offices of the fake news media.
Certainly I do not have a ton of confidence that anyone atop the Washington Post masthead any longer possesses the sophistication to apply nuance to this problem, or to even understand the specifics of the context in which it arose. Skipping the work in favor of blank convention grants Hegseth the authority he was seeking, and without the bother of putting pen to paper. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the record will show a liberal institution endorsing some pretty horrifying moral calculations, and affirming by rote a misplaced and perfectly imperturbable national supremacism.
As part of the majority of Americans who disapprove of this mess, I feel poorly served. I am not so willing to ignore that the people putting lives at risk in this scenario are the ones who plotted and ordered an obviously illegal and immoral invasion and kidnapping. If truth, flying around out there in the open, is a threat to their plans, they are free to take a different path. The rest of us have no choice but to live in a world of consequences.
