IT'S NOT ABOUT THE OIL. IT'S MUCH WORSE! https://t.co/ri03Qn6uzz via @YouTube

— Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) (@TFL1728) December 13, 2025

Blaine, retired One-Star General for the United States.  You were second in command for NATO at one point.  Also in charge of logistics for under General Petraeus at some point. 

And EM [Burlingame], you are a former Green Beret, a fabulous writer, and historian.  

Let's start with the Venezuelan oil tanker that was taken by US Security Forces.  On the one side I was just scrolling through X, and it was "Homeland Security and the FBI because it's got sanctioned oil from Iran."  And other reports said that "it's on its way to Cuba and Cuba is now going to suffer."

All noise.

There was something else on that ship it wasn't oil and it probably wasn't drugs.

1:25. Might have been human beings.  

1:26.  Might have been human beings or, even more, it might have been weapons and explosives and fighters.

1:32.  Yeah or somebody's missing trigger or something of a radiological . . .

1:35.  Or, exactly.

1:37.  Right, so people have this misapprobation that we give all . . . I know that most of the world thinks that we care only about oil.  We have more oil than we can use. That's the great excuse but we don't need anybody else's in the world's oil.  So if we do something that, you know, touches on oil, it isn't about oil.  

2:00. Let me broaden it out a little bit.  When I get on American news shows, the shift on this boat everybody seems to think that what we're doing is just trying to stem the tide of drugs into the United States.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The war against the cartels has many tentacles and elements to it.  Drugs is a part of it, it's a very, very justifiable part of it for us to go after those things.  However, there is a much bigger prize out there and that prize is not even in the region it's not even in Venezuela.  That prize sits in Dubai, Qatar, Brunei, Italy the UK.  It's all the world's most powerful who make so much money off of the illicit everything that these people, the cartels, enable.  So what the United States is doing with this campaign is, yeah, we are taking out some of your supply chains.. that's just the attention getting step.  You've got an oil tanker that's owned by 50 shell companies leading up to some Ukrainian oligarch.  Even if it was just oil in there that was shady and enables laundering, that would be enough.  I'm going exactly with EM.  Something else was on that ship that caught our attention.  The other part of it is, if we hit it, which we did, but we took it, we didn't hit it.  We didn't blow it up.  What that means is we know exactly whose rice bowl we just kicked over by taking it.  So we know all the way through.  If you go through the financial forensics and the guys repelled off into the ship.  

4:18.  It's one small little tanker.  It's not going to change anything.  We can sanction the funding on the other side.  We can sanction the sender.  We can sanction the ship owner.  By sanction, I mean we can punish, we can hurt.  Anything that has to do with the seller, the transporter, the insurer of the transporter, and the delivery, the receiver on the other side, and probably two streams up from there.  We have all kinds of tools to punish those people for doing some kind of a resource transaction, natural resource transaction, that we don't like we don't take ships for that.  It's too dangerous too risky and it raises too many issues about piracy on the seas.  Too many PR issues.  So if we take a ship it's because there's something else on that ship.

I want to go back to something Blaine said.  I was in the CIF. I was a counter proliferation guy.  Commanders In-Extremist Force, or it went to CRF, Crisis Response Force, but Commanders In-Extremist Force, we're Delta Force Seal Team 6 light, or the JAG team.  We work with a group called DTRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, that's public information.  What does DTRA do along with the Russians and the Chinese and others?  We monitor radiological smallest little piece of radiological materials all over the world-- equipment, hardware, component pieces, all of that stuff is monitored and tracked as closely as possibly can be done.  If you're going to force World War 3 and nothing else is working, what is the final step that you're going to go to?

You're going to go nuclear you're going to do a dirty nuke or you're going to do a nuke in some Western city, town, or community and you're going to use Azov Ukrainians, who are fluent Russian speakers, to put in . . . we're going to . . . where you're going to find a passport at the burn down World Trade Center kind of trick.  And you're going to do a dirty nuke or a nuke and you're going to make it look like the Russians did it.

So what do you think Chinese the Russians Iranians Persian and US intelligence the good factions the US intelligence are single-minded focused against right now?  And oh, by the way, the asovs and the British and by the way unfortunately the Americans at the time try this twice already in the Ukraine.

6:53.  Let me add something here that might be very helpful because you viciously tried to besmirch and take away the credibility of me and EM in your recalcitrant remarks not two seconds ago about whether or not we were putting spin on the ball and trying to get inside the heads of your listeners and watchers rent free.  There's this beautiful tool online called Marinetraffic.com.  Anybody can look it up.  Dial your viewer over to Venezuela and Caracas I am in the territorial Waters around Venezuela I'm looking at no fewer than five tankers right now squander but so we're not going to squander the resources to just go and wrap up a whole fleet of tankers it's very inefficient, leads to nothing, doesn't get what you want you want.  However, you heard me in our last talk about my model of the Jenga Tower. Remove several blocks out of the illegal illicit Jenga Tower, then it's worth taking