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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on ABC’s This Week and was asked by George Stephanopoulos why the Trump administration did not seek congressional authorization prior to attacking Venezuela.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Why wasn’t congressional authorization necessary?
SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: It wasn’t necessary because this was not an invasion. We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation. This was a law enforcement operation. He was arrested on the ground in Venezuela by FBI agents, read his rights and removed from the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Also speaking on ABC This Week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the U.S. had no authority to enter Venezuela and oust Maduro.
MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER: They did not just do ships off the water. They went inside Venezuela, bombed civilian as well as military places. And it’s a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: All of this comes after months of U.S. attacks on boats who the Trump administration accused of carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific near Venezuela, though not providing evidence.
For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by David Cole, constitutional law expert and professor in law and public policy at the Georgetown University Law Center, former ACLU national legal director. He’s just written a piece for The New York Review of Books. It’s headlined “Trump’s War: The invasion of Venezuela is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple.”
Professor Cole, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out your argument. This key point that they’re making — they did not consult Congress, Trump, Rubio, the Trump administration, because this is a law enforcement operation — what does that mean?
DAVID COLE: So, it’s clearly not a law enforcement operation. This is an operation that began by summarily executing hundreds of people — over a hundred people on boats, who are claimed to be smuggling drugs. It escalated to bombing a loading dock within Venezuela. It included an embargo on ships to Venezuela, and, finally, an invasion in which many targets were bombed. We did pull out Maduro and his wife, but that’s sort of — that was the excuse; that wasn’t the justification. And Trump made that very clear. We are running the country. We are taking its — giving access to our oil companies to its oil. This was not a law enforcement operation; it was an excuse for imperialist intervention.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Cole, you mentioned imperialist intervention. There were — there have been similar actions by the United States in the past — obviously, the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent a popular rebellion that was in the process of restoring its democratically elected president. There was also the 1983 invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration. And interestingly, we’re hearing reported by Cuba that 32 of its nationals were killed in this most recent attack. Back in 1983, more than 20 Cubans who were assisting the Grenadian government were also killed as they were resisting the U.S. invasion. This is obviously not just a one-off of the Trump administration; this is a continuing pattern of the United States in dealing with governments that, in one way or another, try to exert their sovereignty or independence in contradiction to the U.S. Your thoughts?
DAVID COLE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the whole world order is based on the principle, probably the first principle of international law, that countries have to respect their neighbors, and they can’t simply invade a neighbor or any other sovereign nation because they don’t like the way they are running things there. You know, if Canada were to bomb U.S. drug manufacturers because drugs are being brought across the Canadian border, we wouldn’t say that’s OK. If Mexico were to bomb gun manufacturers in the United States because our guns are killing thousands of Mexicans every year in Mexico, we wouldn’t say that’s OK. Trump said that Biden was an illegitimate president. If Russia invaded the United States and abducted Biden to put him on trial in Russia, we wouldn’t say that’s OK. The whole premise of the international order is that we respect each other’s borders.
And when we do this, we just give a green light to Russia. Why should it stop at Ukraine? We give a green light to China: Go into Taiwan. This is really putting us on — putting the world on a very, very dangerous course. And have we done it in the past? Yes. But our violating the law in the past doesn’t justify violations of the law today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you now about the status of Maduro. Clearly, he’s going to appear in court today. And in terms of — but he will be entitled, clearly, to a defense. And what’s your sense of the — first, the whole issue of whether, as a sitting head of state, he can be tried? What will be the — what will be the issues that the judge in this case will have to deal with initially, after arraignment?
DAVID COLE: Well, head of state immunity is the principal one. That will be, I think, Maduro’s first argument, because the principle of head of state immunity is that one country cannot try the head of another country in their courts, not civilly, not criminally. And if anyone should, you know, appreciate the idea of immunity, it would be President Trump, who successfully got the Supreme Court to give him immunity from prosecution even after he leaves office. This is not someone who has left office. This is someone who was in office — whether legitimately or illegitimately is not our business — and he has head of state immunity. So, that’s the first and principal issue that the court will have to deal with.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you comment on President Trump promising to run Venezuela and seize the country’s oil, saying that that’s going to fund this whole operation? Let me play Trump in his own words.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The oil companies are going to go in. They’re going to spend money. They’re going to — we’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to go to professor Miguel Tinker Salas, who writes all about Venezuela and oil. But, David Cole, the legality of this? You know, it reminds me when the U.S. invaded Iraq, George W. Bush. The jokes that were going around, a child asking his dad, “What’s our oil doing under their sand?” The same issue here. Can you talk about what he is referring to and what it means to seize the oil, the largest oil reserves in the world?
DAVID COLE: Well, the thing about President Trump is he says the quiet part out loud. So, you know, we have been accused in many other instances of intervening in other countries because we have economic interests that we want to exploit through force. What Trump did was admit it, out and out admit that the purpose of this operation is to get their oil. That is not a law enforcement operation. That is not legitimate under any understanding of international law, of U.S. law, to go and invade another country because they have something we want. It’s just — it’s just not the way the world operates, or the world should operate.
And, you know, the United States — again, the United States has done it in the past, but, generally, we have given justifications that, at least on the face of it, were far better than this one. So, we went into Grenada allegedly to protect the students, our students, who were in their medical schools. We went into Panama and pulled out General Manuel Noriega, but we did so only after Panama had declared war against the United States and had killed a U.S. Marine, and we had an Air Force base there and thousands of American citizens.
In this instance, there is no even pretense of protecting any Americans. This is about protecting America’s financial interests, and in particular the financial interests of its oil producers. And that is just beyond the pale in terms of international law, U.S. law, basic morality.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we just have 30 seconds. What recourse do those who are objecting to this say — if you say this is illegal, how is President Trump held to account, nationally and internationally?
DAVID COLE: Well, internationally, we need widespread condemnation of this action, and I’m very disturbed by the failure of many of the European states to really speak out strongly on this. They are clearly afraid of President Trump and his economic tactics against them. But we need international condemnation by the U.N. Security Council, by every country who respects sovereignty. We need Congress to reject an ongoing war in Venezuela. We should not be in Venezuela, period. And so, Congress can vote to end this and should.
AMY GOODMAN: David Cole, we want to thank you for being with us, professor in law and public policy at Georgetown University Law Center, former ACLU national legal director. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Review of Books, “Trump’s War: The invasion of Venezuela is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple.” Go to democracynow.org.
Next up, two Venezuelan American professors: NYU’s Alejandro Velasco and Pomona College’s professor emeritus Miguel Tinker Salas. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Greed” by Sweet Honey in the Rock in our firehouse studio decades ago.
