Connecticut Democrats, Reflections on the Madero Extraction

Barely two days after Nicolas Maduro made his acquaintance with the interior of a Brooklyn courthouse, National Assembly President of Venezuela Jorge Rodríguez, a part of Maduro’s socialist oppression machinery, announced his country “will release an ‘important number’ of political prisoners, including both citizens and foreigners,” ABC News has announced. “’Consider this gesture by the Bolivarian government, which is broadly intended to seek peace,’ Rodríguez said in an announcement publicized over TV.”

 

The arrest of Maduro and his future prosecution already has had a rippling effect in Latin America and the Middle East, not to mention Democrat Party Central, USA.

 

The resistance to the Trump administration by the Presidents of Columbia and Cuba, both states reliant on income derived from the purchase of Venezuelan oil, have in the past been far more fierce than the denunciations of Trump as a larval Nazi dictator by progressive Democrats.

 

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel apparently has read some of the writing on the wall. According to reports, Diaz-Canel “has said he is open to talks with the U.S. after President Donald Trump urged the regime in Havana to make a deal with him “’before it is too late.’… Trump said he would block Cuba from receiving Venezuelan oil or funds—the island nation relies heavily on both—cranking the pressure on the communist regime in Havana, which Trump has put on notice of impending action by the U.S.”

 

Interviewed on “The Arena,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy was asked by the host “… if the world was better off without Maduro in charge of Venezuela. Murphy deflected and pointed to what he said was rising instability in the country’s streets.

 

“’You know, people asked that question after Gaddafi was taken out,’ Murphy told Hunt. ‘Isn’t the world a better place because Muammar Gaddafi is no longer in charge of Libya? And then the country collapsed into a catastrophic civil war that they have not come out of today.’”

 

Gaddafi’s gruesome death and its aftermath is not ancient history. President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton reacted joyously to Gaddafi’s extraction and murder from a hidey-hole. “We came, we saw,” she said at the time, “he died.”

This writer noted back in April 2016, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic candidate for President, simply repeated the so-called “policy errors” of Mr. Bush and convinced Mr. Obama to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi from power. The ouster was successful: “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted Mrs. Clinton. Libya descended into chaos, and the Obama administration – refusing steadfastly to let a crisis go to waste – began shipping war material from a Libyan compound to American supported, anti-Assad forces in northern Syria. The American compound in Benghazi soon was destroyed by Islamic terrorists. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrorists who murdered Christians, among others, in the newly established caliphate and in Paris and Brussels and the United States and Canada and London and the Netherlands were, all of them, faithful followers of Mohammed, peace be upon him.”

 

Most readers unfamiliar with the nooks and crannies of U.S. Latin American policy for the past few decades, may regard the abduction of a Latin American socialist leader – a violation, many Democrats insist, of the “sovereignty” of Venezuela –as an intolerable intrusion. The extraction of Maduro, conducted flawlessly by Delta Force and soldiers with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was an operation designed to enforce a prior conviction of a drug lord, essentially a legal matter. Criminals, heads of countries or not, are not permitted under American law to evade the long arm of the law by falsely claiming sovereignty. The extraction of the President of Venezuela was an arrest operation to facilitate the prosecution of Maduro on charges specified in an arrest warrant issued several years earlier.

 

The arrest, however, has had profound political repercussions involving the interdiction of Venezuelan oil. Maduro and his predecessor, socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, had managed over the years to define themselves as stalwart enemies of the United States and friends of the enemies of the United States. Their duration in office by illicit means – Maduro twice stole free and democratic elections – and their oil sales to anti-Democratic states such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Cuba, China and Iran, was effectively terminated by a U.S. blockade of Venezuela’s coast line. No oil exported to the above mentioned “sovereign” countries can only mean that money from such sales will not be deposited in the treasuries of “sovereigns” such as Maduro. The U.S. throughout its tangled history has been accustomed to making sharp distinctions between sovereign nations and dictatorial sovereigns.

 

It certainly is no surprise the New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, after being briefed on plans to imprison Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife in New York City, called their capture an “act of war and a violation of federal and international law.”

 

International and U.S. federal law are at loggerheads on the point. U.S. courts apply the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, which allows criminal jurisdiction no matter how a defendant was apprehended. International law grants immunity to sitting presidents, and it is doubtful that Maduro was a democratically elected president of Venezuela. U.S. legal posture shifts, according to Ker-Frisbie, when a leader is classified as illegitimate or linked to designated narcotics or terror networks, as was Manuel Noriega, the defacto ruler of Panama and a drug runner.

It is alarmingly surprising that masters of the law such as Murphy are unfamiliar with the doctrine’s applications.