Dripping oil and blood

America has been a nation of moralisers since the days of Benjamin Franklin who would surely say that America did it for the good of Venezuela. Nevertheless, the truth is, armed with what is unmistakably the most feared and powerful war machine ever created, America has been the leading violator of international legality and prime perpetrator of international outlawry. Therefore, the apprehension and forced exile of Maduro being violative of international law and Article 2 of the UN Charter is of a piece with the character of an American administration regardless of its dispensation

- PRASENJIT CHOWDHURY

There is hardly any room for surprise in the forced exile of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the way the ruse of anti-narcotics operations was used to interdict oil tankers and to kill civilians on boats in Caribbean waters. Because to cut a long story short, the U.S. administration and military, has resorted toa huge variety of killing machines including the use of napalm, white phosphorous, bunker-busting bombs, cluster bombs, radioactive weapons such as depleted uranium shells, and weapons of mass destruction that have over the last 50 years left millions dead.

Ithad armed and funded death squads in places suchas East Timor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras (especially the CIA-created “Battalion 316”), Colombia, Bolivia, Angola, and Mozambique with an enviable degree of impunity. Ever sincethe election of Hugo Chavez, Washington has been trying to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution but in recent years, regime-change efforts have mostly relied on an all-out economic war against Venezuela.

And in case we are overawed by the US operation to capture Maduro carried out by the Army’s elite Delta Force and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, we have seen massacres carried out by the infamous “Tiger Force” of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division before; not to speak of extralegal operations such as the CIA’s Operation Phoenix that assassinated between 20000-40000 civilian Vietnamese “activists” between 1967 and 1971; the American-style death squads of Iraq's “Salvador Option”, and last but not the least, executive assassination rings under the aegis of the Joint Special Operations Command that engage in preemptive and proactive attacks on foreign nationals in their own countries.