A Damning Indictment: But Not Of Maduro

The “indictment” filed against kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro by the U.S. government is … a thing?

It’s hard to tell exactly what kind of thing it is, though.

It’s shaped like a criminal indictment, and was apparently approved by a grand jury of some kind somewhere, but it’s not an actual indictment; not really.

To quote from the CBC, the U.S. “indictment” accuses Maduro of:

narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine-guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine-guns and destructive devices

And this is true: the document does accuse Maduro of these things.

Like any conspiracy indictment, it gets all hand-wavey about exactly who did what, when and where in an effort to impute all its accusations to a specific individual; conspiracy indictments do tend to read very much like conspiracy theories that way.

So far, so normal.

Then yes, it does go off the rails quite a bit to accuse a foreign head of state (a person in charge of an actual literal army) or possessing machine guns and other destructive devices (without which it’s not really possible to be an army).

The U.S. government accused the president of another country, the commander of that country’s army, of possessing “destructive devices”.

Really. It does actually get that insane.

And stupid.

But what it doesn’t do is also important.

It doesn’t, at any point, make any claim that Maduro was ever, at any time, within the jurisdiction of or subject to U.S. laws.

And that’s kind of important.

Because it demonstrates that actual law not really involved here; this is not about law.

This is about raw power, and the “indictment” only exists to provide the smallest possible fig leaf for exercising that power in whatever way the coup wants.