CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Bogus U.S. Case Against Nicolas Maduro

Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

So the U.S. military and CIA kidnapped the duly elected, legitimate president of Venezuela in January, shackled him, brought him to a U.S. prison, and now the white house is desperate to pin crimes on him that fit the unjustifiable punishment it has inflicted. That would be money laundering. And, apparently, the gang in the white house worries, per CBS May 19, about the absence of this charge from the New York indictment of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, because their case is weak, and they know it. In fact, it’s a good guess – mind you, a guess – that it’s been fabricated, spun out of whole cloth to frame Maduro for whatever might stick, because Donald “We’ll Take the Oil” Trump despises Maduro’s political pedigree – socialist – and coveted, before grabbing, his nation’s energy.

I suppose if the money laundering charges don’t work, there are always gun charges, and if those don’t pan out, the Department of Justice (sic) can try a drug indictment. Meanwhile, Washington, having evidently co-opted the acting president in Caracas, Delcy Rodriguez, has finally got its hands back on luckless Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, deported over the weekend of May 16 from Venezuela back to the U.S., whence he had previously been released from prison by Joe Biden on December 20, 2023.

Saab’s an ally of Maduro, and according to the AP on May 19, “was charged Monday with bribing top officials to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from lucrative contracts to import food at a time of widespread hardship” in Venezuela. Who caused this hardship, Saab allegedly exploited? The government for which that so-called justice department works, the government whose sanctions starve Venezuelans, the government that had the brazen nerve to blame an admittedly shady character like Saab for the atrocious damage it inflicted on Venezuela. That would be the government of the USA.

So there is “a single count of money laundering tied to a decade-old conspiracy” against Saab. He was previously kidnapped in the first iteration of Trump’s rule, back in 2020, during an airplane refueling stopover in Cape Verde on “a high-level humanitarian mission to Iran.” Those who saw Israel’s hand in this kidnapping of the Venezuelan with........

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