Can you briefly tell us about your background and experience in international law?
unidentified
Sure.
Well, international law is a big field, and there's lots of subfields to it.
My particular subfields include things like international environmental law, climate change law, international criminal law, which of course implicates, you know, Mr. Maduro, and national security and foreign relations law.
Now, there are some disagreements among experts in this field whether or not the U.S.'s arrest of Maduro, obviously, which happened in his home country, violates international law.
Where do you stand?
unidentified
Yeah, it clearly does.
Everything about the whole Venezuela scenario violates international law in about a dozen different ways.
Not just with Maduro's capture, but backing up to blowing up boats in the Caribbean.
What we saw from the Trump administration is an interesting pivot.
During the period that we were targeting Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, all you heard from the president and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was that we were at war against narco-terrorists.
By labeling them terrorists instead of criminals, they weren't obligated to capture them, arrest them, prosecute them, present evidence, right?
You can do targeted killing.
But when you back into a situation where you're calling it a war, then you're backing into the Geneva Conventions.
And when you back into the Geneva Conventions, you can't do things like blow up people who survived your first attack, right?
Then, when they decided they wanted to capture Mr. Maduro, suddenly Secretary Rubio appeared on the scene and said, no, this isn't war.
This is law enforcement.
So there was this pivot.
Now you have to ask yourself, why was there this pivot?
Well, under the laws of war, if you're in an armed conflict, which we asserted that we were, then the commander-in-chief is a valid target.
So that would be Mr. Maduro, right?
Under Article 236 of the Venezuelan Constitution, the president is the commander-in-chief.
Well, they would be ipso facto admitting that he's the president, right?
So they had to move out of that war setting into a law enforcement setting so that at trial, he's not able to raise a sovereign immunity defense by being the president.