A comment here led me to became aware of an interesting non-profit group calling itself the National Security Archive (NSA). It is located at George Washington University. This group combs through and pieces together government information, including content obtained under the Freedom of Information Act law and other reliable sources. Declassified government documents are among the information sources the NSA analyzes.
Detailed research and analysis like this is about the only way the American people can get useful, trustworthy glimpses into what our government wants to keep secret from us. Investigative journalists also do this kind of public service work, but as we all know, the US government routinely keeps us as ignorant as it can about most of the bad things it does.
This link is to a detailed, deep dive into the origins of the power a US president has to mess with other nations' internal affairs, including kidnapping their leaders, rigging elections and staging coups. The article is entitled Imperial Prerogative: How the Panama Invasion and the “Barr Doctrine” Set the Stage for the Maduro “Snatch” Operation. Our old friend Bill Barr was an attorney that helped cook up the "legal reasoning" to give US presidents the power to, more or less, wreck other nations, including democracies. The article focuses on the US involvement with Panama in the 1980s, but extrapolates that to the US messing with Venezuela in 2026.
The NSA article points out that In 1989, Barr, then Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), wrote at least five legal opinions related to US efforts to remove Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega from power. At least two of the Barr memos are still classified. Chief among them was a finding that the President had the inherent constitutional authority to arrest individuals abroad even if those actions contravene customary international law and even if they contravene unexecuted treaties or treaty provisions, such as Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. The UN charter bars threats and use of force among member states except in self-defense.
So despite being a member state, the US seriously blows off the UN and its charter when its convenient to do so.
The NSA analysis points out that both Operation Just Cause (Panama 1989) and Operation Absolute Resolve (Venezuela 2026), are strikingly similar. Both rely on (1) executive branch legal memoranda claiming inherent constitutional authority unconstrained by international law, (2) invocation of drug enforcement as justification, and (3) significant civilian casualties, and clear violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.
Apparently, the US operation in Venezuela today is illegal under international law. And the reasons for intervention, narco-terrorism and drug enforcement, appear to be nonsense.
CONTEXT
In case anyone is wondering, the NSA is the gold standard for declassified document research about US national security policy. It was founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars at George Washington University. The NSA has the world's largest nongovernmental collection of declassified US documents. Media Bias/Fact Check rates the NSA as Least Biased with High Credibility, based on its minimal editorializing of historical and contemporary issues, and based on its extensive use of declassified documents and its extensive use of primary and secondary information sources.
Q: Is it better to keep the American people in the dark about the bad things the US government does to other countries? Or should we be kept reasonably well informed* so that the public knows what is going on and can express support or disapproval?
* Just reasonably informed, not completely informed about things that reasonably need to be kept secret from us.
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