To Understand Venezuela, You Have To Understand Panama
Sources
Brennan, David, and Meredith Deliso. “Venezuela Live Updates: Multiple Detained Americans Released, State Department Says.” ABC News, January 13, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/International/live-updates/venezuela-live-updates-cuban-president-us-moral-authority/?id=129123988.
Finucane, Brian. “Revisiting the Office of Legal Counsel’s Override Opinion.” Just Security, November 17, 2020. https://www.justsecurity.org/73412/revisiting-the-office-of-legal-counsels-override-opinion/.
Gaiser, T. Elliot. OLC Memo on Venezuela, Maduro Capture. 2025. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26471613-olc-memo-on-venezuela-maduro-capture/.
Lowell, Hugo. “DoJ Deemed It ‘Unnecessary’ to Conclude Whether Seizing Maduro Violated Law, Memo Reveals.” US News. The Guardian, January 14, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/14/maduro-international-law-memo.
Roos, Dave. “How the US Captured Manuel Noriega in 1989.” HISTORY, January 6, 2026. https://www.history.com/articles/us-invasion-of-panama-noriega.
Savage, Charlie. “Can the U.S. Legally ‘Run’ Venezuela After Maduro’s Capture? Here’s What to Know.” U.S. The New York Times, January 3, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/us/politics/maduro-venezuela-trump-legal-issues.html.
Yilek, Caitlin. Senate War Powers Vote on Venezuela Appears at Risk as Trump Puts Pressure on Republicans - CBS News. January 14, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-venezuela-war-powers-vote-trump-pressure-republicans/.
Transcript
Hi, it’s Wednesday, January 14th, 2026, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. On Monday last week we talked about the Monroe Doctrine and how Trump is justifying the forced removal of the leader of Venezuela via a couple paragraphs in a speech given by James Monroe 200 years ago. Today we’re talking about the actual word of the law–what laws did Trump break in carrying out that attack over the weekend? What will Congress and the Supreme Court have to say? And how will the case against Maduro play out in court? And luckily, history is pretty informative for us because, it turns out, the US has intervened in Latin America a whole fuck of a lot of times, in case you didn’t know. Entire docuseries could be and have been made about each individual country and the US’s involvement, but today I want to talk about Panama, and the incredibly similar case of the capture of Manuel Noriega.
Let’s take it back through time to Panama City, 1989. In the early hours of December 20, 1989, 24,000 US troops, along with hundreds of helicopters and fighter jets descended on Panama City in a military campaign known as “Operation Just Cause.” The target was Panama’s de facto leader Manuel Noriega. He fled his home and took refuge in the embassy of the Vatican in Panama City. Soldiers surrounded the building and, for 3 days, played nonstop rock music through loudspeakers as a form of psychological warfare. On January 3rd, 1990, Noriega surrendered to the tune of I Fought The Law by The Clash. Over the two weeks that it took to execute Operation Just Cause, 20 US soldiers died and somewhere between 500 to several thousand Panamanian civilians were killed, mostly from the hundreds of American bombs launched on impoverished neighborhoods. The strike came as a surprise to Americans, including to the US Congress which did not provide pre-authorization for the strike. It came as a surprise to anyone who was aware of relations between the Panamanian leader and the US. Noriega was a longtime, well-paid, trusted CIA informant for decades before his capture. Working his way up through the military ranks, starting as early as the 1960s Noriega provided intel about operations in Cuba to the CIA, and by the late 1970s he was on the payroll making $110,000 dollars per year, paid to him by the US government the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars today. At the height of the cold war, the US was willing to shell out mountains of cash for intel on communist activity in the Western Hemisphere. He also served as a key informant to Reagan regarding the leftist Sandinistas in nearby Nicaragua.
And that entire time, while Noriega was collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay from the US government, he was also acting as an informant for Fidel Castro in Cuba and was on the payroll of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia.
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The entire time Noriega was giving intel to the US and collecting money from them with one hand, he was also allowing planeloads of cocaine through Panama on their way to the US, earning a monthly commission from the Medellin cartel of upwards of $4 million plus $200,000 per planeload. At the time of his arrest, he was estimated to be worth up to 800 MILLION US dollars or over 2 billion dollars in today’s money. And the US knew about his double dealings the entire time. Again, the Cold War made them so desperate for information that they were willing to look the other way. Until they weren’t. By 1989, the Soviets were crumbling, President George H W Bush was newly in office, and the world knew about the CIA’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Noriega’s double dealing. An expose in the New York Times in 1986 blew the lid wide open on that dirty little secret, and so Noriega’s increasing brutality when he ascended to military leader of Panama became a major PR issue for the Bush administration. In 1989, Noriega held democratic elections in Panama that were meant to be free and fair except for the part where when Noriega realized his political opponents were probably going to win he halted the voting and afterwards, when people took to the streets in protest, his version of the Gestapo, known as the “dignity battalions” attacked protesters with metal pipes and rubber hoses. After a failed coup attempt at the end of 1989, the Bush administration was waiting for a trigger event to provide the pretext necessary to go in and oust Noriega themselves. On December 16, an off duty US Marine was shot and killed by Panamanian military forces after he refused to stop for a roadblock. A US naval officer and his wife who witnessed the shooting were detained and tortured. And the Bush administration seized on the opportunity to justify military entry into the country to detain Noriega.
Another important detail: Noriega had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Florida back in 1988 on charges of drug smuggling and money laundering. And so the invasion and bombing of Panama by US military forces was sold as a DEA operation that needed military assistance in order to bring Noriega to justice. This wasn’t an act of WAR. This was clearly within Presidential powers to assist the DEA in bringing a man to justice and was completely justified by national security interests. And because it wasn’t an act of war, we could ignore Congress and international laws in the process.
The man who wrote the memo back in 1989 providing this legal justification for military action in Panama? The head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President George H W Bush, a one William Barr. Long before Bill Barr served as Attorney General during Trump’s first term, he was toiling away as a government pencil pusher attempting to provide legal justification for presidential overreach for DECADES. And his memo, called Authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Override International Law in Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities, also known as the Override Opinion, was roundly criticized back then as completely misinterpreting foundational legal principles and making legal conclusions with zero citation or justification. Back in 2020, the organization Just Security published a helpful article revisiting this botched opinion written by Bill Barr. In the Override Opinion, Barr wrote quote “as a matter of domestic law, the Executive has the power to authorize actions inconsistent with Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.” That was the basis of his argument, which is batshit crazy. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is not some deep cut obscure factoid in international law. It is one of THE central tenets that governs modern international law and has for the last 80 years. It says that states quote “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” So Barr argued that hey you know that treaty we signed? The President actually doesn’t have to abide by it. EVEN THOUGH it is well established that the treaties that the US signs on to are equal in weight to the federal laws we pass domestically. Meaning that when the constitution says that the President must take care that the laws be faithfully executed, that includes the laws established by international treaties. That is his duty. But Barr does legal gymnastics attempting to reason why that’s not actually the case. And the crux of his argument in the memo rests on an assertion he makes that the Just Security article points out is completely unaccompanied by citation to any authority. He claims that certain types of international treaties, called non-self-executing treaties, are not legally binding on the President. Why? No reason. No authority says so. I, Bill Barr, have just decided it. Ignore the fact that whether or not a treaty is “self executing” has nothing to do with whether or not it is a law of the land that the president is bound to take care to faithfully execute. It gets a bit into the legal weeds, but the point is that Bill Barr set a standard, long before Trump came to office, of using vague misstatements of law, couched in official sounding language and a fancy little memo, to justify expansive presidential power and complete disregard for long-established norms of international law. He set the stage for it. As the Just Security article concludes, quote “the Override Opinion is extremely consequential as it provides the president a practical license to violate one of the foundational rules of modern international law, a rule intended to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” and a rule that the United States played a pivotal role in creating.”
After Noriega was apprehended, the opposition candidate, who was seen as the true winner of the recent Panamanian elections, was sworn in to run the country. Noriega stood trial in the US and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. That sentence was later reduced for good behavior. He was later extradited to France in 2010 to stand trial for crimes committed there. And then finally in 2011, France extradited him back to Panama, where he spent the rest of his life in prison for crimes he had been convicted of in absentia in the 1990s. He died in 2017 at the age of 83 due to complications from a brain tumor.
Just like our incursion into Panama, the strike on Venezuela that ended in Maduro’s capture was unexpected, unapproved by Congress, and roundly criticized for being contrary to international law. And just like Bill Barr did in 1989, the yes man that Trump has positioned in the Office of Legal Counsel just released a memo attempting to provide legal justification for the strike in Venezuela. Like Barr’s Override Opinion, this legal memo tries to argue that international law doesn’t have any sway over whether the President can do whatever he wants to whatever country he wants. And, of course, the man Trump found for the job is even less qualified than Bill Barr was at the time of the Override Opinion.
Meet T. Elliot Gaiser, the Assistant US attorney for the Office of Legal Counsel whose signature appears at the bottom of the memo the Trump regime recently released as legal justification for its strike on Venezuela. Gaiser is a 36 year old graduate of ultra conservative Hillsdale College. According to his Wikipedia article, Gaiser was a conservative podcaster while attending Hillsdale college, though I couldn’t find record of that podcast. After college he interned at you guessed it The Heritage Foundation as well as Liberty Central, a political group founded by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He then went to law school at Ohio State for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago. Fun fact about the law school game is that a lot of people will do a year at a lower ranked law school because they couldn’t get into the higher ranked ones and then transfer to a higher ranked law school for their second and third year so they can put the more prestigious title on their resume. Fun little trick of the industry. After law school Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. He then worked as legal counsel for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, including working on litigation that challenged the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Litigation that was roundly unsuccessful. He then became solicitor general of Ohio before being nominated by Trump last year to be assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel, no doubt recommended to Trump by his connections in The Heritage Foundation for Gaiser’s truly stellar far right resume. They want yes men who can use fancy legal words to legitimize their illegal actions, and that’s what they got in Gaiser. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called him “completely unqualified” at his confirmation hearing, because he’s never worked for the Department of Justice or the federal government at all. Gaiser’s signature also appears on a memo justifying strikes on boats in the Caribbean. He seems to enjoy the habit of making comparisons between two completely unrelated things as legal justification for doing heinous shit. For example he compared the alleged drug traffickers in the boats the US bombed in the Caribbean to a foreign nation attempting to invade the United States, making their extrajudicial murder justified. He does it a lot in this memo about Nicolas Maduro as well.
In the memo he does confirm that Operation Absolute Resolve, the name of the campaign to detain Nicolas Maduro, will TECHNICALLY constitute an armed conflict under international law BUT that doesn’t actually matter at all. In fact, he doesn’t bother to get into the specifics of how international law would be implicated at all, because actually we only need to look at domestic law and the constitution to conclude that the President can do whatever he wants here. He says quote “international law does not restrict the President as a matter of domestic law when it comes to extraordinary rendition.” And what does he cite to? Oh yeah the Bill Barr memo from 1989. This is what’s so fun about the right wing legal apparatus is that one person needs to make an assertion in a legal memo and back it up with zero citations or evidence but then 36 years later another person can just cite to that unsubstantiated memo and viola there’s your supporting evidence. You can just create things to cite to out of thin air if there are enough layers. What a fun trick.
And so because, based on nothing, the President can just ignore international law whenever he wants to, then we just have to look at this other made up two part test to determine whether the mission served a national interest and whether its scope is limited enough to not rise to the level of a “war in a constitutional sense.”
As I say all the time on this channel, whenever the administration can argue “national security” is an issue, they get wide leeway from Congress and the courts to do whatever they want. Whether or not the threat to national security is realistic or justified doesn’t really seem to matter, as long as they say the magic words. So of course it’s not hard to say well drugs, scary cartels, national security, we’re just going in as a law enforcement operation this isn’t a MILITARY operation, and badabing close enough there’s your legal reasoning. It’s a 22 page memo, large parts have been redacted, but if you want to read it for yourself I’ve linked it in the sources below. So in summation the US signed the UN charter. Any treaty we sign and is approved by Congress becomes the law of the land. The president is tasked with taking care that the law of the land is faithfully executed. Under a plain reading of the law that would include that he can’t violate central tenets of international treaties that we’ve signed. Under the ever-expanding unitary executive theory acrobatics that his lawyer-trained yes men are willing to do, none of that matters because look at this memo Bill Barr wrote once.
Okay so, laws broken: definitely the UN Charter. But also, potentially, the War Powers Act of 1973. In response to Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Act over Nixon’s veto to reassert its authority over the US’ involvement in foreign wars. Under the constitution, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, but it is Congress that is allowed to declare war or escalate armed conflict, not the president. That got wishy washy during the Korean and Vietnam wars, which is why Congress reasserted that authority through the War Powers Act. It requires the President reports to Congress within 48 hours of initiating hostilities, and gives a deadline of 60 days unless Congress approves. But of course ever since the passage of that act, presidents have pushed the bounds of their authority. And so last week, the Senate moved to pass a resolution to block further military operations in Venezuela, with all Democrats supporting the measure and five Republicans backing it as well. The resolution wasn’t formally passed, but the Senate is scheduled to hold a vote on it today, Wednesday. That vote is in question as Trump has spent the last week badgering the 5 Republicans who voted with Democrats to move the thing forward last week. Trump has also claimed he decided to cancel further strikes on Venezuela pending the outcome of this measure. It’s unclear if a vote will even happen today and how that vote would go at this point. The reality is there are no troops on the ground in Venezuela at the moment, and it appears that Trumps’ strongman tactics have worked to force the interim government to bend to his will for now, with the Trump regime claiming that the administration of Delcy Rodriguez, former Vice President who was sworn in as President after Maduro’s capture, is being cooperative, though it's unclear what that means.
And Nicolas Maduro and his wife appeared in federal court last week for their formal arraignment. Maduro plead not guilty, going on a lengthy diatribe during what is typically meant to be a short and uneventful hearing. Once again, because the US has inserted itself and deposed leaders in numerous countries around the world frequently in the past, we have a good bit of precedent to tell us how it will likely go for Maduro. And frankly it’s not looking great for him. In his defense, he will likely try to argue that his arrest was unlawful because it violated international law. That will not hold up in court. The Supreme Court has held regularly that the method by which a person is detained internationally is outside their jurisdiction and doesn’t matter so long as the person is presently within their jurisdiction, which Nicolas Maduro is. Secondly, he will argue that he has head of state immunity. Going back at least as far as the early 1800s, the Supreme Court has recognized that the head of state of a foreign country is exempt from arrest or detention within that foreign territory. However, Manual Noriega also tried this argument and failed. Noriega was a military strongman, not a recognized head of state. Similarly, Nicolas Maduro, though formerly a legitimately elected president in Venezuela, is not the legitimate head of state of the country in the eyes of most foreign governments. There is ample evidence that the most recent elections that Maduro claimed to have won were undermined by widespread fraud. There is a question as to who gets to determine who is the head of state–is it whether the US recognizes him formally as the head of state or whether he has declared himself head of state? But odds are that, just like in Noriega’s case, the court is going to find that he was not legitimately the head of any state and therefore cannot claim immunity. And Maduro was formally indicted, there is ample evidence that he committed various crimes for which he could be found guilty in the United States, like Maduro is not an innocent victim bystander in all of this, as much as I don’t agree with the US forcefully removing the leaders of countries, whether legitimate or not, Maduro is not like a good man, ya know. So I anticipate a pretty negative outcome for him, and the courts will not care who he is or how he was captured.
So things continue to be up in the air both on the ground in Venezuela as well as here in the United States. News happens fast so the war powers vote might happen as I’m posting this video. If it does, that just means that Congress would be very very angry!!! If he did anything else in Venezuela. But it seems that his sights are already set elsewhere, having threatened Cuba, a major oil partner with Venezuela, as well as Mexico and, of course, Greenland. We’ll talk about Greenland next week–well, that’s the goal anyway. You never know what new and fresh horrors await us over the rest of this week, so that could change.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from Monday with updates on what’s happening in Minneapolis.
