The bounty farce: How the Western media rebrands an invasion as a ‘capture’

When the Trump administration’s attorney general, William Barr, announced a “bounty” of $15 million in March 2020 on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the presentation felt less like a diplomatic maneuver and more like a casting call for a low-budget spaghetti Western. The entire show – replete with the cinematic gravitas of a sheriff pinning a “Wanted” poster to a saloon door – was a masterclass in American kitsch. We were told this was about “narcoterrorism” and “fentanyl-laced cocaine,” a convenient script that rebranded a sovereign head of state as a common cartel boss – a low life criminal.

For those of us who lived through the 2011 NATO invasion of Libya, the performance was painfully familiar. I remember when the same ink was used to blot out Muammar Gaddafi’s legal status, transforming a recognized leader into a “legitimate target” overnight.

Now, as then, the Western media dutifully swapped the word “abduction” for “capture” to describe the military raid in Caracas. We are witnessing the revival of a dangerous playbook: one where semantic engineering does the heavy lifting for illegal regime change, and international law is treated as a mere suggestion in the pursuit of oil and optics.

This rebranding, part of the same official Western propaganda by top Western media outlets, looks like a calculated act of “perception management” designed not only to bypass the messy hurdles of international law but also to brainwash the public.

By replacing the word “abduction” (which identifies the illegal seizure of a sovereign leader) with the sanitized term “capture,” the Western media effectively serves as a PR wing for the White House. To “capture” serves as a legal arrest; to “abduct” a president from his capital is a violation of the very sovereignty the UN Charter was built to protect.

I saw this same alchemy in March, 2011, when Barack Obama declared that Gaddafi is no longer has “the legitimacy to........

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