It was 2002 when Delcy Rodriguez, sworn in today as President of Venezuela, came to my apartment in London well after midnight to tell me, a BBC television reporter, that the US was planning to kidnap, and likely assassinate, the then-president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

The coup, Rodriguez said, was planned for March, but I could not get the BBC to send me there on the basis of Rodriguez’s inside info. In fact, there was no coup in March. Chavez was seized on April 2.

President Chavez was kidnapped and flown by helicopter to a prison on Margarita Island off the Venezuelan coast. But President George W. Bush had let Venezuelan plotters operate the coup, and they were incompetent.

Chavez, the first Black and Indian president in Venezuela’s history, was guarded by a young soldier who was the same color as Chavez. He handed Chavez his cell phone. Chavez reached his Air Force generals who made it clear to the plotters — most of them white (race matters here) — that they would be bombed into oblivion unless Chavez were returned in 48 hours to his desk. The coup leaders brought back Chavez within hours.

I’m not going to say that we weren’t warned. Trump has been beating the war drums about Venezuela for months. The US has been shooting small motorboats and their crews, like ducks on the water, for months, while making unverified claims about whether they were drug runners. The US had built up an intimidating flotilla of carriers and support ships in the Caribbean demanding that the country’s president, Maduro resign and leave the country.

Still, I have to admit, I held onto a last straw of hope that not even Trump would be crazy enough to invade the country illegally under international law and without Congressional approval. When we started hijacking ships on the open seas and bombing ports where they were supposedly being loaded, I knew we were going from bad to worse, but still, surely someone somewhere in Washington would tell Trump to calm down and get a grip. There was no reason that the US needed to go any farther off the grid as a rogue nation.

What was defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime (one country attacking another one) is depicted by Trump and even the supposedly anti-Trump corporate media as some sort of law-enforcement. Bombing is liberating. Kidnapping is capturing. Murdering people on boats is “impeding the flow of drugs.”