Karim Khan and Delcy Rodríguez
Why Complex Political Realities Resist Social Media Certainty
Social media is not conducive to nuance. In the interest of reach, cut and dried positions are more effective and binary moral judgement expected. This leads to over-simplification of complex issues, and to skipping over facts inconvenient to your chosen narrative.
There are issues affecting two high-profile people where it is worth considering the detail before coming to a firm view—and in doing so perhaps acknowledging that we may not have sufficient information to make that view more than provisional.
I want to look at the furores around Karim Khan and Delcy Rodríguez.
Karim Khan has been dismissed as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, by the Bureau of the Court (consisting of the diplomatic representatives of its member states). This follows a lengthy investigation in which three judges found there was no evidence that met the standard of criminal proof, set against member state committee reports that argued in effect that in cases of workplace harassment, the standard of criminal proof is not applicable.
The essential background is that Khan had requested and obtained arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and two Israeli ministers, pursuant to charges of war crimes against them.
The allegations against Khan did not emerge until after the Netanyahu arrest warrant.
The effort to remove Khan was undoubtedly promoted within the ICC structures by those governments aligned with Israel. The Israeli government itself appears to have been actively pushing for Khan’s removal.
The very well-connected Israeli journalist Guy Azriel, from right-wing Israeli TV channel i24NEWS, has posted that a team of Israeli diplomats was involved in promoting the allegations against Khan. Azriel is a former Israeli diplomat himself and well plugged in.
The ICC has of course suffered from massive pressure from Israel and the United States, with sanctions applied to its judges and personal threats made directly against both judges and staff.
Karim Khan has stated that his family were threatened by Israel. But just as I noted that the allegations against Khan only emerged after the obtained arrest warrants against Netanyahu, we should note that Karim Khan only spoke about this after the sexual allegations.
Yet none of this makes the allegations against Karim Khan automatically untrue. All of that could be true, but the sexual harassment genuine.
That is the viewpoint of Em Colquhoun in this opinion piece in the Canary. Colquhoun also notes correctly that the ICC has a long history of pro-Western narrative bias in its targets for prosecution, and ludicrously targeted Hamas figures for prosecution as “balance” to the Israel warrants.
On 3 December 2023 I wrote extremely critically of Karim Khan:
I saw the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court shuttled around Israel and the West Bank in a fleet of armored Toyotas, looking like the most arrogant of VIPs, while refusing to act against Israel and seeking to “bothsides” the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
I realised that Karim Khan KC, brother of an ex Tory MP, himself should by rights be charged with complicity in war crimes.
Karim Khan is not a standout crusader for justice who sought to redress the balance of ICC prosecutions. He only sought the Netanyahu charges when the war crimes of the Israelis in Gaza became so blatant that they could no longer be avoided. The limited number of warrants in circumstances where the entire Israel cabinet and senior IDF command are plainly implicated in Genocide, alongside thousands of soldiers, is glaring. But Khan did appear assiduously to be pursuing the warrants against Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and Israel was sufficiently worried to actively seek to displace him, with eventual success.
I part with the Canary article where it argues that where the truth of the sexual abuse allegations is not plain, the appearance of impropriety is sufficient to warrant dismissal.
What? This is extraordinary. “It doesn’t matter if you did it, it looks like you could have done it” is an extraordinary measure of guilt. What does it mean in practice?
In my diplomatic career, I frequently travelled in many countries and to many conferences with female staff who often were subordinate to me, and we would quite normally stay in neighbouring hotel rooms. I never had any non-professional relationship with any of the staff concerned and no allegation was ever made against me. But if one had been, I don’t see how I could have avoided Colquhoun’s appearance test.
What would be the consequences in practice? A man could never be alone in a room with a junior colleague, could never travel for work with one? Otherwise there is the appearance of impropriety?
This is nonsense. It is not just nonsense, it is nonsense of a return to Victorian societal standards and actually a threat to the advances in women’s professional status.
The problem with the conveniently timed allegations against Khan is that we have seen the playbook often. The state weaponises sexual allegations, and the agency of apparently left-wing commentators like Colquhoun, to undermine and even destroy those whom the state sees as a threat—as Khan had somewhat unexpectedly become.
Let me give you a personal anecdote.
When I was attempting to stop the acceptance of intelligence from torture by Western intelligence services in the War on Terror, I was suddenly faced with 18 disciplinary charges. They were sprung on me at a meeting in FCO personnel department, where I was told that they would be investigated if I did not accept reassignment to a less controversial Ambassadorship.
I did not accept and an investigation commenced.
One of the charges was that I had extorted sex from visa applicants. I was astonished by this accusation. After months of investigation I was eventually faced with a visa application form as the evidence against me. It had written on it—I do not know by whom, but not by me—“Ambassador says approve.”
The application form was for a young lady named Albina Safarova—a person I had never met in my life. Furthermore it eventually transpired Ms Safarova had not made any complaint against me and had not claimed I had ever met her. The only “evidence” of any kind was “Ambassador says approve,” written by an unknown hand on an application form.
There is more. I started to get messages from many people who had worked for me. It became obvious the FCO was systematically contacting all the women I had worked with in my 22-year career with them, and was encouraging them to make accusations against me.
They could not find one person to accuse me. Many of those contacted still worked for the FCO. It was made plain that their employer would like them to make complaints, yet none did.
In my own case, I know for certain that the state fabricated a sexual abuse accusation against me because I was seen as having become a threat.
This happened to me in 2003. I suspect in today’s peculiar atmosphere the state may have had more success in getting me completely cancelled, despite the complete lack of relevant evidence and the absence of any woman actually accusing me of anything. Doubtless there were situations where Em Colquhoun could have discerned an appearance of impropriety, even though nothing actually happened.
I was eventually cleared of all 18 charges. It is impossible accidentally to make 18 separate accusations against somebody, all of which turn out to be untrue. I was disciplined for having revealed the allegations existed, and eventually forced out.
I subsequently saw sexual allegations weaponised against close personal friends of mine, each of whom was seen as a threat to the State—including Julian Assange and Alex Salmond. I know that I was innocent, and everything I know of their cases makes me believe those two were also. Otherwise, you have to believe that people who have dedicated their lives to anti-imperialist causes are routinely, sexual psychopaths. This is akin to believing Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.
You would also have to explain why Murray, Assange and Salmond have faced formal investigation when nobody on the Epstein list has—and then further explain why all the resources of the Deep State, fully deployed, were unable to convict the anti-Imperialists.
We do not know how events in the ICC will play out. There is no doubt whatsoever that the UK, EU and allies will seek to obtain the appointment of a Zionist prosecutor who will deprioritise or even drop action against Netanyahu. I expect they will succeed; but we shall see.
I do not know the truth about the Karim Khan allegations. It is important to repeat that. But I am deeply, deeply suspicious of their timing. Any abuse of power imbalance at work, if it existed, is very bad. It has come to be a part of the narrative surrounding the ICC’s actions against Netanyahu. We also have the facts of the Genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and the scale of the everyday sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees.
So we have potentially two wrongs, the just resolution of which has come into conflict through circumstance and timing.
The first potential wrong is an individual instance of sexual abuse in the workplace by Karim Khan. I do not know if this is true or not. But I do know it has been weaponised by those seeking to stymie the investigation of the second wrong. The second wrong is Genocide and war crime on a mass scale. I do know for certain that this is real.
If pursuing the first alleged wrong does indeed come to prevent justice for the definite crime against humanity, it is difficult to see that as a desirable outcome.
Now, gentle reader, I give you an elegant segue. Let nobody think I do not work at my writing.
Just as Karim Khan was removed as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Venezuela announced it was withdrawing from it. Left-wing commentators immediately seized on this as further evidence that Venezuela is under Trump’s direct control. Yet the withdrawal decision was pronounced by new Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia, a man of impeccable left-wing credentials who survived Chávez’s extremely thorough purge of the diplomatic service and earlier served as Foreign Minister under Maduro. The reasons Plasencia gave were impeccably left-wing and entirely valid, relating to the ICC’s Western bias and disproportionate action against leaders from the Global South.
If Venezuela had done this a year ago, it would have seemed a move consistent with the values of the Bolivarian revolution. But happening now, it all seems too convenient that it aligns, in practical effect if not in expressed motivation, with Donald Trump’s campaign against the ICC. It does so at a time when US and Israeli troops have been in the country providing earthquake relief.
The presence of the Israelis had sparked the first demonstration in Caracas by hitherto loyalist Chavista elements against a policy of Delcy Rodríguez’s government.
There has been much written recently about the appropriation of Venezuelan oil revenues by the Trump administration. This remains an entirely illegal arrangement, with no founding agreement by the Venezuelan government and based on straight military force. The US still has naval ships off the Venezuelan coast to intercept any tanker not carrying oil to a US Treasury-approved destination.
The USA has been illegally selling Venezuela’s oil. It has not physically occupied the oilfields, but Venezuela has been filling tankers with oil for which the US Treasury has collected the payment. Trump has boasted repeatedly of the huge amounts of money his administration has made from Venezuelan oil. The Financial Times this week ran an article on Venezuela’s missing oil money.
The answer to this question is a prime example of the truth taking us away from the simple narrative that gives a comfortingly clear picture. The answer will surprise you. I have direct first-hand knowledge of this from my time in Venezuela and from access to the highest levels of government there.
The US Treasury has been paying Venezuela its oil revenue regularly and promptly. It has been paying 97.5% of it into the Venezuelan treasury within one week of receipt. 2.5% of it has been retained by the US Treasury as a “fee.” The idea of a transaction fee for illegal military seizure of control of the asset is a blatant racket, but that is the extent of the American depredation.
So the total amount the USA has stolen from Venezuela is about $300 million to date, not the billions Trump has claimed. In fact the US naval operation to blockade Venezuelan tankers (and kidnap President Maduro) will have cost much more than the money the US has made from its illegal venture. It is however not in anybody’s interest to say so, of which more in a moment.
There had been an initial period when the money was going to a personal account in Qatar rather than the US Treasury, and no doubt at that time Trump was considering what he could get away with. But that only lasted a couple of weeks, and that money was recovered quickly into the new arrangement.
I can only state for certain that 97.5% was being paid over within a week for the first four months of the period, until I left Venezuela. But it is my understanding that it has continued smoothly.
There is more. The US has been selling the Venezuelan oil at a 5% discount to the world price. How you calculate a benchmark price for Venezuelan crude before applying the discount I am not sure, as the stuff is quite particular. But—and here we get into the realms of inconvenient facts a lot of my audience will not wish to hear—this compares to the 15% discount that China was imposing when it was the main recipient of Venezuelan crude.
On top of which, China was making payment not within a week, but with a delay of months and sometimes years. Plus China was deducting money at source for repayment of Chinese loans to Venezuela. These loans were genuine and for excellent infrastructure projects, but obviously the deduction of repayments from oil revenues hit Venezuelan government fiscal flexibility hard.
So the truth is that Venezuela is (even apart from the price bonanza from the Hormuz closure) getting a great deal more revenue from the United States than it was from China (and Russia) and getting it much quicker. That is an inconvenient fact if ever I heard one.
The Rodríguez government does not trumpet this, as it does not wish to appear complicit or happy with a client relationship that is imposed on it and illegal. The Trump Administration does not trumpet this, because it wishes its base to believe it is making billions out of Venezuela, not engaged in a military-led venture that is actually costing billions.
That is why the whereabouts of Venezuela’s money is a mystery. I know the answer because I was told and shown at the highest levels of government. I actually both phoned and emailed the Financial Times to try to tell them the answer to their front-page question, but they did not reply to me.
However, the basic and rather dull answer is that Venezuela’s money is in Venezuela.
I would add to this a point which Delcy Rodríguez made to me personally. Venezuela had never voluntarily stopped selling oil to the United States. The USA imposed sanctions on Venezuela, not the other way round. In a free world, the United States would be the largest destination for Venezuelan oil and is the country’s most obvious economic partner—a point made by Anya Parampil in her excellent book Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire.
The difficulty is the United States' unwillingness to engage in fair trade with anyone.
What Venezuela desperately wants is the normal ability to trade fairly with any other country, including the ability to supply Cuba. It has been prevented from doing so because the Western powers are desperate to destroy any state running an alternative economic model—which if capitalism were genuinely an economically superior system, they would have no need to do. China did not impose the sanctions on Venezuela, but exploited its advantage from them.
The USA has imposed a classic Imperialist resource-extraction operation.
The imperial extraction does not lie primarily in the headline price paid for the crude. The oil can only be sold through and to US-approved companies, which capture the larger margins in trading, refining, shipping, financing and marketing. Venezuela receives payment for the raw commodity (minus the small fee), but is locked out of the higher-value stages and denied the freedom to sell to other buyers. That is how classic resource imperialism frequently works: control of commodity access, logistics and the value-added chain rather than simple open seizure of the export revenue.
There was a stunning Freedom of Information release last week of a CIA note that indicated that the CIA did not believe that the Venezuelan elections from 2006 to 2020 were significantly affected by election fraud. So the imposition of the vast bulk of Western sanctions which crippled Venezuela over that period—and at one point caused devastating famine and mass emigration—were knowingly based on a lie.
My own investigations in Venezuela led me to believe that opposition claims that they won the 2024 Presidential election—claims promoted by all the Western powers—were equally untrue and the “evidence” incomplete and often forged.
Venezuela has obtained very little by way of sanctions relief from the Trump administration, and appallingly it has received no sanctions relief at all from Western nations to help it cope with the devastating earthquake. This has made it difficult for the relief charities to pay for anything, move goods and equipment to Venezuela or operate there at all. The Western media has delighted in making claims of government inefficiency in earthquake response, while never mentioning the crippling effect of decades of sanctions on government supply chains.
In truth, the resilience of Caracas has been extraordinary. I am in contact with the team I assembled in Caracas and a score or so of other friends and contacts. Mobile phone contact was never cut to the large majority and only for a few hours to those who did lose access. Electricity has been almost constant, and so has potable water supply.
What is more, the massive Russian- and Belarusian-built social housing blocks—which I had greatly feared would have collapsed with huge loss of life—withstood the earthquake comparatively well. It was the modern glass and steel blocks in the wealthier areas which proved most prone to disaster. That may be due to those areas being on flatter alluvial land more prone to shake.
Of all the decisions for which Delcy Rodríguez has been criticised from the left, the one with which I struggle most has been the acceptance of an Israeli earthquake relief team, with accompanying IDF PR personnel. For Israel, which buried tens of thousands of children under rubble, to be parading its assistance in digging people out of rubble, is too much for me.
But consider this. You are Delcy, and your capital has just suffered as much catastrophic damage and loss of life in an hour as Gaza did in many months. You have thousands of people potentially alive and desperate to be dug out. Could you turn down any offer of specialist relief in those circumstances? It was an agonising decision to be forced to make. I received a personal assurance from the Venezuelan government that the Israeli deployment was temporary and had a time limit which, if true, means they have already gone.
I have struggled with this. But ask yourself this question before you condemn, as I asked myself:
If your own children were buried under rubble, and an Israeli rescue team to hand, would you forbid them to dig your children out? When you have considered that question, then you can condemn the Venezuelan government.
I would not, I think, have allowed the Israelis to come and conduct an exercise where I suspect propaganda value to them was in the event greater than any real help: but I am not on the ground to verify what they really did.
It is worth noting here that repeated speculation that Venezuela is about to normalise diplomatic relations with Israel is so far unfounded. I was told in person by the recently departed foreign minister that Venezuela had made plain to the Trump administration that, in its new enforced relationship with the United States, a red line on the Venezuelan side was the anti-imperialist alignment of its foreign policy. That appears to be the case, as reflected in votes at the UN General Assembly, where Venezuela has not switched to the US camp.
Delcy Rodríguez’s point that Venezuela never voluntarily stopped trading with the USA is also relevant to its position with the IMF. Venezuela never left the IMF. Chávez said that he would, but then changed his mind. Maduro also did not leave the IMF.
Contrary to much disinformation, Venezuela has therefore not rejoined the IMF. Nor has Venezuela accepted an IMF loan, a Structural Adjustment Programme, or any IMF budget-monitoring mechanism. What Venezuela has done is to take some 500 million dollars in Special Drawing Rights to which Venezuela was entitled. Access to these had been blocked by financial sanctions, which were voided by the slight easing under Trump.
The money was Venezuela’s share of a general release to assist developing countries through the COVID years. Venezuela was simply blocked from its share. It was, in effect, Venezuela’s own money. To portray taking this as some “betrayal” of socialist values is ludicrous.
I have no reason to adjust the assessment of Delcy Rodríguez that I reached after careful study. In fact I have the strongest reinforcement, in that I now know with absolute certainty that Delcy Rodríguez did not betray Maduro. I have had direct access to documentary, eye-witness, audio and visual evidence that conclusively showed me that:
Maduro was aware of his likely kidnap and stood down armed resistance.
In the preceding weeks Rodríguez had been approached to cooperate with Maduro’s removal and had adamantly refused.
On the night of his kidnap Rodríguez was present, furious, refusing US overtures and seeking every avenue for Maduro’s immediate release.
I believed these things to be true from first-hand accounts before I wrote my last major article on Venezuela: I am now absolutely certain they are true.
Venezuela abjured the path of armed resistance to the poised US forces. Venezuela is a quarter the size of Iran, has far weaker armed forces and is within direct bomber range of the United States. It is a pacific country and has chosen to try to ride out the Trump storm, while maintaining the key benefits of the Bolivarian Revolution—especially free and universal education, free healthcare, widespread pensions and the commune system.
The Chavista system already drew much criticism from the international Left for simply aiming to spread these social benefits from oil revenues, while allowing capitalists to dominate the rest of the economy. Communal ownership of means of production and distribution was growing organically, particularly through the communes, but there has been no fundamental change to the capitalist sector in a mixed economy. It is this factor which makes accommodation with US capitalist firms possible.
This is dependent on the Venezuelan government tolerating US predator capitalism and the US government tolerating Venezuelan wealth distribution. This is the basis on which Rodríguez has been avoiding war and waiting for Trump to pass. It is the basis on which Trump has been exerting no pressure for regime change in Caracas, where he said again this week that Venezuela was “not ready” for early elections.
Where there is room for genuine criticism from the Left is that this approach effectively cooperates with imposed American imperialism in key economic sectors; that the US is seeking to expand its monopoly into other Venezuelan mineral resources; and that imagining this is temporary and the Democrats would now be any better is probably illusory.
But a devastating war is the only currently available alternative, and that definitely would destroy Chávez’s social achievements.
There is no plain right or wrong answer. All of Rodríguez’s options are bloody awful, compounded by the rightward shift of Latin American governments and the new US-backed electoral fraud next door in Colombia. Those who have romantic notions of wearing bandanas and brandishing AK-47s in mountains and jungles have for the most part not seen children die in agony. This is not easy.
I have addressed two apparently disparate topics. What unites them is simple. In both cases the available facts are messy, the moral weights pull in more than one direction, and the political incentives of powerful actors are obvious. Social media, and much of what now passes for political commentary, cannot tolerate that. It demands a clear good guy, a clear villain, and the suppression of any fact that complicates the story.
That demand is not moral clarity. It is intellectual laziness dressed up as principle. It produces the spectacle of people who will not look at the timing of the allegations against Khan, or at the actual flow of Venezuelan oil money, or at the evidence of Rodríguez’s conduct on the night Maduro was taken, because those facts make the preferred narrative less comfortable.
There are truths that conflict. There are sometimes choices in which every available option is bad. Facing that reality, weighing what is known against what is only alleged, and then deciding, is the actual work of political and moral judgement. Declaring the complexity itself illegitimate, and treating those who acknowledge it as morally suspect, is the opposite of seriousness.
The age we are in rewards the opposite. That is not a reason to join in. An important concomitant of this viewpoint is that I absolutely have no claim always to be right. If I have guided you through the facts and some key issues around them, and helped stimulate you to form your own opinions, then I am very happy.
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This is what committed journalism looks like. The non reading majority won’t stand for it.
What a complex tale of woe! Thank you for your thoroughness Craig, I'll now have a good break from reading Central American political affairs and avoid a stiff drink. Well done.