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Gen. Rick Hillier, Canada’s former Chief of Defence Staff, said on The Evan Bray Show Tuesday, that the commanders of the U.S. military operation in Venzuela weighed their options and decided the action was legal, and acted with the ultimate approval of U.S. commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump.
Hillier said he supports the operation, saying Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was an illegal president who refused to let go power and forced millions of Venezuelans to leave their country because of repression, fear of arrest, potentially torture and poverty.
Listen to the full interview here:
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This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Hillier told Evan Bray that the military in the United States would not have taken this step had they not felt confident that they were on legal ground to do so, and when conducting an operation of the scale of what the U.S. did in Venezuela, it’s essential to have legal support.
“You’re always surrounded by hundreds of lawyers who are ready to offer their opinions based on their study of the situation, on what is right and what is wrong and what is legal and what is not legal, and what is a grey area — because usually most of it is a grey area,” he said.
“These are people who are professionals, and they operate based on ethics — those people in uniform, those commanders — and they execute the mission when it’s legal, when their orders are right and legal.
“There’s a huge grey area and you’ll get as many opinions as you have lawyers. And at some point in time as a commander you have to make a decision and decide whether or not you’re going to execute and do it based on the best legal advice available.”
Hillier said that only the United States could conduct such an an operation.
“We’ve all known that for decades, the United States has been spending billions on their defense forces and building capabilities. And if you ever wondered whether or not that was going to end up actually being operationally capable or just more big ships and more planes and more battalions, then wonder no more,” he said.
“The assets and the resources, whether that’s space forces or cyber forces that took down the electrical apparatus and shut off the power right at the crucial moment, or whether that’s the intelligence that was developed both on the ground and through cyber intelligence, or whether that’s the integrated forces standing offshore ready to project power, or whether that’s the evacuation capabilities — all those things come into play, and no other country brings those forces together with that kind of detail, that kind of integration.”
Hillier said Canada is getting closer to be able to conduct an operation of this scale.
“We have … established the Canadian Joint Forces Command and what we’re doing with it is a great thing,” he said.
“We have a good capability in the Special Forces and some other pieces, but we don’t have those numbers, and we don’t have all those capabilities put together … but we are on the way to doing some of those things.”
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