apparently manuel noriaga is to be released from us custody sometime this month, possibly to be exdradited to france were he has been tryed in absntia for money laundering. he says he wants to return to panama where he is charged with murder and outher things, he was a cia operative, trained at the soa,and a us marine, do you think he was arrested because of his drug trafficing or becaus he knew too mutch? was it to overshadow the the whole iran contra scandle? any predictions of where this will go from here?
Norriaga was our first Sadaam. We didn't force the issue and want him hanged in the manner Sadaam and his ilk faced, but we wanted him discredited and out of the way. I find it strange he's going to be released right now when a Bush is in office, how convenient. In Panama we killed untold and undocumented numbers of innocent people, we've done the same thing in Iraq and Afghanastan. The US is so noble isn't it? Democracy whatever that truly means doesn't mean what it did when our forefathers fought for it.
The Panama Canal has dominated Panama’s history. US military invasions and interventions occurred in 1895, 1901-1903, 1908, 1912, 1918-1920, 1925, 1950, 1958, 1964 and 1989.84 In November 1903, US troops ensured Panama’s secession from Colombia. Within days, a treaty gave the US permanent and exclusive control of the canal.85 Former Panamanian military leader, Manuel Noriega, recruited by US military intelligence in 1959, attended the US Army School of the Americas in 1967 and led Panama’s military intelligence the next year. By 1975, the US Drug Enforcement Agency knew of Noriega’s drug dealing. He met, then-CIA Director, George Bush in 1976.86 In 1977, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos, signed a treaty to return the canal to Panamanian control in 1999. Other Americans undermined the treaty using “diplomatic…and political pressure, through to economic aggression and military invasion.”87 In the early-1980s, Noriega’s drug smuggling helped fund the contras in Nicaragua. He took control of Panama’s National Guard in 1983 and helped rig elections in 1984. Falling from US favour, the US indicted Noriega for drug crimes in 1988.88 On April 14, 1988, Reagan invoked “war powers” against Panama. In May, the Assistant Defense Secretary told the Senate: “I don’t think anyone has totally discarded the use of force.”89 PRETEXT On December 16, 1989, there was what media called an “unprovoked attack on a US soldier who did not return fire.”90 The soldier was killed when driving “through a military roadblock near a sensitive military area.”91 Panama’s government said “U.S. officers…fired at a military headquarters, wounding a soldier and…a 1-year-old girl. A wounded Panamanian soldier…confirmed this account to U.S. reporters.”92 The wife of a US officer was reportedly arrested and beaten. RESPONSE George Bush called the attack on US soldiers an “enormous outrage”93 and said he “would not stand by while American womanhood is threatened.”94 Noam Chomsky questions why Bush “stood by” when a US nun was kidnapped and sexually abused by Guatemalan police only weeks earlier, when two US nuns were killed by contras in Nicaragua on January 1, 1990, and when a US nun was wounded by gunmen in El Salvador around the same time.95 The US media demonized Noriega and turned the “‘Noriega’ issue into an accepted justification for the invasion…. Colonel Eduardo Herrera, ex-Director of [Panama’s] ‘Public Forces,’…said: “If the real interest of the US was to capture Noriega, they could have done so on numerous occasions. [They] had all of his movements completely controlled.”96 On December 20, 1989, “Operation Just Cause” began. More than 4,000 were killed. US crimes included indiscriminate attacks, extra judicial executions, arbitrary detentions, destruction of property (like leveling the Chorrillo neighborhood), use of prohibited weapons, erasing evidence and mass burials.97 A US-friendly president, Guillermo Endara, was soon sworn in on a US military base. REAL REASONS The Carter-Torrijos Treaty was torn up and the Panama’s military was dismantled. A right-wing, US think tank stated in 1988 that: “once [Panama] is controlled by a democratic regime….discussions should begin with respect to a realistic defense of the Canal after…2000. These discussions should include the maintenance, by the US, of a limited number of military installations in Panama…to maintain adequate projection of force in the western hemisphere.”98 The invasion was a testing ground for new weapons, such as the B-2 bomber (worth US $2.2 billion) that was used for the first time. The invasion also: · rectified “Bush's ‘wimpy’ foreign relations image” · gave a “spectacular show of U.S. military might in the final months before the Nicaraguan elections, hinting…that they might want to vote for the ‘right’ candidate.” · “sent a signal…that the US…[would] intervene militarily where the control of illegal drugs was ostensibly at stake. · “demonstrated the new U.S. willingness to assume active, interventionist leadership of the ‘new world order’ in the post-Cold War period.” SOURCE http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2002/How-To-Start-A-WarMay02.htm
