The Panama Deception

The shooting began at midnight. Everyone ran toward their home.

People started hollering. Children began crying.

It was a complex operation, 27 targets were hit simultaneously.

I heard some of my family get shot.

I don't know nothing else that has happened.

I just was "keep going", because I was frightened to die.

I was frightened to die.

The goal was not to level the place

but to minimize damage to property and most important of all

to minimize casualties. And that was accomplished.

My daughter did not belong to any group. She had nothing to do with Noriega.

She was innocent. She had nothing to do with all of this. And they killed her!

If I had to do it again, I would do it again. Because the cost was high.

It was men, women, civilians and military. They gave their lives. Not for us.

They gave their lives for democracy, for liberty, for freedom.

And I don't mind paying any price under the sun, to be free.

On December 19th 1989,

while Panamanians were getting ready for the Christmas holidays,

the United States was secretly mobilizing 26,000 troops, for a midnight attack.

I saw helicopters approaching. They were close.

The lights went out and the helicopters began to shoot.

People were running left and right without direction

without knowing where they were going.

It was not just machine-gun fire. There were bombs. The noise was frightening

You could hear gunfire coming from all directions.

And a strange noise that we had never heard before.

People were frightened, running, wondering what was going on.

The sky was completely red. And there was a tremor you could feel throughout the city.

The invasion was swift, intense and merciless.

When it was over, thousands lay dead and wounded and the country was in shambles.

Millions of U.S. tax dollars were swallowed up in three days of brutal violence.

The strategy was considered a stunning military and political success.

In many ways, the invasion served as a testing ground

for the Persian Gulf war one year later.

It is also an indication of the kinds of intervention

the United States may undertake in the years to come.

But still, big questions remain.

What exactly happened during the invasion of Panama? And why?

This is the CBS evening news. Dan Rather reporting.

More than 20,000 U.S. soldiers and marines

launched their attack in the early morning darkness...

As the invasion unfolded

Americans stayed glued to their TV’s and newspapers for coverage.

But how much of the real picture did the media give them?

The performance of the mainstream news media in the coverage of Panama, has been

just about total collaboration with the administration.

Not a critical critical murmur, not a critical perspective, not a second thought.

The story that the White House was pushing

was getting this so-called narco-terrorist in a net.

And that was the thrust of all of the coverage.

When are we going to get Noriega? Have they let Noriega get away?

By late today, they had taken control of much of the country

but their chief target general Manuel Noriega, escaped.

Manuel Noriega belongs to that special fraternity of international villains.

Men like Gaddafi, Idi Amin and the ayatollah Khomeini,

whom Americans just love to hate.

The White House announced a $1 million reward for his capture.

The justice department set up a hotline

taking in tips on Noriega's possible whereabouts.

They focused on Noriega to the exclusion of what was happening to the Panamanian people

to the exclusion of the bodies in the street, to the exclusion of the number dead

to the exclusion of what happened to the women and children in that country

during this midnight invasion.

In some ways, the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was no surprise

given the history of relations between these two countries.

The United States refused to recognize

Panama's independence movement throughout the 1800s.

But when the U.S. proposal to build a canal

across the Isthmus was turned down by Columbia,

U.S. policy abruptly changed.

In 1903, the United States provided military backup

enabling Panama to secede from Columbia.

By doing so, the United States secure the rights to take over the canal project

that had been abandoned by the French.

In a treaty negotiated between the French canal investors and the United States

the Americans were granted sovereign control in perpetuity

of a 10 mile wide strip of land they called the Canal Zone.

Panamanians were not included in the negotiations

and no Panamanians signed the treaty.

The United States immediately placed the Canal Zone under military control.

Teddy Roosevelt was asked by what right he acquired possession of the canal.

At least in the honest words of a thief, he said I took it.

That gives you no right in law. It never has.

And hopefully never will.

The canal project had a dramatic impact on Panama.

The U.S. imported cheap labor from the Caribbean, India, and Asia

changing the racial makeup of the country.

Thousands of these workers died and those who remained

lived as part of a new racial underclass.

They created an apartheid system in Panama based on racial segregation.

Where black people could not live in the same home

where black people could not even use the same water fountain.

The Jim Crow law that was practiced in the southern part of the United States

was implemented in Panama by the United States government.

After the canal was completed in 1913

the United States continue to expand its military presence

and tighten its grip on Panamanians politics.

Violent confrontations between Panamanians and the U.S. military grew

in the decades that followed.

Tensions peaked in 1964

when students tried to exercise Panama's right to fly it's flag in the Canal Zone.

21 Panamanians were killed and hundreds were wounded in the confrontation.

In 1968, Panama's government was overthrown in a military coup.

Omar Torrijos, a colonel in the national guard,

emerged as the new leader of Panama.

Although he used repressive measures to consolidate his power

he became immensely popular.

Torrijos introduced an unexpected period of social reform

that benefited Panama's majority population of Blacks, Indians and Mestizos.

It created a populist reformist process.

Humberto Brown, an administrator at the state university of New York

served as the Panamanians diplomat to the United Nations.

He was educated in Panama, during the Torrijos period.

Where, for the first time in Panama, we had a participation

of the non-oligarchical people of nation.

Where people like myself could go to university and get a degree, where

the peasants, where people from the Mestizos, where

all the people were deprived an opportunity, for once in their life

were playing an important role in our nation.

In 1978, relations between the United States and Panama reached a high point.

Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos negotiated treaties that abolished the 1903 treaty

establishing a new relationship between the two countries.

The Carter-Torrijos Treaties

required the United State to vacate its military bases

and withdraw its troops by the year 2000.

Full control of the canal and the Canal Zone would be turned over to Panama.

Although these new treaties were a source of pride for Panamanians

many conservatives in the U.S. had vehemently opposed them.

The Panama Canal Zone is sovereign United States territory

just as much as Alaska is

as well as the states carved from the Louisiana purchase.

We bought it, we paid for it.

And general Torrijos should be told we are going to keep it.

In November 1980,

Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide election victory.

8 months later, on the night of July 31, 1981

Omar Torrijos was killed in a fiery plane crash.

The circumstances of the incident are unclear.

Authorities said that his plane crashed into the side of a mountain.

But witnesses said that the plane exploded in flight.

Although his death was officially declared an accident,

many suspected that he was assassinated.

Some think that Manuel Noriega may have been involved.

But many are convinced it was the CIA that was responsible.

I'm quite convinced that the CIA killed Torrijos.

This I know because I worked with Torrijos.

Jose "Chu chú" Martinez was one of Torrijos closest aides for many years.

They killed him precisely at the moment they had to kill him.

At that moment Torrijos was having a big influence over Central America.

Especially among the revolutionary movement.

They killed Torrijos because Torrijos represented precisely

the political solution of the whole Central American problem.

Waiting in the wings for his chance to take power, was colonel Manuel Noriega,

the CIA's primary contact in Panama.

Noriega was head of Panama's military intelligence

and had a long standing relationship with the U.S.

He had been on the CIA payroll since the 60's.

When George Bush became director of the CIA in 1976,

under president Ford, he inherited Noriega as a contact.

Despite evidence that Noriega was involved in drug trafficking,

Bush kept Noriega on the payroll.

In fact, he increased Noriega's salary to more than $100,000 a year

and eliminated a requirement that intelligence reports on Panama

include information on drug trafficking.

Over the last 20 years, since Manuel Noriega was recruited by the CIA to be an asset,

he has obviously provided many important pieces of information to U.S. intelligence.

Peter Cornblue is senior analyst at the National Security archives.

The archive has assembled 100s of previously classified government documents

revealing the details of Noriega's relationship to U.S. intelligence.

They paid him an incredible amount of American taxpayers money.

And obviously decided that his value to them, was so important

that his drug smuggling, and other illegal activities, could simply be ignored.

I, George Herbert Walter Bush, do solemnly swear

that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States.

After George Bush became vice president under Ronald Reagan in 1981,

he was named head of the administrations anti-drug campaign

and once again took responsibility

for monitoring Noriega's intelligence activities.

Bush in fact seems to have been instrumental,

even according to the documented evidence

the administration itself has made available,

in seeing to it Noriega was well taken care of.

And in fact, admiral Stansfield Turner, the former director of the CIA under Carter,

claims he cut Noriega off, that he removed him from the U.S. payroll.

Bush put him back on and in fact gave him a raise.

And developed an even closer relationship than had existed before.

With support from the CIA, Noriega was able to outmaneuver his rivals

and in august of 1983, he became commander of the Panamanian military.

As the Reagan administration expanded its covert war

against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,

Noriega became increasingly helpful.

Working with the CIA, and with Israeli arms dealers,

Noriega helped coordinate an arms supply network

to provide weapons to contra bases in northern Costa Rica.

It is by now undeniable that the same planes that were carrying arms

from Panama into Costa Rica were also carrying drugs.

And in fact, the people who were the pilots flying those arms to the contras

and flying drugs on up,

eventually reaching the U.S., had been indicted and are now serving time.

This operation essentially gave Manuel Noriega the assurance