The Panama Deception

It seems people are letting their politics decide their ratings. As a documentary, it's good but not outstanding. It's a fairly straight forward PBS or Frontline type documentary. It won an academy award because it was against not very strong competition. One was downright bland, about using music in films.

The first third of the doc is completely uncontroversial. It's a straight forward history of Panama, the canal, and how Noriega got into power.

The ones hating this doc, calling it paranoid, were themselves paranoid and downright hysterical, and bashing the film on flimsy pretexts. The film actually gives plenty of voices from the Bush administration. This includes a Pentagon spokesman and several generals.

And sometimes their outrage leads them to spout falsehoods. They claim the film says "The US Army used lasers to kill people." No, it says some weapons were laser guided, being tested in the field for the new time.

Claiming "There were mass graves" and "thousands dead." That's not even controversial. Every estimate is several thousand killed.

Claiming some of the experts should be better labeled. That might be the only criticism with any validity. Perhaps for a few, who are shown as authors or journalists. I went to the trouble of looking them up. Two were in academia, one a TV reporter, another a national radio reporter.

I wanted to write just to share some light on the issue of U.S. foreign policy but after reading the posts here I'm glad to see that not all Americans are short-minded and/or blind about their government, or supporting it even though they know what things they do just believing thats what a good "patriot" do. I would say a good patriot is what a lot of the people here posting are doing because it shows the world there's still hope the U.S. can become the country it's supposed to be as it was intended by the U.S. constitution. Patriotic is not defending the U.S. blindly just because is your country.

Let me just say I was 11 years old at the time and a lover of the USA (I had already been in Disney World :)) but two months prior to the invasion Americans surrounded my neighborhood, closed the roads, put cutting wire, armored vehicles, helicopters flying etc. (they did this because there were still some Americans living there, although imagine that were you live Chinese soldiers take control over the area, in a nice town of Florida, I don't think you would like that) and I have to walk home (I was returning from my school, still in the uniform) and an American started pointing me with this huge machine gun attached at the top of an AV (I guess now that was an M-60) and kept following me as I walk. Let me tell you, that can change your life. During the invasion I have to stay down under my bed for almost two weeks until it ended. Not an experience I would like to repeat.

Believe me or not, the video not only is unbiased, but is actually missing even more. For all of you who think is biased, just remember, everything you were hearing about the invasion was good things, like the US government was doing "just" a favor to the Panamanian people, that "all" of us loved it, etc. Obviously these guys wanted to tell the truths the US gov. didn't say and exposed the lies they did say. So in that aspect, yo better believe they were biased, that's the intention of the video, to go against what they told us, not to make it appear as if they were doing the film from a neutral point of view and that the conclusion of the film was what they told us on it.

I read some people here was mad saying it was all lies but they were never in Panama, not before, during, nor after. Then how can they say is not true? I know this people don't like hearing negative things about their country, but imagine, I'm not only hearing hypocrisies about the reasons of the invasion, which offends me, but also a lot of my fellow countrymen died.

Well, I wrote more stuff but its too long to fit in here, if I create a homepage in the future, I'll post it and give a link here. Peace out

Narrated by Elizeabeth Montgomery and produced by Barbara Trent who previously produced "Cover-Up" a documentary about the Iran-Countra scandal or deception "The Panama Deception" has to do with the real reasons behind the 1989 invasion of Panama which had nothing at all to do what we the American people were told at the time by the Bush I Administration and the US media.

The unprovoked invasion of Panama that cost as many as 4,000 Panamanians and two dozen US servicemen's lives had to do with the September 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that was to hand over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian Government on New Years Eve 1999. Something that the new incoming Reagan Administration was dead against and determined to overturn. After Panamanian strong man Omar Torrijos was killed in a mysterious plane crash on July 31, 1981 CIA sponsored Manny Noriaga was was put in charge hoping that he would do as he's told by his handlers back in the USA. Manny who was canned or kicked off the CIA payroll by President Jimmy Carter's CIA Director Mansfield Turner back in 1978 was immediately put back on the CIA payroll by the Reagan Adminstration at double his salary. It's then that Manny started to organize both drug trafficking and supporting the Sandinista contras for his employers the CIA.

It was later when Manny didn't go along with what he was told that the US now run by President George Bush the First made plans to dump him in him becoming too independent for his own good. After a number of failed attempts to ouster Manny it became obvious to the Bush Administration that it had to use use force but at the same time demonize Manny in order to get the American public to support a military invasion and take over of his country. Planting stories about Manny Noriaga being a sexual degenerate and drug user and pusher, which he was for the CIA, as well as Hitler lover it didn't take long for Bush in the excuse of restoring democracy in Panama, which in fact never had it, let loose the "Dogs of War" on that country from which it has never recovered since now over 20 years after it was invaded.

What turned out to be the real reason for the invasion of Panama was not just to scudded the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Teaty but destroy and disarm the Panamanian Army! With the Panamnian Army needed in protecting the canal the aforementioned treaty became invaded which Bush made sure it would be! And thus have the US military, which in fact destroyed it, replace the Panamanian Army when the treaty came into effect some ten years later!It was also the invasion of Panama that opened the door to a new and aggressive form of US foreign policy that was implemented in countries like Iraq, in 1991 & 2003, Kosovo and Afganistan that with no Soviet Union to worry about no one not even the UN being able to challenge it.

P.S Even though the documentary "The Panama Deception" was released in 1992 it in fact accurately predicted the course of US foreign policy for the next 20 or so years! Something that Jean Dixon or even the great seer Nostradamus couldn't do and it didn't even need a crystal ball to do it!

Aesthetically I do not value "The Panama Deception" very highly. Most of the time it looks poorly made; even the image quality of the footage Barbara Trent shot in Panamá looks poor. The reason that it works for me as a Panamanian, and that it may have considerable value for a foreign viewer, is that it is quite honest when it analyses the so-called "Operation Just Cause" to destroy Panamanian armed forces, under the guise of an international raid on Manuel Antonio Noriega, in the name of democracy. Nobody believes this today and it is not hard to do so in retrospective, when one thinks of El Salvador or Nicaragua, just to name a couple of Latin American countries where self-determination was violated by American troops. I could be biased because it deals with one of the lowest points in the Panamá-USA relations, from a point of view that leaves little space for doubting what it denounces: on one hand, it offers motives for the Panamanian invasion, that sound more credible than the rhetoric arguments of American or Panamanian officials, and on the other it shows how irresponsibly the US media treated the fact. Besides, in the final analysis, what Trent seems to be more concerned for, is the empowerment (as the name of her organization) of the American people, through the acknowledgement of what their governments have done in the last two centuries, taking the invasion of Panamá as a case in point. Panamanians all have different opinions about what happened, about the data and inferences the film offers, as many Americans also do; and I believe this is what makes this documentary work. In the case of my fellow countrymen, it is also a starting point to research the effects of a hyper-violent moment of our national history, when suddenly the notion (and our perception) of a "state" vanished, and we lived moments of total social, economic and political chaos with protagonists of all social classes, as the film graphically shows.

First it must be stated that it is quite apparent that those involved in the production of this documentary have an agenda and that makes the documentary somewhat obviously biased. It also must be noted that, no matter what the reasons were for the invasion, the people of Panama are certainly no better (or worse) for the change in government and worse off because of the invasion. Whether Noriega was involved in drug-trafficking or not (I would tend to think most governments with large-scale drug production areas within their borders probably are, and Noriega is no exception), getting rid of Noriega was like shhoting a flea with a Howitzer: noisy, messy, expensive and ultimately futile overkill. A good piece of work so long as you understand that there is an agenda here. I suspect that if you put the governmental story on one side and this on the other, the truth would be somewhere between them, but closer to the documentary than the government.