Editorials & Other Articles

Judi Lynn

(160,630 posts) Sun Oct 12, 2014, 12:59 PM Oct 2014

How Television Sold the Panama Invasion

How Television Sold the Panama Invasion

The media go to war

By Jeff Cohen and Mark Cook

Two weeks after the Panama invasion, CBS News sponsored a public opinion poll in Panama that found the residents in rapture over what had happened. Even 80 percent of those whose homes had been blown up or their relatives killed by U.S. forces said it was worth it. Their enthusiasm did not stop with the ousting of Gen. Manuel Noriega, however. A less heavily advertised result of the poll was that 82 percent of the sampled Panamanian patriots did not want Panamanian control of the Canal, preferring either partial or exclusive control by the U.S. ("Panamanians Strongly Back U.S. Move," New York Times, 1/6/90).

A "public opinion poll" in a country under martial law, conducted by an agency obviously sanctioned by the invading forces, can be expected to come up with such results. Most reporters, traveling as they did with the U.S. military, found little to contradict this picture. Less than 40 hours after the invasion began, Sam Donaldson and Judd Rose transported us to Panama via ABC's Prime Time Live (12/21/90). "There were people who applauded us as we went by in a military convoy," said Rose. "The military have been very good to us (in escorting reporters beyond the Canal Zone)," added Donaldson.

While this kind of "Canal Zone journalism" dominated television, a few independent print journalists struck out on their own. Peter Eisner of Newsday's Latin America bureau, for example, reported (12/28/89) that Panamanians were cursing U.S. soldiers under their breath as troops searched the home of a neighbor--a civilian--for weapons. One Panamanian pointed out a man speaking to U.S. soldiers as a "sapo" (a toad--slang for "dirty informer&quot and suggested that denouncing people to the U.S. forces was a way of settling old scores. A doctor living on the street said that "liberals will be laying low for a while, and they're probably justified" because of what would happen to those who speak out. All of Eisner's sources feared having their names printed.

The same day's Miami Herald ran articles about Panamanian citizen reactions, including concern over the hundreds of dead civilians: "Neighbors saw six U.S. truck loads bringing dozens of bodies" to a mass grave. As a mother watched the body of her soldier son lowered into a grave, her "voice rose over the crowd's silence: 'Damn the Americans.'"
Obviously there was a mix of opinion inside Panama, but it was virtually unreported on television, the dominant medium shaping U.S. attitudes about the invasion. Panamanian opposition to the U.S. was dismissed as nothing more than "DigBat (Dignity Battalion) thugs" who'd been given jobs by Noriega. And it was hardly acknowledged that the high-visibility demonstration outside the Vatican Embassy the day of Noriega's surrender had been actively "encouraged" by the U.S. occupying forces (Newsday, 1/5/90).

Few TV reporters seemed to notice that the jubilant Panamanians parading before their cameras day after day to endorse the invasion spoke near-perfect English and were overwhelmingly light-skinned and well-dressed. This in a Spanish-speaking country with a largely mestizo and black population where poverty is widespread. ABC's Beth Nissen (12/27/89) was one of the few TV reporters to take a close look at the civilian deaths caused by US bombs that pulverized El Chorillo, the poor neighborhood which ambulance drivers now call "Little Hiroshima." The people of El Chorillo don't speak perfect English, and they were less than jubilant about the invasion.

More:
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/how-television-sold-the-panama-invasion/

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How Television Sold the Panama Invasion (Original Post) Judi Lynn Oct 2014 OP

Contras, Dirty Money and CIA Judi Lynn Oct 2014 #1

Operation Northwoods blkmusclmachine Oct 2014 #2

After the Panama invasion, Time magazine ran a photo spread of Panama with buildings bearing the Lydia Leftcoast Oct 2014 #3

Judi Lynn

(160,630 posts)

1. Contras, Dirty Money and CIA

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Sun Oct 12, 2014, 01:04 PM

Oct 2014

Contras, Dirty Money and CIA

December 19, 2013

From the Archive: On Dec. 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. The U.S. news media viewed the assault as a case of Bush seeking justice, but there was a darker back story of U.S. guilt, as Robert Parry reported in 1997.

By Robert Parry (Originally published in 1997)

On the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1987, John F. Molina, a 46-year-old Cuban with the look of a Latin Sean Connery, sauntered from the stylish Panama City offices of the law firm, Sucre y Sucre. Molina and his companion, Enrique Delvalle, had been clearing up business that they had with lawyers who had created shell corporations for an arms supply network for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. The two men stepped out onto the busy street and climbed into Molina’s red Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Without their noticing, a young bushy-haired man with a moustache darted toward the car. The young man raised a .32-caliber pistol, pointed it at Molina’s head and fired three times. Molina slumped across the front seat. For a moment, Delvalle thought Molina was reaching toward the opposite side door. Then, Delvalle realized that John Molina was dead.

The gunman fled on foot. He was chased and cornered by an armed bystander, and then was arrested by Panamanian police. In custody, the killer identified himself as Maximillano Casa Sanchez, a Colombian hit man. Casa Sanchez told police that Colombian narcotraffickers had sent him to Panama to rub out Molina over a drug debt.

In the following days, La Republica, a newspaper allied with then-dictator Manuel Noriega, played up the drug angle — and Molina’s ties to Noriega’s political enemies in the Cruzada Civilista. The newspaper also noted that in the 1970s, Molina was president of UniBank, or the Union de Bancos, the Panamanian outpost for the WFC Corp., a shadowy money-laundering network earlier known as World Finance Corporation and run by Miami-based Cuban-Americans with close ties to the CIA.

More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/19/contras-dirty-money-and-cia/

blkmusclmachine

(16,149 posts)

2. Operation Northwoods

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Sun Oct 12, 2014, 06:51 PM

Oct 2014

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1

Lydia Leftcoast

(48,217 posts)

3. After the Panama invasion, Time magazine ran a photo spread of Panama with buildings bearing the

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Sun Oct 12, 2014, 07:53 PM

Oct 2014

following graffiti in white paint: "Thank you President Bush. God bless America."

I couldn't help thinking of the graffiti in white paint that appeared all over Grenada after the U.S. invasion there: "Thank you President Reagan. God bless America."

It just so happened that when I was living in Oregon in the 1980s, I heard a talk by a sociologist who had done most of his research in the Caribbean and had a lot of friends in Grenada. When he visited after the invasion, he noted those graffiti and started asking people who had put them up. No one knew. Finally, a man told him that he had gotten up to pee in the middle of the night, had heard a car pull up, and had seen a bunch of white men get out of the car and spray paint the graffiti.

The Panama graffiti are suspicious for another reason. Latin Americans like to remind us United States types that our country is not all of America.

I listened to the Canadian newscasts (CBC) about the Grenada invasion. They had an entirely different take on the situation than any U.S. news source, including NPR. A few years later, I read the book Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny, and its account of the Grenada invasion was just like that from the CBC.

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