Panama declares U.S. invasion date day of mourning

[flashl]

The anniversary of the 1989 U.S. invasion was declared a day of "national mourning" by Panama's legislature on Thursday, and it established a commission to determine how many people were killed when U.S. troops stormed the capital.

The measure was unanimously approved as Panama commemorated the 18th anniversary of the day thousands of troops landed to arrest dictator Manuel Noriega on drug charges.

"This is a recognition of those who fell on Dec. 20 as a result of the cruel and unjust invasion by the most powerful army in the world," said Rep. Cesar Pardo of the governing Democratic Revolutionary Party, which holds a majority in the legislature.

The measure, which requires the approval of President Martin Torrijos, also calls for a monument to honor the dead.

U.S. officials downplayed the issue. "We prefer to look to the future," said U.S. Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall. "We are very satisfied to have a friend and partner like Panama, a nation that has managed to develop a mature democracy."

Read Full Text

[Recursion]

1. An (accidentally) honestly named operation

Q: Why did we invade Panama?
A: *shrug* just 'cause

[flashl]

2. Move along, there's nothing to see, cause ...

"We prefer to look to the future"

[Judi Lynn]

3. You might find this interesting, written about Panama and this ritual:

December 18, 1999
Panama prepares to act out trauma of U.S. invasion

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) -- Residents of a Panama City suburb set
ablaze in the December 1989 U.S. invasion to oust military strongman Gen.
Manuel Noriega are set to act out their collective trauma at a macabre
anniversary rite on Sunday.

Every year since the December 20 invasion, residents of the capital's El
Chorrillo district have built a model of one of the razed homes from their
community using tires, cardboard boxes and boards, only to torch it once
more, the rite's organiser, Hector Avila, told Reuters.

"Before we burn it, we are going to put Chinese explosives (powerful
firecrackers) inside, and throw rockets at it as if it were the U.S. attack,"
Avila said.

"When it's alight, the adults from the barrio are going to rescue the children.
We'll have black bags filled with beef to represent the bodies," he added.

The dark rite, which represents a working through of the inner city
neighbourhood's human losses, involves a cast of 50 adults and children.

"We do it so as not to forget what happened here, and so that people know
how their neighbors died," Avila added.

The U.S. government has estimated that 300 Panamanians died in the
invasion, but Panamanian human rights groups say the civilian death toll was
3,500. The number who died in El Chorrillo is unknown. Eighteen U.S.
servicemen were killed.

More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/panama/chorrillo.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So few of us ever really heard or read much about it at the time. What a hideous shame, and _{George W. Bush's} dear old dad can take his bow for this. He set the underhanded, dishonest precedent his cheesy, grotesque son has followed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Subject: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO PANAMA

Written 4:22 pm Feb 25, 1991 by christic in cdp:christic.news


WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO PANAMA IS A DIFFERENT STORY

Project Censored: Nomination for the "Ten Best Censored Stories of 1990"


According to a variety of non-mainstream but authoritative sources, the
U.S. invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989, received inadequate and
erroneous news coverage. It now appears that the legal implications of the
invasion, the Bush-Noriega relationship and the actual post-invasion
conditions in Panama have all been misrepresented to the American people.
But perhaps the most fraudulent news coverage dealt with the true numbers of
civilian and combat fatalities.

Official accounts spoke of 202 dead Panamanian civilians, 314 dead
Panamanian soliders, and 23 dead Americans.

The press was oddly silent two months after the invasion when a Southern
Command official acknowledged to the L.A. Times that only 50 Panamanian
soldiers died. And, American soldiers reported that at least 60 to 70
Americans were killed, possibly many more. Apparently some combat deaths
were disguised as accidental deaths unreleated to the invasion. The new
findings indicate that the U.S. lost more soldiers than Panama. Physicians
for Human Rights (PHR) has challenged the government figure of 202 dead
civilians and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has put the figure
at 3,000, using the phrase "conspiracy of silence" to describe efforts to
bury the true civilian death toll. The official U.S. report was based on
unconfirmed battlefield observations and mortuary and hopital statistics.
PHR's investigation tallied burial sites, mortuaries, hospital records, and
interview with officials.

In addition to Stealth Bombers dropping 2000-pound bombs, U.S. soldiers
are reported to have directly fired upon civilian homes with machine guns,
rockets, and tanks in the barrio of El Chorillo surrounding Noriega's
headquarters. U.S. soldiers evacuated apart- ments and summarily burned
them to the ground. Witnesses reported U.S. troops killing wounded
civilians with either gunshots or rifle-butts to the head.

CBS's "60 Minutes," in a September 1990 expose, reported the existence of
at least six yet-to-be-exhumed mass graves to conclude that Panamanian
civilian deaths could run as high as 4,000. The findings of many watch
groups support the "60 Minutes" casualty report. Peace and Justice in
Panama, The Central American Human Rights Commission, Panamanian National
Human Rights Commission, Panamanian Episcopal Commision and the National
Lawyers Guild all calculate the death toll to range from two to four
thousand.

More:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/real_pan.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

IMPORTANT VIDEO!

You will not want to forget about this video someone posted at D.U. last year. It will be worth every minute of your time:

The Panama Deception
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-446387292666223710&q=Panama+%2B+invasion&total=88&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

[flashl]

14. Thanks for your informative post.

[Judi Lynn]

16. Thanks for posting the original article. That's how we all get informed, a bit at a time.

It's sad, isn't it, that it often takes YEARS before we really learn the truth, although the LIES get to us immediately!

[flashl]

17. I remember the 'rumors' ringing truer than the 'offical' story.

[Truthiness Inspector]

4. Poor little Panama

A third world country that is now the CROSSROAD OF THE AMERICAS, Panama City shines. A country that has clean water systems put in by the awful Americans.

I've been to Panama, and the best things there are because of American intervention and help.

Day of mourning my ass.

[killbotfactory]

6. Yes, the US is just a gentle giant, only trying to help the little people

our interests in the country were only due to wanting to help our poor, disadvantaged Panamanian friends.

:puke:

[Truthiness Inspector]

7. You avoid the obvious:

Panama is FAR better off for our intervention than it was without it.

[Solon]

8. They just have to tolerate invasions that cost their citizens lives now and then?

What the fuck is your malfunction?

[Judi Lynn]

10. Former "economic hitman" John Perkins wasn't too impressed by all the "good"

the U.S. had done in Panama, was he?

Here's a quote from an interview he did on Democracy Now:

JOHN PERKINS: No, I never worked directly for the N.S.A., I worked for a company called Chas T. Main, big consulting firm out of Boston. And these days almost all of this work is done by private contractors. It’s not done directly by the C.I.A. or the N.S.A. They may recruit us, but we work for private industry.

The same is true of the jackals, Amy. If economic hit men fail, which we don’t usually do (but I did in Panama, for example, and I tell in detail in the book about how that ended up)—but my failure ended up in a jackal going in and assassinating Omar Torrijos, the president of Panama. When economic hit men fail, the jackals go in and either overthrow governments or assassinate leaders; and they, too, do not work directly for the government. These days, they’re private contractors. The days of the government agent, the 007, who’s licensed to kill, are long gone.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say you failed, you mean what?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was sent in to Panama to bring Omar Torrijos around, to bring him into our system, and he refused to do that. He said, ‘Look, I know if I play your game’—he told me directly—‘If I play your game, I’ll become very rich. But that’s not what interests me. I want to help my poor people.’ And, so he said, ‘You can either get out of Panama or play the game my way.’ Well, we decided to stay and try to bring him around. He never would come around. And I knew all along that if I failed to bring this man around something dire would happen to him.
(snip)

Yep, something, by god, DID happen to Torrijos, in just the pattern John Perkins has described in his books, and in his speeches.

By the way, Torrijos is mentioned also, in the Panama Deception video which is linked in one of my posts, and in post #5, by killbotfactory, who just added it to this thread.

If you haven't taken the time to see the video, put it aside and see it when you've got an hour and a half. You won't regret it.

On edit, forgot the link to the John Perkins interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/1/3/former_economic_hit_man_john_perkins

Sorry.

[MadHound]

19. You know, that's kind of the logic the British used to try and persuade colonists not to fight them

The conventional British logic was that the US thrived under their rule. Trade prospered, the British defended their colonists, why in the world would a bunch of Americans want to spoil it all by fighting for independence? Oh, yeah, freedom and all that.

Same with Panama, Americans simply can't understand what gripes Panama would have against the US, after all we provide them with new buildings and infrastructure. The thing is none of this replaces being free.

Sorry, but our continuous mucking around in Central and South America has caused nothing but pain, grief, and death. Hell, Panama is nothing but a colonial creation of the US, cut out of Colombia many years ago by the US, all to form our all important canal.

Noriega was nothing more than a capo for the BFEE. He outlived his usefulness and had become a liability to them. Therefore Poppy decided to take him out, by any means necessary. It hasn't helped Panama, Noriega was replaced by somebody equally vile. That fight wasn't a fight to restore freedom or democracy, it was simply the BFEE taking care of some loose threads, using the US Army as enforcers.

[Judi Lynn]

9. You don't seem to grasp there is filth connected to slaughtering people.

Drop your pathetic self-righteousness. Paying a lot of money to the politicians in order to BUY Panama for a while is not a devine right to control them. Your right-wing loon politicians have NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to invade, plunder, rape, slaughter people anywhere, so drop it.

The best things?

What if, like other sane, peace loving people, they want to be left the #### alone, even if it means bypassing "the best things."

Only complete assholes would ever presume to imagine, in their disordered minds that intervention and "help" as practiced upon the people of Latin America helped anyone other than the scums in our country and in theirs. They people themselves have suffered horrendously.

Take some of your valuable time you could be using spewing right-wing expansionist, greedy, grabby, murderous "values," and use it, instead, doing your homework on what the hell all these years of butting in have done to the people who have lived, or attempted to live in their own countries.

[Bright Eyes]

13. How about Cuba?

And Mexico! They need some infrastructure!
Most of South America could use an American invasion. You know, to spread the wealth, right? Totally unselfish.

I'm sorry, but that is dumbest posts I've read in a long time.

[blindpig]

18. Ah, The White Man's Burden

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.



Yet the ungrateful wogs hate us, sure proof of their inability to manage their own affairs. Our altruism is ignored, just like those wretches in Iraq.

unfuckingbelievable

[killbotfactory]

5. If you haven't seen it, watch The Panama Deception

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-446387292666223710

[Diamond Dave]

12. This doc is an eye-opening piece that everyone should view.

I really don't know how to describe how we felt when we viewed it the first time. Overwhelming comes to mind.

[Diamond Dave]

11. "We prefer to look to the future," Dear sir, we don't have a future to

look to. You all took care of that some time ago. Our only future is owning up and saying we are sorry, we apolgize. Forgive us.

But then, well, that is just too damned much to hope for. At least as long as Bush Inc. is in charge.

The rest of the world is waiting for us, the US to do something.

They are waiting and getting tired of waiting....................

[Ravy]

15. Sounds like we won their hearts and minds....

and Rice says we don't have any permanent enemies.