[Peace] No free press in 1989 Panama invasion means 'no peace'

[charles joseph smith]

Maria Silva, a good friend of mine, let me watched a independent
documentary film on Thursday, January 17, called "The Panama Deception".

Only a few people including me were in Maria's house to watch the film.
Including me.

Here was the summary of what we saw in the documentary:

As I watched the film, I told Maria Silva if Manuel Noriega was trained
at the School of the Americas. She said "yes, he was trained at the CIA."

But it was not just Noriega I thought about. I thought about the press
covering the invasion of Panama that happened on December 19, 1989.

The first few weeks of the invasion went on as planned. But at the same
time, the numbers of civilian (and military) dead and wounded were kept
out of the
mainstream media, as the U.S. invasion military forces imposed extremely
stringent press restrictions on both local and foreign journalists and
their news camera operators in the vicinity of the invasion. Many were
deported, jailed, harrassed, evicted, pushed back by force  or, in
some cases, had their cameras, film and/or journal entries seized and/or
destroyed. Some of them were even put to death.

Panama's local press also could not escape the awful restrictions. The
U.S. military, just about a few days after the invasion,  ransacked,
pillaged, and commandeered most of Panama's local
radio stations, including that of most independent channels, and
demolished Panama's leading newspaper, "La Republica", on the grounds that
that newspaper was stirring messages of hard-headed fighting spirit of the
"Fuerzas de Defensa de Panama" (Panamaian Defense Forces)--the ones the
U.S. believed stirred Manuel Noriega to his rise as kingpin drug
trafficker in Panama.

I can speculate the reasons for the press restrictions...

1. The soldiers involved in the mission used systematic torture, unlawful
   search and seizure, detainment and/or interrogation without any due
   process of law or habeus corpus, 'trumped-up' arrests, and
   setting fires to poor slums in Panama city. Some killed innocent people
   --and Panamaian military--outright. By imposing the restrictions, the
   soldiers avoid a possibility of war crimes tribunals and other courts-
   martial.
2. If they reveal publicly the exact number of dead and wounded, there
   would have been so much hatred between Panama and the United States
   that it would be like as if Iran hated the United States.
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