Word: panamas
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With tension already high between Washington and Managua, the politically tinged charges were hardly surprising. Long-strained relations soured further last month when the U.S. invaded Panama -- which the Sandinistas predictably denounced as Yanqui imperialism. To make matters worse, U.S. soldiers burst into the residence of the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Panama and searched it for weapons, a blatant violation of diplomatic immunity. Managua retaliated by expelling 20 American diplomats. Still bristling last week, Ortega drew a nasty parallel between the ambush and the November slaying of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, a crime many believe was committed...
...last time Manuel Noriega set foot in the U.S. was in 1985. He was not only Panama's strongman then but also an American intelligence asset. His hosts from the CIA took him to lunch at a Washington restaurant...
...hosts -- from the Justice Department this time -- took him to jail. After landing at 2:45 a.m., the deposed dictator was sped to a Miami federal courthouse. There he was posed in a T shirt for a humiliating mug shot, then stashed in a windowless basement cell. Panama's numero uno had become federal prisoner...
After the eleven-day standoff outside the Vatican embassy in Panama City, Noriega's surrender to American authorities, which George Bush had defined as a chief goal of the invasion of Panama, triumphantly clinched the gamble the President took by ordering U.S. troops into combat. With Noriega in handcuffs, Panamanians celebrating in the streets and U.S. casualties relatively low, Republican Party chairman Lee Atwater probably had it right when he called the outcome a political jackpot for Bush...
...even as the war in Panama winds down, the battle in the U.S. is just shaping up. Noriega now has at his disposal an arsenal he could not call upon at home: the ample resources of a defendant in an American courtroom. The general's lawyers raised the standard defense objections about pretrial publicity and inadmissible evidence. Both objections have been given a fresh twist by Noriega's singular status as a de facto head of state tracked down by an invading army. The biggest question, however, is more a matter of politics than of legal procedure. With Noriega...