Noriega was our friend

Noriega was not only our friend; he was one of our special friends, a key ally in our War on Communism (remember that?) and our War on Drugs. He is now as a special guest in the Miami Federal Correctional Institution, the only officially recognized prisoner of war currently held by the USA under the rules of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of war, and the only military prisoner ever to serve simultaneously a prison sentence for violations of American civilian law—for crimes committed when he was the ruler of another country. How did this happen?

To find the answer to this question you will have to read Shooting the Moon, by David Harris, as I am doing now. This is not an easy book, so let me give you a quick summary: Noriega was a victim of the Iran/Contra scandal. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about this story makes much sense—but sometimes reality is complicated, especially at higher levels of our own government, where there are all kinds of nutty characters running around. This book is proof that freedom of the press still exists in the US, because it doesn’t say anything flattering about our rulers. It makes them look like a bunch of lunatics.

Of course you already knew this, but you don’t know half of it. Take the relationship between General Noriega and William J. Casey, the director of the CIA and Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 election. These were two thugs if ever there were any. Casey was an anti-communist nut and he went berserk when the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua. Suddenly, Nicaragua was the most important place on the planet. Panama also became important, and of course, the brutal dictator of Panama, General Noriega, who had been a nobody before.

But he was not a nobody to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). He was a valuable player in the War on Drugs, including several undercover operations. The Washington headquarters of the DEA described the General as “the best goddam friend the DEA has in all of Latin America.” Of course they overlooked the General’s own drug dealing, because everybody was doing this, including the CIA itself.

The crazy conflict here between drug enforcement and drug profits in high places has not gone away. Drug enforcement keeps up the prices and supports one of the largest industries on the globe—which includes a large penal system. But let me get back to General Noriega’s story, and the CIA’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua (or Nickawoggwha, as Bill Casey pronounced it.)

The contras were Bill Casey’s pet project, and the General helped him all the way. He allowed Panama to be used as a staging base for their supply lines, and through his close connections with the Israelis, acted as a middleman in providing weapons. He even made a personal contribution of several hundred thousand dollars to the Contra cause. This seemed like a smart strategy at the time, but the General had no understanding of American politics.

In 1984, the Democrat majority in Congress passed legislation prohibiting American support of any sort for the Contras. That left Bill Casey with two options: he could either cease his campaign or he could wage his own private war with the Sandanistas outside the framework of constitutional government. Casey decided the CIA was more powerful than the rest of the government, which made sense to the General, because this was the way it worked in Panama. Both Mr. Casey and the General were wrong.

The history of their demise is complicated, and it involved Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, USMC. He became a fixer for the whole operation. One of his operations was this:

A Honduran colonel had helped secure base camps and staging areas in Honduran territory next to Nicaragua. But the FBI apprehended the colonel when he attempted to smuggle cocaine into Florida, the proceeds of which were intended to finance the assassination of the elected president of Honduras, and the installation of a general in his place who was sympathetic to Casey’s underground enterprise. Ollie went to bat for this creep. In total, some eight high-ranking officers from the Army, the Defense Department, and the State Department (including Elliott Abrams) urged the court to be lenient. He would normally have gotten 25-30 years. He got two concurrent five years terms instead, in a minimum-security prison, and he would be allowed to stay in the US when he was finished. He did not sing on his friends.

Only a few months later, the whole Iran-Contra scandal broke. All of the Generals supporters were out of power, and he was fair bait for some gung-ho drug prosecutors who felt they were on a “Mission for God” and Noriega was the devil. In 1986, twenty thousand American solders invaded Panama and seized Noriega.

Many years later this process would be repeated, only the devil in this case would be Hussein.