Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Truth About the Invasion of Panama


Just yesterday, I became aware of a documentary on the 1989 US invasion of Panama. Although I had some familiarity with the details of the invasion, it all came from MSM. I had no idea that the invasion resulted in thousands of Panamanian civilians killed by US forces.

The documentary is strong in not only providing details of the invasion and what went down, but it is also strong in detailing how the military kept the press away and how back home, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings erroneously reported Panamanian casualties in the 50 to 250 range.

Once you see this documentary (produced in 1992), your mind will quickly turn to more recent US military actions and you will wonder what we are not being told about them.

The documentary is a must view. It is available through Amazon and also as a download via Netflix

UPDATE:

James Cacciatore emails:
I'm a huge fan of your work and recommend your site to everybody I meet. I also try and make your amazing work simpler to understand for my clients, 7th graders students. Anyways, just wanted to point out that "The Panama Deception" is also on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zMmITXwSts

11 comments:

  1. search "the panama deception" on 1channel(dot)ch to watch for free...

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  2. Or if you are strapped for cash, don't have a Netflix account or just really, really cheap... You can watch it on the Democracy Now! website:

    http://www.democracynow.org/2003/6/13/the_panama_deception_the_untold_story

    or you can download it from the Internet Archive at:

    http://archive.org/details/dom-24389-thepanamadeception

    or you can watch it on YouTube at:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zMmITXwSts

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  3. We have much more accurate information regarding current conflicts, more "disclosure," thanks to the Internet.

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  4. 'mericuh is #1! soldiers are protectin' our freedumbs! If you don't support sending the troops overseas you hate America because the Al-Quadas are gonna take us over with their bad breath and other 3rd world technologies!

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  5. I remember renting and watching this documentary in the early 1990s and then showing it and recommending it to many others because I was so impressed with the depiction of U.S. military savagery.

    Even though its been over 20 years, the things that I still remember most vividly were the digging up of graves of where the U.S. had dumped the masses that they had murdered, the testing of high tech incineration bombs on whole families that would leave the victims as a sort of crystallized char frozen in time as they attempted to flee the carnage in their cars, and the complete systematic leveling of massive sections of Panama City.

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  6. NPR radio coverage reported Noriega forces being chased around residential neighborhoods. The important event the media chose to hone in on was finding red underpants in Noriega's bedroom. Turns out, many a "strongman" has red underpants, and this is worth reporting... Daniel Ortega, Manuel Noriega, and Idi Amin among them. Coincidence, or do all "strongmen" simply have tacky taste in underpants? And is that what flips them from the "useful" to the "getting too big for his britches" category?

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  7. I agree wholeheartedly. Stumbling upon this documentary 6 or 7 years ago is one of the things (along with reading Ron Paul's weekly column) that got me seriously questioning anything and everything the government does, particularly when it comes to "foreign policy" , which is just a lovely euphemism for "when, where and how many people we gonna kill"

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  8. Ah, now we know where all those nasty "naked shorts" come from.

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    Replies
    1. Oops, this was supposed to be a (flippant) reply to Anon 4:08. Out of that context, it seems both nonsensical and insensitive. My apologies.

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  9. Brad Smith

    I was part of the invasion force and stayed there until June 6th. Overwhelming firepower was used all over the country. I don't even remember all of the different barracks that I saw demolished. The poor part of Panama City was also destroyed. The film really doesn't even do it justice. It doesn't really get into the thousands of doors we kicked in over the next 6 months as we disarmed the people. It doesn't talk about the random roadblocks we would set up to enforce the curfew that was part of Martial law. Those checkpoints also got many people killed.

    This invasion convinced me that government is evil. All governments all the time. Noriega's government and the US government were both responsible for these deaths. Not that I wasn't also responsible. I was and I shoulder the blame and always will. However, unlike governments I have to live with my guilt. Our government didn't admit their guilt let alone feel bad or learn any lessons from their actions.

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  10. I checked the DVD out of my local public library. For free!

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