Chapter 3
Panama

Just after midnight, the morning of Wednesday, December 20, 1989, United States military forces launched a massive land, sea, air invasion of Panama. "Operation Just Cause" was the first major military operation since the invasion of Grenada six years earlier, and the biggest since Vietnam. According to George Bush's December 20, nationally televised speech, the reasons for the invasion were to protect American lives, defend the canal, restore democracy to Panama, stop drug trafficking, and bring Panama's leader, General Manuel Noriega, to justice. The invasion, Bush made clear, was against the leader of Panama, not it's people. Nevertheless, Operation Just Cause was roundly condemned internationally by the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

Since completion of the Canal in 1914, the history of the U.S. - Panamanian relationship has constantly alternated between paternal partnership and bitter conflict, and the tensions that led to Operation Just Cause had been brewing for at least three years before the invasion. As a result of deteriorating relations with Panama's dictatorial leader, the United States had frozen $56 million worth of the country's assets in American banks, prohibited trade relations, and had stopped paying taxes and fees for use of the canal which, right after drug trafficking and money laundering, was the nation's leading source of income. Manuel Noriega claimed that the U.S. was waging economic warfare on the people of Panama, and by the time of Operation Just Cause, the Panamanian Gross National Product had contracted 27% and unemployment had skyrocketed to 30%. Just a few years before the invasion of Panama, Noriega had been on the CIA payroll, was praised for helping to fight the war on drugs, allowed the U.S. to train Nicaraguan Contras in Panama's jungles, and even met with Vice President Bush for a lunch in 1983. But because of his repeated rejection of American authority and his refusal to continue to serve American interests in the region, by 1989, the Bush administration could no longer tolerate Noriega's money laundering, drug dealings, and dictatorial disregard for democracy. Nothing illustrated this better than the infamous Panamanian presidential elections of May 7, 1989 -- obviously stolen by Noriega whose "Dignity Battalions" beat and bloodied the opposition candidates in plain view of the world's television cameras. Embarrassed by the Panamanian leader flaunting his power and invincibility, the United States responded by enhancing the visibility and number of its military training exercises in the region. By August, hostile encounters between the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and the U.S. military stationed in Panama were frequent. President Bush was further embarrassed by failing to support a coup attempt against Noriega in October. It was hardly surprising that by December a Panamanian soldier had been shot and wounded, an American killed, and both nations were gearing up for greater conflict.

Not only was Panama America's first military expedition out from under the shadow of the Cold War; it was the first real test of the press pool system that had been devised by the Sidle Panel after the debacle of Grenada. General Carl Stiner, a planner of the Grenada invasion warned his colleagues before Operation Just Cause, "There's a couple of things we really have to watch this time around. We've got to keep a lid on looting, and we can't let the press turn sour on us." Ironically, violent looting and a bitter press pool were two of the biggest military problems of the Panama mission. Though from a political and military standpoint the operation was successful in achieving all of its stated goals, as was the case in Grenada, dealing with the media "went unsatisfactorily and was the least successful aspect of Just Cause."

Under the guidelines established by the Sidle Panel in 1984, it was not actually necessary to summon a stateside press pool for the invasion of Panama since there were already American reporters stationed in Panama City. Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney felt the battle would be too chaotic to cover without the pool so he opted for it. The preparation and assembly of the pool turned out to be quite chaotic itself. At the beginning, it seemed as though the military had learned its lesson from Grenada and was planning accommodations for the media concurrently with other aspects of the invasion. As early as November 13, the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the public affairs office of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) in Panama to submit a plan for dealing with the press in case of an invasion. SouthCom assumed it would not need a pool from Washington as there were already reporters in Panama, and on November 22, sent a top-secret fax to the Pentagon that former Assistant Public Affairs Secretary at the Department of Defense, Fred Hoffman, described as "far short of a fully fleshed out plan." It provided bare bones public affairs guidance rather than details. The Pentagon assumed this meant that SouthCom had deferred to Washington the responsibility of staffing the pool, but the decision of whether the pool would be drawn from Panama or Washington was delayed, and remained alive until just hours before the invasion began. In fact, the Defense Department's Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Pete Williams, did not give his staff or the Public Affairs Office at SouthCom the go-ahead to begin planning for the press until only five and a half hours before the invasion began. The press pool planning that had started off so promisingly was derailed due to fears about secrecy, and as such, by December 19 no equipment, transportation, or provisions were set aside for journalists when the actual invasion occurred. "Looking back, General Maxwell Thurman of SouthCom said he might have been able to reach out and place possibly two helicopters at the disposal of the pool if he had known on Monday that it was coming from Washington."

Due to this lack of planning and communication, it was inevitable that the pool would be poorly supported once it arrived in Panama. To make matters worse, Secretary Cheney set the call-out for 7:30 P.M. on Tuesday "with full knowledge" that the press would arrive in Panama well after the operation's 1:00 A.M. starting time. Citing security as the reason for the late arrival of the pool, Cheney said that given the choice between the legitimate needs of the media and keeping the operation secret for as long as possible, "you can be absolutely certain I will always come down on the side of protecting security as long as I can." There were, in fact, a number of security breaches by reporters and news organizations called for the pool, though none of them jeopardized the operation. At a Time magazine Christmas dinner party there was an open conversation among guests about who would go to Panama, and some 200 party-goers wished the selected correspondent good luck as he left for Andrews Air Force Base. Additionally, NBC news scrambled around Washington D.C. trying to find a private contractor to provide it with satellite equipment to bring to Panama, and another pool member broke rules by calling his family and telling them where he was headed before his plane left the U.S.. Though these secrecy violations could be interpreted as justification for Secretary Cheney's late call-out of the pool and the military's general mistrust of the press, the first two breaches, at least, could easily have been prevented had the Pentagon been organized and dealt with news offices during their regular business hours. Ironically, it was the Pentagon's secrecy driven decision to delay the press pool call-out that ultimately caused the most potentially damaging security lapses.

The pool that was selected was slightly different from the original configuration envisioned by the Sidle Panel. There were four photographers, six print correspondents -- three of whom were oddly all from newspapers in Texas, one radio reporter, and a television reporter from NBC who brought with him a two member camera crew, a three person satellite team, and two tons of equipment. Even before the pool lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base, there were a number of technical problems. Most of the reporters arrived at the base poorly equipped: one lacked a passport, another an immunization record, and the one from the Time magazine party was heading into the tropical heat of Panama with only his wool winter suit. As the C-141 transport plane lifted off for Panama, a Colonel serving as the lead pool escort jokingly announced to reporters, "It won't come as a surprise that we're going to Alaska." As it turned out, with the kind of access the pool ended up having, they may as well have been heading north.

By all accounts, the functioning of the pool was dismal. The journalists arrived at Howard Air Force Base in Panama at about 5 A.M., by which time the majority of the fighting was over. Claiming the streets of Panama City still too dangerous for the pool to use ground transportation, they could only move by helicopter. But the single UH-1 Huey helicopter that had been reserved for the use of the press was not big enough to fit the entire pool and all of its equipment, so they waited at Howard Air Force Base for a larger chopper to be taken off of another mission. Once the new helicopter was loaded, the pool was "'escorted' not to the scene of the fighting around [Noriega's] Commandancia or at Fort Amador, but to Fort Clayton" where they were invited to watch CNN's coverage of the fighting taking place three miles away at Quarry Heights. The pool was then brought to a windowless room and given a briefing by U.S. Embassy Charge d'Affaires John Bushnell, who knew nothing about the military situation and proceeded to lecture extensively about the history of Panama since 1903. One pool reporter summed up the lecture as "worthless." Pool journalist Steven Komarow later described the opening scene in Panama:

Next, the pool encountered a number of technical problems. Reporters were unable even to file their first dispatches until six hours after their arrival. Once they were allowed to file, the journalists found that the phone lines did not work, the fax machine was cutting off the margins of their copy, and photo transmission was painfully slow, taking ten hours to send eight photos back to the U.S..

After vehement protest by pool members, SouthCom public affairs officials found another helicopter to fly the pool to Fort Amador where some PDF holdouts were being blasted out of their barracks by a U.S. howitzer set up on the edge of a golf course. At about 10 A.M. the reporters landed on the U.S. controlled golf course where Fred Francis of NBC noted,

By the second day in Panama the pool split up and members finally got near some shooting and newsworthy events, but only by accident. One group of pool reporters got a vivid tour of the looting in Panama City when their military driver got lost on the way to a ceremony of the new Panamanian government. Likewise, another group were on hand to see a small band of Noriega loyalists launch a mortar attack on the SouthCom headquarters.

The press pool was stymied not only by a lack of access to military action but was also actively restricted in ways reminiscent of Grenada. Pool journalists were not allowed to see or speak with combat GIs, wounded Americans, or Panamanian prisoners. Photographers were not allowed to take pictures of damaged equipment or caskets which bore no name identification, a restriction which Fred Hoffman described as "inexplicable." Pool members were repeatedly denied permission to interview senior commanders. One two-star general at the airport told Fred Francis, "Sorry, my operational orders are that I can not let you talk to my men. I can't speak with you." Though many in the military were uncooperative with the press pool, others simply did not know what it was or how to deal with it. "More than once the pool encountered unit commanders who had no idea what the pool was all about and felt they had to check up the chain of command. Obviously, word about the pool had not reached down through the military echelons."

Despite all of these problems there were positive aspects to the functioning of the press pool. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell thought the pool "worked marvelously," but he did not go into great detail how or why. Pentagon Public Affairs Chief Spokesman Pete Williams viewed the pool's arrival in Panama to be a major accomplishment in itself, and another Pentagon Spokesman, Bob Taylor, pronounced the pool to be "a big success" since it "filed fifty-some stories out of there." Often, the only positive things that could be said about press access in Panama were in comparison to the situation of Grenada in 1983. Rear Admiral Brent Baker, a member of the Sidle Panel, saw the Panama pool deployment as "a quantum jump from Grenada," and similar feelings were echoed by journalists that "[b]ad as the pool operation was in Panama, it was better than the one we had in Grenada." Finally, as Steve Komarow pointed out, the members of the pool worked together extremely well under adverse conditions. "The camaraderie among us was extremely strong.... Everyone worked without the jealousy and acrimony that could have erupted with more sensitive reporting egos."

Still, the operation of the pool left neither the media nor the military satisfied, and the complaints far outweighed the praise. Even the Pentagon's first reaction to the fate of the press pool was that someone had blundered. Though he later softened his criticism, Chief Spokesman Pete Williams said, "incompetence" on the part of the Army in Panama turned the first day of press coverage into a "disaster." Williams assured reporters that the Pentagon "stomped all over [U.S. commanders in Panama] and they got the message in spades." Likewise, General Maxwell Thurman, a man not particularly known as a friend of the press, admitted, "I think we made a mistake by not having some of the press pool in with the 18th Airborne Corps so they could move with the troops." In his evaluation of the Panama press pool deployment, Fred Hoffman was critical of the "excessive concern for secrecy" of political and civilian leaders in Washington and blamed the SouthCom public affairs officials in Panama for poor leadership, organization, and logistics. Ultimately, Hoffman believed that "the blundered treatment of the press pool suggested that the Bush administration was manipulating it for its own purposes."

Steven Komarow's observation that "We kind of missed the story," and the pool's self-proclaimed motto, "Semper Tardis" [Always late], fairly well sum up the feelings of the journalists who travelled to Panama to be a part of the press pool. As it functioned, the pool's purpose in Panama clearly was not to serve as a source of independent observation and information. As Komarow noted, "Instead of being part of a military operation, we were brought in afterwards to view the spoils. The selections shown us were designed for maximum propaganda impact." In a number of instances, according to NBCs Fred Francis, there was "no reason in the world they couldn't have thrown some of us into an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) and taken us" to sites where the fighting was happening. Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Jonathan Wolman compared the experience of the pool to that of a sports reporter "missing the game but having great access to the locker room afterward." Kevin Merida of the Dallas Morning News, another member of the pool described it as "a Keystone Kops operation:"

Once the main work of the invasion was over, GIs were quite willing to describe to journalists the greetings of cheers, applause, and American flags they received from some Panamanian citizens. Yet, that was exactly the kind of event journalists needed to see with their own eyes. It could only have benefitted the military to let them see it. In the end, perhaps the most important complaint about media access in Panama was that SouthCom used the existence of the pool as an excuse to try to detain more than 300 other journalists from entering the country for days after the invasion.

Despite the military's efforts to control the media, there were a number of journalists already in the battle zone who provided coverage during the invasion much to the chagrin of their colleagues drowning in the pool. For the most part, these journalists had been working and living at the Marriott Hotel in Panama City, which became a main target for PDF vengeance soon after the invasion began. Knowing that Noriega's Dignity Battalions would be searching their hotel rooms, CBS news correspondent Juan Vasquez and producer John Meyersohn hid on the mezzanine of the bureau office and spoke to Dan Rather in New York City while gunmen in the hallway deliberated whether to break down the door of their office. Vasquez commented afterwards that despite the fact that their "hotel room was a frustrating place for reporting a war -- we couldn't see much of anything from our window," he and others were simply too scared to go outside for first-hand investigation and combat reporting. "Those of us in chaotic Panama City had to weigh our desire to cover the story against the instinct to run for cover." The dangers journalists faced were real. By the end of Operation Just Cause, one newsman was dead, two wounded, and four had been kidnapped. The journalists kidnapped by drunken "Digbats" were released rather quickly and only slightly manhandled. The rest of the injuries to the press corps were inflicted by American troops. On Thursday at 7:30 A.M., U.S. soldiers guarding the Marriott mistook an American convoy coming towards them as Panamanian and, in the ensuing "friendly" cross-fire, two reporters were wounded and a Spanish photographer killed.

Despite the dangers of stepping outside the hotel, the non-pool media in Panama City were able to clarify and report some important pieces of information that would not otherwise have been exposed by U.S. military public affairs officials. On Friday, the third day of the invasion, Juan Vasquez walked the streets of Panama City without military escort and found "pandemonium." Though U.S. soldiers were deployed in key spots, they were apparently under orders not to interfere with Panamanian civilians unless their lives or mission were threatened. The looters were gutting every store in sight, and he encountered mobs wielding guns, machetes, baseball bats, and crow bars. What Vasquez saw were clearly the kinds of images which the White House and Pentagon officials hoped would not make it back to American television. As Washington tried to convey the impression to the American public that everything in Panama was completely under control, independent, unescorted reporters

It was not until Friday, the third day of the invasion that some 300 journalists waiting to get into Panama were admitted. But even for 36 hours after they were allowed in, members of the media "were held virtually as prisoners on U.S. military installations on Panama, were given very limited information on what was happening and access to only a half a dozen telephones" to file stories. Many were unable to meet their deadlines. The ABC Washington bureau chief described the red tape he went through to get his people into Panama as such: "A while ago it seemed that you couldn't imagine another bureaucratic hurdle that needed to be cleared. After the Pentagon said yes, and Howard Air Force Base said yes, and the Southern Command said yes, Costa Rica said no [to flying into Panama]." Once in Panama, the reporters were allowed to take over the officer's club at Southern Command headquarters in Quarry Heights. There, media members were fed, provided with satellite uplinks, could sleep anywhere, and were allowed to set up their editing equipment. The only things not provided for the media were answers to questions and access to the action.

After Operation Just Cause, the American media underwent an attack nearly as all-encompassing as the one Panama had just suffered. On one side, the Pentagon and the White House argued bitterly that the press had been overly demanding of the military's resources and unfairly critical of a well-run operation. On the opposite side, there were numerous complaints that the media had not been critical enough of the military, and had not ventured to ask the questions and explore the issues that needed to be pursued. Many felt that the press in Panama had simply served, free of charge, as the Pentagon's propaganda mouthpiece.

In defense of the military, it was often frustrated simply by the behavior and attitude of many of the journalists in Panama. One Air Force public affairs officer who had a hard enough time supplying journalists with the minimum necessities of room, board, and transportation later told of a local television correspondent "who stepped off the plane dressed in a tailored winter suit, nylons, and high heels. She demanded an air conditioned car to take her to air conditioned quarters where she could shower and wash and set her hair" before her 11:00 P.M. broadcast. She even tried to order some airmen to carry her bags. Though not every reporter in Panama was such a primadonna, there certainly were enough of them to make the military feel justified in their disdain and mistrust of the fourth estate as a whole. The incident which created the most turbulence between the media and the military occurred on the afternoon of December 21. President Bush chose to hold a news conference at the same moment that the bodies of American troops were returning to Dover Air Force Base. Confronted with two simultaneous news events, CBS, ABC, and CNN chose to go to a split screen. On one half of their television screens, Americans saw flag-draped coffins being unloaded from a plane, while on the other half, "The President was in a triumphant, almost goofy mood." Unaware that the split screen was in use, the juxtaposition made President Bush look inappropriate and insensitive at a very somber moment. Though a CBS executive defended the split screen decision noting "The timing was the White House's, not ours," White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater was "flabbergasted" by what he felt was an unfair and manipulative move by the media. By the second day of the invasion, the general consensus of the planners of the operation was that television broadcasts were focusing too heavily on the negative -- like the looting and chaos in Panama City. They felt the media was "giving the operation an unwarranted black eye, distorting the truly remarkable success that had otherwise been achieved since H-Hour."

Remarkably, many were arguing just as strongly the exact opposite opinion. The Nation conducted a survey of war coverage by nine major American newspapers. Of the over 300 articles and editorials examined, The Nation concluded that four aspects of Operation Just Cause were insufficiently questioned and covered: The propriety of the invasion under international and constitutional law; other possible motives the Bush administration may have had for launching the attack; the political, social, and racial composition of the new American-backed Panamanian government; and the personal history of Manuel Noriega rather than caricatures and demonization. The survey only found one story that even discussed the fact that Noriega's lavish life style was built not just through drug money, but by CIA dollars as well -- a New York Times article reported that the U.S. government had paid Noriega over $1.2 million in the three years proceeding the invasion.

Numerous other claims of the military and the Bush administration were not disputed or even discussed by the press. Though defense of the Canal was a stated goal of the invasion, little was mentioned about other American military interests in Panama and Central America. The Center for Defense Information reported that SouthCom headquarters "coordinate[d] all U.S. military activity and military aid programs throughout Latin America," in particular, running the jungle training schools where, in the past, Ronald Reagan's Nicaraguan Contras were taught and trained in secret. Likewise, George Bush's claim that Panama had declared war on the United States was not questioned even though Noriega never made any such direct declaration. Even if Noriega had declared war on the United States, he was perhaps only responding to the fact that President Bush had approved the spending of up to $3 million dollars to recruit Panamanians to overthrow the leader of Panama. The American media also ignored the outrage of the United Nations and the Organization of American States and never questioned the Bush administration of attempting to renege on the Carter-Torrijos Treaty of 1977 which promised, among other things, to turn over control of the canal to Panama by the end of the century. During the first week of the invasion, as newspapers ran profiles on the new president of Panama, Guillermo Endara, and his two Vice Presidents, no hint was ever given that these three men belonged to the 10% white minority of Panama, and that their 1989 campaign was, for the most part, directly financed by the Reagan administration. In a Columbia Journalism Review article, William Boot argued that the military should not have been so restrictive of the press, if only because the press, in this war, was on their side:

Manuel Noriega: Villain du Jour

The media's presentation and depiction of General Manuel Noriega deserves particularly special attention. It is well known that Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll for a number of years, even though, in 1976 CIA Director George Bush had evidence that Noriega had been involved in drug trafficking since as far back as 1972. This, however, could be overlooked since, until the end of the 1980s, the U.S. was still fighting the Cold War in Central America not the "Drug War." In 1984 Noriega openly stuffed ballot boxes for his candidate Nicolas Barletta to defeat the popular Arnulfo Arias. Even though many voting districts blatantly reported with twice as many votes as people, Secretary of State George Shultz attended Barletta's inauguration and praised the election as "an important step in Panamanian progress towards democracy."

The fact that Noriega had once been a close ally of the United States was rarely mentioned in the press in the months leading up to and immediately following the invasion of Panama. Rather, the media relished having a corrupt, Third World dictator with a pock marked face to replace Libya's Moamar Khaddafi as their new villain du jour. For two years before the invasion it was difficult to find a reference to Noriega in the press without certain adjectives such as "Panamanian strongman," "dictator," or "reputed drug kingpin" adjacent to his name. The effect of this was to sway public opinion against Noriega and create an atmosphere in which objective, rational foreign policy decisions towards Panama would be quite difficult to make. In the months leading up to the invasion, a "massive media campaign to demonize General Noriega was launched, including obtaining his indictment in a U.S. court on drug charges. All of this was part of a deliberate plan to get General Noriega to either accede to U.S. demands or step aside." Once the invasion began, a New York Times journalist admitted, "We wound up focusing on the Noriega manhunt just like everyone else... It was because the administration was making a big deal about Noriega. The ostensible reason for the invasion was to get this narco-terrorist in a net."

This attitude of blindly following along plot lines constructed by White House and Pentagon public affairs officials continued throughout the invasion of Panama. Newspapers across the country duly projected the image of American morality and innocence versus Noriega's corruption and evil by printing such items as Lieutenant General Thomas W. Kelly's report of Noriega's office:

In case the descriptions of Noriega's lair were too subtle for the press to get the proper image, Rear Admiral Ted Sheafer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff editorialized:

Noriega was a corrupt, debauched thug... we found a witch's diary that goes along with the evidence that we have that periodically up from Brazil would come normally two female and one male member of the occult who would council him on -- I can't imagine what.

The Army's claim to have found fifty kilograms of cocaine hidden in a freezer in Noriega's house made front page news the day after the invasion. Much later, buried in the inside pages of newspapers, the Pentagon admitted that the substance was not cocaine, but tamales wrapped in banana leaves. Upon discovering this mistake, the docile American press then reported the Pentagon's new plot twist that Noriega "used the tamales for unspeakable acts of witchcraft and voodoo." Also never mentioned was the fact that Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion that Noriega practiced, is "legitimate, respected, and common religious practice in the Caribbean." Just as it was common a century ago for the West to denounce their native opponents as primitive, uncivilized and beholden to dark, mysterious forces, the media seemed to help the Pentagon spread this same sort of neo-colonialist, racist imagery.

Perhaps the biggest controversy of Operation Just Cause, and one that intrinsically involved the American press, was the issue of Panamanian casualties. According to official U.S. military counts, 516 Panamanians were killed during the invasion, and about 3,000 wounded. Of these casualties, 314 were classified as members of the PDF, and 202 as civilians. These numbers were never accepted as accurate by many in Panama or the United States, and even if they were, they meant that the U.S. military was responsible for as many deaths as was the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and nearly as many as the Romanian secret police were in Timisoara weeks before Operation Just Cause. Unofficial casualty estimates have run from 1,000 to as high as 3,000 Panamanian civilian deaths during the invasion. There were those who believed that "from the moment they made Noriega's headquarters in the poor neighborhood of El Chorillo the focus of their night time attack, the Generals plotting Operation Just Cause knew that high civilian casualties could be expected." During and immediately after the invasion, however, the mainstream press did not question the military's numbers and rarely even discussed the issue of Panamanian casualties, particularly civilian casualties. It was not until four days after the invasion that the first story on civilians killed in Panama appeared on ABC news. In what appeared to be a "great victory of self-censorship," not a single photograph of the destruction of the El Chorillo neighborhood were taken by any of the major American photographic news agencies. Panamanian casualties simply did not seem to be a newsworthy story during or after the invasion.

The bulk of the deaths and destruction took place on the first night of the invasion, and mostly in the wooden shanty town of El Chorillo. Though the American press was unable to witness any of this early fighting, many Panamanians have since come forward with descriptions of American brutality. An El Chorillo resident testified that he saw American soldiers "entering each house. We saw the people -- the residents -- coming out, followed by the soldiers, and then we saw the houses, one by one, go up in smoke. The U.S. soldiers were burning the houses." On December 27, on the Trans-Isthmus Highway, a Panamanian public prosecutor described another scene of U.S. troops using fire power liberally. She said a line of cars were stopped at a U.S. road block, and when PDF troops in the last car in line fired at the Americans, they responded by machine gunning every car in line from first to last, killing almost everyone. There were also questions of whether the U.S. tried to hide Panamanian deaths by anonymous mass burials and burning bodies. The Independent Commission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion of Panama received "numerous individual testimonies collected by human rights organizations of people who witnessed U.S. troops using flame throwers to incinerate corpses on the streets in the days following the invasion." Likewise, there were numerous allegations made, most notably on the September 30, 1990 broadcast of Sixty Minutes, that the Americans buried hundreds of Panamanians in unmarked mass graves. At least two such graves were exhumed afterwards. Hospital workers gave graphic accounts of wards and mortuaries overflowing with bodies, of clearly marked ambulances being shot at, and of American soldiers arresting, at one hospital, nine of ten doctors on duty, ostensibly because their testimony would be a powerful rebuttal to the image of a clean war.

Despite these and many other testimonies and descriptions of the destruction, the general impression in the U.S. public was, as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Les Aspin said that "Operation Just Cause appears to have been implemented with a minimum of what the military euphemistically calls 'collateral damage'... We heard no complaints from Panamanians about the indiscriminate use of firepower by U.S. troops." The government also responded to the issue of mass graves. Military officials said they used two mass graves, but only to temporarily inter the remains of Panamanian soldiers and civilians for sanitation reasons. The Pentagon said that Panamanian health officials helped bury the bodies, and they were disintered a week later and given to the Panamanian government. Likewise, the military claimed that Noriega's Dignity Battalions, not Americans, started the burning of the wooden shanties of El Chorillo. As for why the press was not more attentive to civilian casualties, Fred Francis of NBC explained, "I'm a military correspondent, and for me, in an operation involving 25,000 troops, civilian casualties of three or four hundred people didn't constitute a major story. I mean, this was a war."

Even if "three or four hundred" civilian casualties was not worth reporting, since the press was restricted from the fighting and since there was such a lack of investigation afterwards, there was no way to prove whether or not a more newsworthy number of casualties, in fact, occurred. Weighing the arguments of both sides, it is impossible to tell facts from lies from exaggerated personal testimonies. For many Panamanians and Americans, it is only natural to suspect that the Pentagon covered up some of the true facts and numbers of Operation Just Cause. For others, it is only natural to trust the word of the U.S. government and military. If independent journalists had accompanied American forces into El Chorillo and other places where the action took place, these suspicions and questions about Panamanian deaths could either have been resolved or confirmed.

The December 1989 invasion of Panama was the first real test of the press pool system developed by the Sidle Panel five years earlier. Though at first, the military made a real effort to prepare for the pool, because of miscommunications between the Pentagon and SouthCom, planning was stopped and did not resume until hours before the invasion. Soon after the pool journalists arrived in Panama, it was quite obvious that the military had not prepared for them effectively and that their role would be extremely limited. Meanwhile, non-pool reporters in Panama City provided some coverage, but for the most part, were unable to venture outside of their rooms. Some of those who did go outside were kidnapped by Dignity Battalions and shot at by Americans. Once opened to the press, over three hundred media people descended on Panama. Though some still complained about military restrictions, many journalists seemed content to stay inside the Quarry Heights officer's club poaching the leads of their colleagues. In Grenada, the military took the blame for the American public's inability to get an honest picture of the action. In Panama, the media was just as much at fault as the military. Two anecdotes illustrate this:

When initial reports from Army information sources described the story of Captain Linda Bray leading a three hour battle to capture a heavily defended PDF position, a frenzied media pounced on the story of the first American woman to lead troops in combat. Original Army reports erroneously claimed that Captain Bray had "crashed through the gate in a jeep armed with a .50 caliber machine gun. Three enemy dead were found later." In reality, the fight occurred over a PDF dog kennel, it lasted ten minutes, no one was killed, and Bray gave the attack order over the radio. Though there was little interest in Captain Bray at first, as soon as the first "women in combat" stories emerged, everyone wanted to talk to her, and the capture of the kennel soon reached legendary proportions. Linda Bray was trotted out before all four morning talk shows, and eventually Rep. Patricia Shroeder (D-Colorado) was using Bray as an example of why laws barring woman from combat should be repealed. Though the Army must take the blame for originally producing the exaggerated reports of Bray's heroics, this illustration justified the military's fear and mistrust of "mob journalism" spreading inaccuracies and blowing insignificant stories well out of proportion. The Linda Bray example shows how the media in Panama was often more interested in story ideas that provided sales and exposure rather than ones that provided accurate information.

But certainly the military was also at fault. After Manuel Noriega turned up inside of the Papal Nunciate in Panama City, the media invaded the Holiday Inn and rented every room on the side of the building overlooking the embassy court yard. On December 27, the Army set up a massive speaker system and began a deafening heavy metal sound barrage that appeared to be designed to taunt Noriega out of the Nunciate. Reporters soon noticed that the speakers were pointed towards the Holiday Inn rather than towards Noriega's room, and as CNN's Charles Jaco found out from sympathetic military intelligence officers, General Thurman had, in fact, ordered the speakers set up to prevent reporters from using their microphones to eavesdrop on the soldiers below. The music was so loud that two sets of speakers were blown out, and journalists on the top floor of the Holiday Inn had to scream just to communicate with each other. On December 29, after the Vatican ambassador threatened to end the negotiations for Noriega's release, the music was finally turned off. That the Army would go to such extreme and ludicrous measures shows precisely how little trust and understanding there was in Panama between the media and the military.

After Operation Just Cause, the military and the media were, for the most part, still unhappy with each other. But the relationship had clearly changed. This was no longer the super-critical press of Vietnam. Journalists in Panama often parroted the reports and information of military public affairs officials rather than providing the American public with fresh first-hand observations and challenging investigation. Likewise, although they were still highly restrictive, the military no longer felt compelled to use the heavy-handed exclusion tactics of Grenada in order to achieve its aims of a media supported war. By the time of the Persian Gulf War, one year later, it was apparent that a new media-military relationship had formed.