Manuel Noriega was president of Panama from 1983 - 1989. He was an American ally & helped the United States to combat Cuban & Soviet Union influence in the region. He acted as an intermediary with US-backed contra rebels fighting Daniel Ortega’s leftwing Sandinista government & with the Salvadoran government & rebels.
When Noriega demanded that the Panama Canal - an artificial 82 km waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean & divides North & South America be handed over to the government & people of Panama as agreed in an earlier document with United States, he was declared a dictator & drug trafficker by the Bush administration. America do not want to handover the canal which is a major strategic shipping, naval, economic & military asset to the US back to the rightful owners - the government & people of Panama on whose soil the canal was dug.
Instead, president H W Bush, after economic sanctions imposed on Panama failed, in December 1989, ordered Gen Colin Powell, then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, to launch "Operation Just Cause", sending 26,000 American invasion troops into Panama in a rehearsal of the Powell “doctrine of overwhelming force” that was next employed two years later in the first Gulf war.
As 26,000 American soldiers invaded Panama, Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy. American forces laid siege on the Vatican embassy where Noriega took refuge & used loudspeakers to blast high-decibel rock music into the compound. The Papal Nuncio could stand it no longer & surrendered Noriega to the US forces.
The number of civilian & military casualties in that 1989 American invasion of Panama is still disputed till today as American forces & the Western press covered up the atrocities.
America invaded a sovereign nation, captured the president of a sovereign nation in a sacrilegious violation of international law in the embassy of the Vatican in his country, took the president of a sovereign nation & imprisoned him in America.
Only America determines what is legal & illegal in the world. Let them go to Ukraine & tell Russia what is right & wrong. I only pity the Ukranianian civilians who America & the rogue regime they helped to install through a coup in Ukraine have decieved into inviting war & suffering upon themselves.
By Michael Ogueke
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