Manuel Noriega was the president of Panama, a military dictator, and, per John Kiriakou, one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere. Kiriakou raises him to rebut a televised denial by former CIA officer Jack Devine that the agency ever worked with drug traffickers: Noriega, he notes, “was a paid CIA source for decades.”[1] Kiriakou frames the case as part of the CIA’s need to address its drug-facilitation history “truthfully.”[1]
Kiriakou also describes the 1989 U.S. operation that removed Noriega from power: President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama with the military, and Noriega fled to the Vatican embassy in Panama City.[2] U.S. forces occupied Panama City and set up sound systems around the embassy, playing death metal at high volume until the Vatican ambassador told Noriega he had to leave; Noriega walked out and was taken into custody.[3] Kiriakou says the U.S. invoked the 1985 “Kiki Camarena law” to legally justify the 1989 invasion — telling Soviet objections at the UN Security Council that the action was legal under U.S. law.[4]
The template for a scalp
Asked why Washington would refuse Maduro amnesty in exchange for stepping down, Kiriakou’s answer was that a trial is the point: “the only thing that I could think of was that Donald Trump wants a scalp.”[5]
Noriega is the precedent he reaches for, and the part he emphasises is the timing of the charges. He “was a long-term paid asset of the CIA until the CIA just didn’t need him anymore, and they turned on him — and all of a sudden he became an internationally wanted narcotics trafficker. Which may or may not have been true, and even if it was true, the CIA knew he was doing it from the beginning anyway.”[5]
The sequel: “we sent in a small strike force and kidnapped him and brought him back to Miami and put him on trial for international drug trafficking, and he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. I think he ended up dying in a French prison.”[6]
Applied forward: “they want a scalp. They want somebody that they can point to to show that they’re serious about drugs — and they prove that they’re serious about drugs by taking this narcotics trafficker, which he’s not, and giving him a sentence of life without parole. It’s the only thing that I can think of. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.”[7]