Douglas Cox: The Noriega File

Douglas Cox is an attorney and an associate law library professor at the City University of New York School of Law.

A recent decision by a French court — paving the way for the return of former dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega to Panama after more than 20 years in prisons in the United States and France — has made a long-standing question suddenly urgent: What happened to the thousands of boxes of documents U.S. forces seized during Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989? The surprising answer, the U.S. government recently confirmed, is that the U.S. Army still has them. The United States should immediately return these documents to Panama, where they are needed not only by historians and human rights researchers but also by attorneys on both sides of legal proceedings that will follow Noriega's return.

During the U.S. invasion of Panama to remove Noriega from office, American forces seized 15,000 boxes of documents from Noriega's offices and the Panamanian Defense Forces. The documents included everything from letters and bank account statements to sensitive secret police files and intelligence reports, and even a number of "stolen" U.S. documents.

Early on, the possibility that the seized documents might provide evidence for Noriega's drug-trafficking trial in Miami, or might corroborate politically embarrassing connections between Noriega and the CIA, made headlines. After Noriega's trial in 1992, however, during which the prosecution made scant use of the documents and the judge largely rejected evidence regarding Noriega's CIA connections as irrelevant, the subsequent fate of the documents remained a well-kept, and largely forgotten, secret. U.S. Southern Command recently confirmed to me, however, that after all these years, the seized documents from the Noriega regime are still in the custody of U.S. Army South, headquartered at Ft. Sam Houston in Texas.

The fate of the seized documents is only a part of the problem...