Tommy Vitor

So that seemed to be, again, shout out Charlie Savage at the New York Times for kind of reporting this out and flagging it.

But it seems like a pretty astounding admission since

designating this fake cartel as a terrorist group is the linchpin of this made up legal strategy that the Trump administration has pointed to to justify these airstrikes where they've been murdering people in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Last thing, there have been a lot of comparisons to this, the Majora operation to the operation against Manuel Noriega in the 1980s and early 1990s that we thought we'd just spend a minute talking about that.

So for those who don't know, maybe weren't alive then, the operation against Noriega was...

Started in December of 89 and ended in January of 1990.

Then President George H.W.

Bush, he ordered this operation to an invasion of Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega, who was the dictator running Panama at the time.

The scale of that operation was massive.

The U.S.

deployed 26,000 troops.

I think about half of them were already in Panama because at the time, U.S.

Southern Command was located there.

in Panama.

Now it's in Florida.

But this invasion came after, you know, lots of repression by the of the Panamanian people by Noriega, lots of evidence that he was involved in drug trafficking, the killing of a US Marine by a Panamanian soldier.

And then the Panamanian General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that there was a state of war, that a state of war existed between the US and Panama, which I think was twisted,

to suggest that Panama had declared war on the US, which wasn't really what happened, wasn't really intended, but whatever, it's history now.

So the US invades, Noriega hides in the Vatican diplomatic mission for a few days before he gives himself up.