09/02/15 – Brad Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up on the show today is Brad Smith, friend of the show, and veteran of the 1989 war on Panama.
I won't say war with, because that would imply that they were kind of fighting in it, too, against us, and not so much, I guess.
Check out his, what he wrote up about it for us here, the truth about the 1989 invasion of Panama at my website, scotthorton.org, at the blog there, stress, scotthorton.org, slash stress, the truth about the 1989 invasion of Panama by Brad Smith.
Welcome to the show.
Brad, how are you?
Oh, real good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us.
I appreciate you writing this up for us.
Oh, thanks.
I like your show and everything you're doing.
Cool, man.
Well, I was telling the audience at the beginning of the show, I don't think, I know I've read some articles here and there, but I don't think I've ever read a good book on the Panama War, only The Commanders by Bob Woodward, which doesn't count as a good book about it.
Although, so I know a little bit about it from that, and just from articles I've read in The Panama Deception, the great documentary from back then.
That's a good one.
You can, if you're ever interested in it, you can check out Our Man in Panama.
Yeah?
That's a pretty good book.
Okay.
You make some good points.
All right.
That's going on the list.
All right, so tell us name, rank, serial number, this, that, when did you join up, and what were you doing, and all those things.
Let's see.
I joined in February of 88.
I spent about two years in.
I started working for S-2, which is battalion-level military intelligence.
And then just before the invasion, I was bumped back into the headquarters for the 1st Platoon, Bravo Company 521 out of 7th Infantry Division Light.
We were the light fighters.
We were carrying just an infantry unit, about on line with the 10th Mountain Division, I guess.
We went in with 82nd, the Ranger Battalions, those guys.
I'll just jump right into Panama.
Let's just say we just bombed the living hell out of the place.
There was about, they say, 24 sites, and I would say that's probably about right if you talk about just the major sites, the different barracks all over the country that were just hammered from the air.
They came in with the C-130 Spectre gunships, which you probably couldn't use in anything like Iraq, but in Panama, where they basically couldn't fight back, they could just circle over top of them and just riddle them with bullets and shells.
They said they had 442 bombs large enough dropped to hit the seismograph, too.
So it was just hell from above.
You talk about in the article, too, about how, and we can get back to all the attacks on the military barracks and all that in a minute, but you talk about how there was this one poor part of town that was just decimated, and I think quite a bit of that is shown in that documentary, The Panama Deception.
Do you know what was going on there?
They were just testing out daisy cutters, or they just missed?
No, what happened there was that that's where Noriega had his headquarters at, La Comodancia.
And that ended up being a running battle that took about, let's say about 12 hours to actually take that place.
The Panamanians call it the Night of Fire.
And all around that neighborhood, there were just running battles.
I mean, we had tanks in the streets, and, you know, they had, I mean, you're talking about how fire missiles being fired pretty much indiscriminately in a civilian part of town.
I mean, there were tanks that ran over cars.
They were, you know, just you can't imagine unless you've been there seeing what happens when you unleash that kind of firepower in a very small, poor, you know, urban area.
And we, of course, covered it up pretty well because as soon as it was over, we pretty much went in and just bulldozed everything.
The press, of course, that, from what I understand, covered Panama pretty openly, except for they said nothing about El Chirillo.
The Panamanians call it Little Hiroshima.
And it's what it looked like.
When they were done, it looked like somebody had dropped an A-bomb because it just, it was, you know, the construction there, it's wood construction, it's poor, it burnt, and it just, the fires just raged through, and tons of people got trapped there.
I personally can't say exactly how many people died.
I know it's a contentious thing, but I don't think it really matters.
We didn't have a right to do it.
We had no business being there killing that many people.
The military said, well, you know, we didn't just have mass graves, except for that we had to do it for, you know, health reasons.
Well, okay, you know, so they're saying it wasn't a cover-up, they just had to bury all these bodies because it was for sanitary reasons.
Well, now when it comes to the civilian casualties in that neighborhood, can you give us at least the size of the ballpark that the debate is between here?
Thousands, tens of thousands?
No, I would say that from everything that I've read and studied and from what I saw personally, I think the estimates of about 4,000 are probably right.
As far as the Panama military, you know, I'd have to say about 500, but you have to realize that's only 3,000 people that they had to begin with.
And, you know, so 500 out of 3,000, that's a pretty high casualty rate, and that's not including the Dignitary Battalion, which a lot of those guys got hunted down and killed later in Operation Promote Liberty.
You know, the Dignitary Battalion was just him handing out weapons to anybody he thought was loyal.
I'm talking all the way down to eight-year-old kids.
Those guys were, I think some of them just hated us.
Some of them just didn't want us there.
You know, some of them were terrible people, too.
I mean, he wasn't very picky about who he handed weapons out to.
I think one of the strangest things was how the people supported us in some areas and, of course, hated us in others.
The closer they came to where we used heavy firepower, you know, they hated us.
But they hated our government, you know, and I call it our government in Panama because it, of course, was at the time, which is missed by a lot of people that, you know, Noriega was definitely our man.
Well, yeah, let's talk about that.
Well, no, let's put that off until after the break because there's a lot to talk about with Noriega there and the whole regime change and everything.
As far as the battle itself, you know, it sounds like you're pretty impressed with the unfairness of the fight where these gunships are just destroying these barracks.
Maybe 500 doesn't sound like that many to people in the context of a war or something like that, but you're talking about in one night's time or two days' time, one or two days' time.
And then you also talk about they wanted to just, you know, they were like turf battles where instead of sending in, you know, low and slow and close and slaughter them from a C-130, then, no, the Air Force guys want to fly their F-117s and see if they can hit the barracks with that.
Oh, that was Rio Hato, and that was just really made no sense at all.
They could have done the same thing, just hit them with C-130s, and instead you ended up with a massive mess-up, and it was they wanted to use their toys.
The same thing happened to the SEALs, the SEALs that went into the Punta Patia Airport.
That was not a SEAL mission.
That was just stupid.
I was at Punta Patia about three days after the SEALs hit it, and I looked at the train, and the first thing I thought was, wow, this was not a mission for the SEALs.
They took three platoons of them, tried to sneak them in, and they got caught running across the tarmac and just slaughtered.
The one platoon, I think, was 12 guys that ran out onto the runway, and four of them were killed, seven of them seriously wounded.
So 11 out of the 12 were laying there on the airport.
Yeah, the economics of bureaucracy to blame, of course.
Oh, absolutely.
All right, hold it right there.
Hold it right there.
We've got to stop and take this break.
It's Brad Smith, veteran of Operation Just Cause against Panama in 1989.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Brad Smith.
He was in the war against Panama in December 1989, and he wrote this piece that I published at ScottHorton.org, slash, stress, the truth about the 1989 invasion of Panama.
And at the break there, we were talking about, you know, stupid missions that were made for, you know, Joseph Heller-type reasons, like let's send the Navy SEALs to take this airport in a way that just led them into a slaughter and this kind of stupidity.
Missing targets with their F-117 stealth bombers that clearly had no business, you know, engaging in this kind of war, but, you know, that kind of, like, a bad episode of MASH basically going on as these decisions are made for just how to kill these people and who to kill.
Yeah, all the other barracks around the country, you know, dozens and dozens, they just hammered them with the C-130s.
They sent it to Rio Hato.
They just missed.
They dropped two 5,000-pound bombs on an empty field.
Well, actually, that's not so bad.
They probably should have done more of the war like that then, I guess.
Well, they just shouldn't have done it at all.
You know, what's really bad is at the time, I have to say I was grateful in a way that we'd used such overwhelming force.
I was married.
I had a, you know, six-month-old daughter.
But as I grew older, it weighs on you more and more because you realize just how wrong it was.
And we just slaughtered people.
That's not a war.
I don't even know if it's an end.
I think they called it a contingency plan.
Yeah.
Hey, did they even give them a chance to surrender or it was just sneak attack in the middle of the night, Pearl Harbor style, that's it?
Pearl Harbor style.
Yeah, there was no warning.
Everybody was.
In fact, when we got alerted, we hadn't even been told.
We just walked in, boom, pack your stuff, we are going.
You didn't contact your family.
That was operational security.
In fact, we were actually put behind barbed wire before we were told where we were going because they did not want news sneaking out to anybody.
So they just hammered 24 different groups of barracks around the country and one police station.
The rest of the police stations we took down one at a time, just going there, taking them over, blocking patrol, getting snitches, kicking in doors.
Then, of course, later we disarmed the people themselves.
Right.
Well, yeah, talk about that and then we'll get to Noriega and the reason for the regime change.
But talk about your occupation of the place when they changed it from Operation Just Because to Operation Promote Liberty.
Right.
Well, there was an intermediate step.
First we hammered all the barracks and we pushed out into the countryside.
We would just go up to a police station, boom, take it over.
By then the police knew we were coming.
A couple times they waited for us and just surrendered.
But the rest of the time we had to go door to door, kicking in doors, grabbing them.
We'd get snitches.
You'd walk around and go, hey, where are these guys?
For the most part they were pretty happy to tell us.
They were pretty brutal.
But then we started kicking in doors just to get guns.
By then we weren't as popular anymore.
That was what they called Operation Promote Liberty.
You've got to love them bushes, man.
Here's another thing that I think people aren't aware of, but if there had been a big outcry over that war, none of the rest of the wars of this century might have happened.
Yeah, that was like their trial run for Desert Storm there.
Hey, we got away with it in Panama, hell yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
That was Bush, that was unilateral, completely.
Nobody else was supposed to do it.
Cheney was on TV a couple months before saying, oh, we'll never do that because the hue and cry would be massive.
Because he knew it was an illegal invasion.
The U.N. said it was illegal.
But they got away with it.
That was on Powell, actually.
Powell was the big one pushing for the Panama War.
Well, what's funny, too, is if you think about it now, I mean, what possible situation could have existed where the U.S.A. had no choice but to invade Panama?
I mean, give me a break.
They claimed that he had started it because he killed a couple service members.
What they don't tell you is that we were purposely driving these guys armed right next to their headquarters, where they weren't allowed.
They were called the hard chargers, these guys.
They went in and purposely got themselves shot up so that they'd have some kind of excuse, I guess.
Yeah, these things happen.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so what was the reason for the regime change anyway?
Because everybody knows that America created Panama.
We stole it from Colombia to build a canal across it.
It is U.S. owned property, certainly at this time, before they gave up the canal at the, you know, 99 or whatever it was.
Well, your guest from the other day, Seymour Hersh, probably had some to start with it, which is a funny way to put it.
Really?
But, yeah, he was one of the first people to start writing about Noriega playing both sides of the fence.
He was sharing information with Cuba and at the same time dealing drugs and all of that.
And then it started spreading that we were going to take him down over drugs.
So that got him all up in arms.
That got Noriega ticked off.
And what he did was he captured a cargo ship going through the canal full of small arms that was headed to the Contras.
He offloaded them and handed them out to the dignitary battalion, handed them out to people.
We collected thousands and thousands of these weapons and shipped them, boxed them up.
We were supposed to be shipping them back to the U.S., but I never saw any when we got back.
That was it right there.
That was where D.C. and Langley's head exploded and they said, this guy's going to die.
Right, right, exactly.
Well, and they buried him under the prison, I guess, in Florida.
They hadn't killed him yet.
I think that was absolutely the final straw.
I mean, some of it was the press getting out because that made him belligerent.
Well, I think at that point he probably thought we were seriously about taking him down.
I don't know if we were at that point, but by the time he did the weapons thing, they sure as hell were.
That was the thing that couldn't get out.
They weren't going to let the public know.
Well, one, because Congress at that point had already told Langley to stop it.
Congress had already made a declaration to stop arming the Contras at that time.
So when he went and grabbed all these weapons, that was a pretty big deal if he'd gone public with it.
Actually, what's funny is that at the time, I came back and I read reports about the weapons.
And the only thing I ever found, come across on it, was that they claimed those weapons came from Cuba.
That Castro was helping Noriega arm his troops.
Well, Noriega didn't need any help from Castro.
We had no problem arming him before that.
Yeah, yeah, he had plenty of weapons from us.
So I wonder, did anybody ever challenge them and ask them, or was that ever a point of the revisionist history, of whether they could have just found some friendly colonels and done a coup against Noriega, rather than invading the place the way they did?
They really just wanted, they had a chance to invade a place and they took it.
Well, it's actually worse than that.
We encouraged a coup two months before the invasion.
Well, actually, we encouraged a coup quite a while before that.
But when the coup actually took place, we were supposed to support it by blocking off reinforcements.
One of their colonels actually had Noriega at gunpoint in his office at La Comodancia.
So they had him, and we did not back the coup.
All we were supposed to do was stop his reinforcements.
We didn't do it.
We backed out on it.
Noriega got the guy disarmed and actually shot that colonel with the gun that he had been holding on Noriega.
And did they deliberately withhold that because they wanted the chance for war, is what you're saying?
Oh, yeah.
Or it was just they hadn't really made that final decision to invade yet at that point?
No, I think at that point they'd already gone too far with all the planning.
So, no, no, let's sabotage the coup so that we have the excuse for the war.
Exactly.
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All right, hey, listen, man, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and telling us your story, Brad.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Hey, you're welcome, and keep up the good work.
All right, y'all, that is Brad Smith, former U.S. Army, 7th Infantry.
And you can read his article at scotthorton.org slash stress the truth about the 1989 invasion of Panama.
We'll be right back.
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