of scandalous abuses within the framework of the trial itself. As a result of the Bush regime's "mind
war" conducted in cooperation with the controlled news media, it is clear that Noriega cannotreceive a fair trial anywhere in the United States, because of the impossibility of finding an
impartial jury. During the time that Noriega was preparing his defense, the US Department of
Justice and the FBI violated the rights of the defendant under the Sixth Amendment by tapping and
taping his conversations with his defense lawyers. Attorney Raymond Takiff had been retained by
Noriega as a lawyer at the same time that he was working for the US Department of Justice as asecret informant in undercover sting operations. In his outrageously political pre-trial opinions, US (^)
District Judge William Hoeveler barred all references to Noriega's dealings with CIA Director and
Vice President George Bush, ruling that the Noriega-Bush relation was irrelevant to the US
government's charge that Noriega was part of drug smuggling into the United States. Hoeveler's
pre-trial ruling amounts to a ban on discussion of wrongdoiNoriega's defense, which is that US agencies, and not Noriega, were responsible for the importationng by the US government. This guts (^)
of illegal narcotics into the United States as an integral part of the US government's policy of
supporting the Nicaraguan contras, and that the US government fabricated the February, 1988
indictments against Noriega as part of a political strategy to overthrow him because he refused to
join the US in supporting the contras.
The parade of government witnesses against Noriega includes the usual rogue's gallery of
professional perjurers from the Federal Witness Protection Program. Those testifying against
Noriega are, almost without exception, felons at the mercy of the US government, many of whom
have concluded plea bargains with federal prosecutors in which they have been treated moreleniently in exchange for their willingness to testify against Noriega. These professional witnesses (^)
constitute a phalanx of CIA stringers and other mercenaries of the perjury wars who have received
total payments of US taxpayers' money estimated anywhere between $1.5 million and $6 million.
The upkeep of this stable of witnesses and other exorbitant court costs are not being defrayed by the
Bush presidential campaign nor by Busproceedings is to retroactively validate Bush's atrocity of December, 1989, ah personally, despite the fact that the main purposnd to contribute to hise of the (^)
efforts at self-glorification for re-election in 1992. Judge Hoeveler has abrogated the usual rules of
evidence, admitting hearsay reports on Noriega's activities from celebrity felons like Carlos Lehder
who have never met nor spoken with Noriega. Despite this unprecedented mobilization of the police
state apparatus, news media like US News and World Report of September 23, 1991 hathat the Justice Department case against Noriega is "shockingly weak," and legal experts notve conceded
friendly to Noriega have asserted that the first month of the prosecution case had utterly failed to
provide convincing evidence of any violations of US law by Noriega.
Bush's performance during the Panama crisis was especially ominous because of the president'sclearly emerging mental imbalance. Several outbursts during the Noriega press conferences had (^)
resembled genuine public fits. Racist and sexual obsessions were reaching critical mass in Bush's
subconscious. These gross phenomena did not receive the attention they would have merited from
journalists, television commentators, and pundits, who rather preferred studiously to ignore them.
One public figure who called attention to Bush's psychopathology was political prisoner LyndonLaRouche, who made the following courageous observations from a jail cell in a federal prison in (^)
Minnesota after viewing several of Bush's press briefings during the last days of December:
George is a very shallow-minded person, very impulsive. He's a person of rage-driven obsession,
and impulses flowing from rage-driven obsessions. Very shallow-minded. He's sort of a jock of one
kind or another, in his mentality. He talks like it, he acts like it, his body language is that of it. Hecan't present a concept. The man is incapable of carrying a concept in his head. He's a poor little
fellow who's so rage-driven that very little intellectual activity can occur in his head; that's his
conceptual style. He's a man characterized by sudden fits of jock-style rage, of obsessions which
flow from seizure by that rage, and of impulses which flow from those obsessions.