from The Nation, February 12 1990 
  
             Not-So-Hot Tamales
 
   It was Col. Mike Snell who first told the press that his boys had found 
fifty pounds of cocaine hidden in a freezer in Manuel Noriega's house.  Gen 
Maxwell Thurman later upgraded the haul to fifty kilos. Now, buried on the 
inside pages of the papers comes an admission by the Pentagon that the 
substance in question was not cocaine at all, but tamales wrapped in banana 
leaves. 
  
  In his tour of Noriega's quarters, "Mad Max" (the sobriquet is commonplace in
the European press, if not here) presented a sleazy set of exhibits -- a 
portrait of Hitler and a bust of Napoleon, exotic weaponry, red underwear and 
"a collection of off-color stuff."  The soldiers were "stunned by what they 
saw," the Defense Department said. "Soldiers aren't used to an awful lot."  Be 
serious: What do they read in bed at Fort Bragg, _The Economist_?
  
   American virtue and innocence in an ugly world has been the sustaining 
narrative of the Panama invasion, and it is now used as a defense in the tamale
episode. "The guys who first saw the stuff did not kow what cocaine was," the 
Pentagon says.  But the issue is less the na‹vet‚ of our cornfed boy soldiers 
than the gullibility of our more worldly reporters, who swallow all this 
nonsense with never a word of protest and then show no greater skepticism when 
the Pentagon repackages its clash between good and evil -- Noriega is now said 
to have used the tamales for unspeakable acts of witchcraft and voodoo.
  
   Yet this incident may be the first sign that the pulp fiction demonology of 
the Penama invasion is unraveling. If the cocaine never existed, what else was 
faked? Is the legal case against Noriega too flimsy to sustain in court, too 
dependent on an inept prosecutor and the tainted testimony of convicted drug 
dealers? Were the dirty pictures really family snapshots?  Was the portrait of 
Hitler really Charlie Chaplin?