Epithets, Voodoo Reports Help U.S. Demean Noriega : NEWS ANALYSIS

For more than a week, the American military has been hurling a fury of scathing images and epithets at Manuel A. Noriega in a campaign clearly designed to demean and demonize the fallen Panama leader.

The denigrations have all contributed to a repulsive portrayal: the American public has been told that Noriega wore red underwear to ward off the evil eye, practiced voodoo with vats of blood and animal entrails, kept “a witch’s diary” in the same room with his favorite pornography and a portrait of Adolf Hitler, cavorted with his mistress in the mirror-walled bedroom of a luxurious yacht, and loutishly ignored the well-being of his wife while warning only his mistress that the American invasion was on its way.

The intensity of the anti-Noriega campaign has raised a host of questions. Is it no more than the normal course of propaganda in war? Is it infused with heavy-handed doses of colonialism and racism? Has it been prolonged by the need to persuade Pope John Paul II that Noriega is too foul and loathsome to merit sanctuary in a Vatican embassy?

The theme of the campaign was set down swiftly. In Washington on Dec. 22, two days after the invasion, Rear Adm. Ted Shaefer, who directs intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described Noriega as “a corrupt, debauched thug.”

In Panama, at almost the same hour, Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, commander of the American military forces there, laid down what amounted to a double strategy for the psychological assault.

Thurman set out to demolish the legitimacy of Noriega as a leader of Panama, refusing to use any title other than “mister” in front of the fallen dictator’s name.

But at the same time, the American commander tried to magnify Noriega’s threat to the United States, denouncing him as “a man who has graduated from a narco-trafficker indicted in the United States to a narco-terrorist,” an enemy amassing so many weapons in Panama that he would “in the long run . . . have given the United States a tremendous challenge in this area.”

From then on, American military officials, from Gen. Thurman on down, in a procession of news conferences, guided tours and press releases, released unsavory material--much of which has been accepted by American reporters on the scene--to emphasize that Noriega was too base ever to have merited legitimate leadership and too evil to be allowed to go on unbridled.

The campaign has provoked some critics, none of them admirers of Noriega, to protest that the U.S. government has over-excited itself, smashing a worthless scoundrel down and down again for an endless series of rounds.

“The guy is a prima facie thug,” said Fred S. Hoffman, who recently retired as deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. “You don’t have to lay it on extra thick. It’s overkill.”

Hoffman was troubled as well by the American psychological tactic of harassing the Vatican embassy in Panama. Some of the 100 troops surrounding the embassy hooked up powerful loudspeakers that had, until Saturday, blasted rock songs like “I Fought the Law” and “Voodoo Child” and “You’re No Good” at Noriega.

“What really offends me is that business outside the embassy,” Hoffman said; “the frisking, the shaking people up and down, the rock music. It’s unnecessary and it’s demeaning to the United States.”

Though some believe the American military may have gone too far, the campaign, in many ways, resembles the classic propaganda of war. The level of vitriol in the anti-Noriega diatribes has echoed the kind of wartime propaganda that helped sell other wars, such as the caricatures of Japanese and German soldiers in World War II, the portraits of a buck-toothed Emperor Hirohito and the drawings of four filthy pigs that children could fold into a likeness of Hitler.

David Kertzer, a professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College who specializes in the use of ritual in politics, says governments in war always try to personalize the hated enemy. “People have an easier time dealing with people than with policies and governments. So we make the enemy a person and identify that person with the devil. The more we identify the enemy as the devil the more we become the savior,” Kertzer said.

David Halberstam, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize covering Vietnam for the New York Times, saw some parallels with propaganda during the Vietnam era, when the Pentagon struggled mightily over semantics to market an unpopular war, calling it a conflict rather than a war, and describing the Viet Cong as Communists or “reds” but never as nationalists.

In Panama, Halberstam noted, American soldiers wounded after two days were seen on television receiving combat medals that had not been handed out to soldiers in World War II until they had spent 30 days and nights in combat. That image, Halberstam said, made Noriega seem more dangerous to America than a German panzer division in World War II.

The campaign against Noriega also seems to some to be infused with neocolonialist imagery. In colonial days, it was common practice for powerful Western officials to denounce their native opponents in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean as primitive, uncivilized and beholden to dark, mysterious forces. Though most of the Third World is now independent, remnants of that attitude still exist.

Overtones in the campaign against Noriega--particularly reports of voodoo paraphernalia--smacked of such racism to Laurien Alexandre, a communications specialist on American propaganda who is director of global studies at the Immaculate Heart College Center in Los Angeles. “I found the portrayal completely racist.”

Pointing out that santeria --the so-called voodoo religion--is “a legitimate, respected and common religious practice in the Caribbean,” Alexandre said that “thousands of Caribbeans having roots in the Yoruba religion (of Africa) have practiced santeria for centuries.”

“That kind of religious ritual . . . it’s kind of disgusting to a lot of the American public,” Alexandre said. “I can see it all as part and parcel of a campaign against Noriega that somewhere down the line has some part of disinformation about it. How else do you make a guy who was once an ally into an enemy?”

At present, the White House is focused primarily on negotiating with Vatican lawyers over winning custody of Noriega from the Vatican embassy in Panama City. President Bush, vacationing in Texas, has not been joining the name calling about Noriega.

As a result, many in the White House press corps see some of the latest military denunciations of Noriega as part of an effort aimed at persuading the Vatican that Noriega should be looked on as a criminal, perhaps even a deviant, rather than a deposed leader.

From a legal point of view, if Noriega is eventually brought to trial on narcotics trafficking charges in the United States, the present depictions of him could prove counterproductive, at least to the degree that they might offer grist for defense attorneys to argue that he cannot get a fair trial in the United States because of prejudicial pretrial publicity.

Although an analyst like Halberstam could scoff at the campaign--”One does not invade countries based on underwear,” he said--there is no doubt that the American military has been successful in persuading the American public to accept their image of Noriega. Night show hosts like Johnny Carson and David Letterman now make jokes about Noriega’s depravity and sinfulness. Carson, for example, said one night that Noriega had no choice but to seek sanctuary in the Vatican embassy because he needed teams of priests to hear his confessions round the clock.

As far as the American public is concerned, it supported the war wholeheartedly even before the abusive campaign against Noriega began. The depictions of him simply reinforce the ongoing effort that already has helped win 80% approval of the invasion by the public, according to an ABC News poll.