U.S. Agents Pore Over Mountain of Noriega Documents

Stacked in a warehouse at a U.S. military base in Panama, hundreds of thousands of documents seized by American forces from Manuel A. Noriega’s homes and offices and other government facilities tempt investigators with the promise of undiscovered clues to the massive criminal network allegedly operated by the ousted dictator.

More than a dozen FBI, Drug Enforcement, Immigration and Customs agents, all fluent in Spanish, pore over the documents, assisted by military computer operators, pursuing a paper chase of awesome proportions.

The document examiners fill seven rooms in the processing center, which is larger than a basketball gym floor. The trove of documents from which they draw is “in the area of 6,000 linear feet,” a Justice Department official estimated.

One at a time, the files are being examined, compared against high-priority categories identified by prosecutors and then indexed in a computer if they seem relevant.

Some immediately useful documents are forwarded to Washington and then to Miami or Tampa, the two cities where Noriega and his co-defendants are to be tried on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.

The federal criminal investigators have company in studying the material seized in the invasion.

CIA agents, among others, searched through the papers for anything unfavorable to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, before it was voted out of office in the Nicaraguan election. But a government source said that they found nothing useful.

Only a few weeks ago, it was not clear what would come of the huge exercise by the criminal investigators. Defense attorneys had questioned the documents’ admissibility, based on the way they had been obtained.

Frank A. Rubino, Noriega’s chief defense attorney, said he intended to challenge the right of the government to introduce any of the documents in a U.S. courtroom.

“The Constitution says you can’t seize property from someone’s home without a warrant, and the invasion force had no warrant,” Rubino said in an interview.

But the Supreme Court read the Constitution differently Wednesday, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to foreigners outside the United States.

Rubino could not be reached for his reaction Wednesday, but Samuel I. Burstyn, who represents a key Noriega co-defendant, Luis A. del Cid, lamented that the Supreme Court’s ruling represents more of a setback to the defendants than just the question of what documents may be introduced.

Like Rubino, Burstyn was attacking the jurisdiction of a U.S. court to try the Panamanians, contending that their arrests were illegal because they took place in the midst of an invasion. But, after concluding that there is no distinction between foreign searches and arrests, Burstyn called the Supreme Court decision “the death knell for any jurisdictional attack in the Noriega case. This is it, so far as the court’s power to try the case,” he said in an interview.

“There’s nothing left now, except to go to trial.”

A Justice Department official who has studied the issues agreed, saying the Supreme Court decision blows any argument against the documents’ admissibility “out of the water.”

But the official, who asked not to be identified, contended that, even before the ruling, there had been no concern in the department over whether the seized documents could be used in the Noriega prosecutions. Even if the high court had ruled that the Fourth Amendment applied overseas, he said, Justice Department attorneys were prepared to argue that the seizure was “reasonable, because it came during a military operation, and the military was carrying out a legitimate objective.”

“You don’t need FBI agents accompanying a Ranger battalion to make the seizure legal,” he said.

Ronald J. Ostrow reported from Washington and Robert L. Jackson from Miami.