NEWS ANALYSIS : Noriega Conviction Relieves White House : Drugs: Acquittal could have been embarrassing because of the way he was brought to trial and the expense of the process.

When a Miami jury convicted deposed Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega on drug and racketeering charges Thursday, the Bush Administration relief was clearly evident.

The possibility of an acquittal or even a hung jury had loomed as a potentially major embarrassment for President Bush, given the monumental military, monetary and legal investment in the case.

And, although the conviction could put Noriega behind bars for the rest of his life, it does not put to rest questions about the means employed to do so.

In December, 1989, the Administration dispatched 25,000 U.S. troops to Panama, primarily to depose Noriega and bring him to trial in Miami. The military offensive, called Operation Just Cause, cost the lives of about two dozen U.S. servicemen and at least 200 Panamanian civilians.

And in its effort to convict Noriega, the government handsomely rewarded a long list of convicted dope smugglers and murderers in return for their testimony, while spending an estimated $5 million to put on the heavily publicized seven-month trial.

All this even though the government itself acknowledged that Noriega was not a kingpin of the Colombian cocaine cartel, but only an errand boy who happened to run a strategically located country.

Drug experts said the Noriega conviction will have no appreciable effect on the flow of narcotics into the United States. Nor will the case provide a precedent for other so-called smash-and-grab operations against foreign heads of state suspected of violating U.S. laws, according to officials and scholars.

Rather, they said, the government is likely to be emboldened in pursuing arms dealers, terrorists, money launderers and similar less prominent people who operate overseas but affect U.S. citizens or interests, unless it is reigned in by the Supreme Court.

“This solves the Administration’s problem. It enables them to put the final lid on Operation Just Cause,” said retired Gen. Frederick Woerner, who was fired as commander of U.S. forces in Panama because he opposed military action to remove Noriega. “But the issue of U.S. intervention remains in the eyes of the Latins. We probably didn’t gain a whole lot.”

The Administration justified the invasion as an effort to install the democratically elected government of Guillermo Endara, who was denied the office of the presidency by Noriega and his bands of street thugs known as Dignity Battalions. A number of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen were harassed by Noriega troops in the days before the invasion, providing further grounds for the lightning U.S. assault in the predawn hours of Dec. 20, 1989.

Although there was no precedent for seizing a foreign leader to bring him to trial in a U.S. court, the Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations had been increasingly aggressive in asserting the right to kidnap foreign nationals and try them in American courts.

In 1987, FBI agents lured suspected Lebanese airline hijacker Fawaz Younis onto a boat in the Mediterranean with promises of a drug deal and a party. Once the yacht had sailed into international waters, the agents arrested Younis and transferred him to the aircraft carrier Saratoga for transport back to the United States. Younis eventually was convicted of air piracy in federal court in Washington.

Then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III said at the time of Younis’ arrest that it was the first overseas apprehension of a foreign terrorist, “but it will most certainly not be the last.”

The government has snatched a number of other suspected international drug dealers and terrorists since then. The legality of the policy is now under review by the Supreme Court. The outcome of the case could provide grounds for an appeal of the Noriega verdict.

Lawyers representing a Mexican doctor abducted at the request of U.S. drug enforcement agents in 1990 argued before the high court earlier this month that the United States could not unilaterally ignore extradition treaties to enter a sovereign state and seize one of its citizens to try him in a U.S. court.

A federal appeals court earlier had ruled that the United States had illegally kidnaped Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Marchain, a suspect in the slaying of American drug agent Enrique Camarena. The court ordered Alvarez-Marchain repatriated to Mexico.

Georgetown University law professor Sam Dash said that, although the Noriega prosecutors tried to present their case as a simple narcotics case, it raised important issues of diplomacy and sovereignty. The United States may be inviting other governments to follow their lead, he suggested.

“We laid the foundation when the executive branch insists that they can kidnap people anywhere in the world and bring them into the country for trial,” Dash said. “So then we cannot complain if they kidnap our top officials. Saddam Hussein could send terrorists to get our defense secretary or a top general for their roles in the Persian Gulf War.”

A former senior government lawyer who participated in decisions leading up to the indictment and seizure of Noriega said he has come to believe that the military and the U.S. courts are not the proper instruments for dealing with problems--even criminal problems--between nations.

“Military force and law enforcement are such blunt instruments for that sort of thing,” said this former official, who asked that his name not be used. “Diplomacy--our ability to influence states in other more subtle ways--is just a far better tool than doing what could aptly be characterized as doing brain surgery with a hammer.”

But Abraham D. Sofaer, who was the chief State Department lawyer during the Panama invasion, said the United States had every right to go after Noriega as a common criminal.

“This is not a precedent for going into countries and grabbing heads of state,” Sofaer said. “We never recognized him as a head of state. After the election (of Endara), we gave him no recognition whatsoever. That was the reason he was indicted--he was not a head of state in our view.”