The Case Against the General: Manuel Noriega and the Politics of American Justice.

• Author: Isikoff, Michael

During his 1988 trial in Tampa, Florida, Medellin cartel baron Carlos Lehder was portrayed by federal prosecutors as the most monstrous drug trafficker of recent times--a deranged, Hitler-loving thug who turned cocaine smuggling into a multi-billion dollar hemispheric enterprise. By the fall of 1991, Lehder appeared to have undergone a remarkably quick rehabilitation. He was now a certified U.S. Department of Justice truth teller, one of the star witnesses in the government's case against the new demon of the moment, Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Never mind that Lehder had never actually met Noriega, or that his track record for veracity was less than sterling. His character transformation is only one of the many bizarre subplots in the U.S. government's four-year effort to convict the one-time dictator of Panama--a story that is told in exhaustive and at times fascinating detail in Steve Albert's The Case Against the General. Indicted in the winter of 1988, during the peak of drug war hysteria, Noriega had been publicly portrayed as a "drug lord" and poisoner of American children. In December 1989, determined to show his resolve against the cocaine threat, President Bush unleashed Operation Just Cause--an invasion of Panama by 23,000 U.S. troops whose primary goal was to capture Noriega and haul him into a U.S. courtroom.

But while Noriega was unquestionably brutal and corrupt--character defects well known to the CIA officials who had long kept him on their payroll--his actual role in the cocaine trade had been grossly overblown. One charge in the 1988 indictment--that Noriega had taken a $4 million cash bribe from a Colombian drug smuggler named Boris Olarte--lacked even the slightest corroboration. (It later turned out to have been concocted by Olarte after he was imprisoned and facing a lengthy prison term.) Another part of the indictment--a tangled story of Noriega seeking Fidel Castro's help in mediating a dispute with the cartel--was thrown in largely for political reasons in Miami and was doubted even by some of the indictment's authors. Indeed, one of the more startling passages in Albert's book recounts the first serious review of the case by professional prosecutors in Miami shortly after Noriega was brought into U.S. custody. Assigned to head the Justice Department's prosecution team, senior litigation counsel Michael P. Sullivan thought the testimony so weak that Noriega could get off. "It was a loser, he [Sullivan] thought," writes...