inter-american commission did not have the competency, that we had not exhausted all remedies as required under international law and the procedures of the commission, and so at every stage, the united states -- and it continues to deny its responsibility. amy: talk about the community, the neighborhood that was hit the hardest. we are talking a bomb every few minutes, massive bombing. >> it was a poor neighboborhood located in panama city. it is also the site of the headquarters of the military. claimed united states is it was doing a surgical strike. it became very obviousus that a whole neighborhood was put up in flames and was beingng destroyed in the invasion. that meant that civilians were being targeted indiscriminately.

and that is what is important about the commission's findings, they did find civilians having been targeted indiscriminately and that the united states was not taking the prececautions necessary. it was acting in a very arbitras trying to meet its military objectives.. under international law, that is criminal. juan: hannah montana --panama became the place where the u.s. tested weaponry. the stealth bomber was first used in combat in panama as well? >> that's correct. thatat struck fear in the populatition because there was l of this unusual weaponry being used. it was t the first time the hume was being used as well to replace the military jeep. there were also to of ways in which the population was being intimidated as part of ththis prprocess. and because so mamany of these

neighborhoods were thehe poores, the places where black and brown panamanians lived,d, they coulde igignored and d marginalized. amy:et's go back to the ososcawinninindocumenty "the panama deption." the pentagon used panama as a testing ground for newly developed high tech weapons, such as the stealth fighter, the apache attack helicopter, and laserguided missiles. that are also reports cannot be explained indicating the usee of externrnal an unknon weaponry. >> we have testimony about combatants who died literally melteded with their gunsns as rt of a laser. we know ofof a automobiles thate , ofin half by these lasers

atrocities committed by weapons that fire poison darts which produce massive bleeding. amy: that clip from "the panama deception" ins with professor simon for step jose luis morin, tell us who he is, the named person in the file. >> the lead petitioner in this case.. cases thattal of 272 were filed with the commission. his case was quite compellingg because that only did he suffefr injuries, but his wife, who was at home at the time in a shown as a 1 15 story building, was struck with artillery fire. she was in the kitchen at the time. her body was destroyed, literally destroyed in that attack. while she was at home. and in ways that were just

indescribable. herle described, because remains were scattered in the kitchen, had to be shoveled into a body bag. the other family members also in that attack alsoso suffered injuries, and they are part of the case. juan: greg grandin, i'm wondering your assessment on the impact of the panama invasion on battlingpresidency? criticism he was a wimp, that he president, andbe how this affected him? >> he was. he was constantly fighting the image of being a wimp, in effect living in the shadow of ronald reagan. he was called reagan's lapdog. yet a long history of violence in the third world, starting texasrom his days in west , and oil, and he, involved at the cia which they helped run logistics in the bay of pigs.

cia, he presided over the head of cia in 1976 during the height of operation condor, which kind of organize national death squads in latin america and coordinated their activity. the single largest run of bombingsgs and executions carrid out by condor happened while bush was the head of the cia. iran contras as vice president. iran contras as vice president. amy: we say iran contras, if you could expand on that, especially for young people who don't understand what this was? >> iran-contras was a scandal that involved selling high-tech weaponry to iran, diverting the provost is for the anti-communist countries in the corolla. amy: in violation of u.s. law. >> but also in my gesture to limit it suggegest -- supportetd the worst kind of death squad, assassins and fascists in central america throughout the

1980's, and bush was deeply involved in that as vice president and coming out of it, having his work with the cia. bush had a longistory of violence in the third world as a way of establishing himself, which obviously continued with the first gulf war. juan: and a key part of that contras, once bush becomes president, he pardons all of the people who were involved with it. >> when he is leaving. one cut when he is leaving as vice president. >> christmas eve, he pardoned six. the independent prosecutor says this completes the cover-up of iran-contra. so in some ways, it is a precedent for current politics in terms of the l limits and limitlessness of presidential to sweep scandals that they are involved in under the rug post of amy: president bush defended his decision to issue the pardons. he issued a statement saying in

part -- "first, the, to mama later of their motivation, whether their actions were right or wrong, was patriotism. second, they did not profit or seek to profit from their conduct. third, each has a record of long and established service to this country." this is casper weinberger speakingng shortlyly after h hes pardoned b by george h.w. . bus. >> i'm completetely confifidentt i would haveeen n acquitteted ia reall trial with i am a a attorneys, whoho a think a t the finest in ththe country, would e participants. they w would present r real evie to a real jury. i'm very pleased, howowever, and rerelieved that my family and i have been spared this terrible ordeal of a very long and unjustified trial. amy: lawrence walsh, so utterly frustrated by this, said this was the decapitation of the investigation -- he had come out

of the eisenhower administration, actually. talk about -- this was casper weinberger -- and the other defendants, who had the records wiped clean. >> went down the memory hole. iran-contra was consequential in the sense of brought together a lot of the different coalitions that made up the reagan administration. the end is a local right, me -- evangelical right, the anti-communist,d and gave t them central americao run, basically, funding the contras, seeking to overthrow the sandinistas. once brenda by the u.s. officials as the world's most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizatation, mada $10 million contribution to the u.s.-backed contra guerrillas fighting during the 1980's to overthrow nicaragua sandinista government, former cartel leader testified. >> i think they rather that through manuel noriega.

that is how i got to the contras. all of the worst elements. of overcoming the vietnam syndrome. it is not the executive branch figuring out how it can reassert and project military power, free from all of the stem accredit oversight. the congress have prohibited aid to the contras, annette was the main kind of prompt that forced the reagan administration. amy: and run through vice president george h.w. bush's ofoffice? >> and oliver north. oliver north was the point person. legacy.bush's it is a continuation. if you look at his work in the 1960's with the oil company, it is all the same -- the point is to show the sociological overlap between these different -- juan: if you could expand because clearly, even though people say he was the director of the cia for only about a year, but he had a long-running relationship with the cia.

oss, wenther was the to yale, skull and bones. amy: the secret society at yale. >> the secret society was skull and bones with millions of dollars budget. again, it is not conspiracy. people are obsessed with the bush family. but the point is, there was a a close relationship between the kind of wasp p my pureblood, eat coast establishment that the bush family represented in the intelligence community. and bush represented some ways its radicalization after the cuban revolution in texas and then iran-contra. there is a line through bush's life that is being ignored in the remembrances of bush. and that line is the easy resort

to violence in the third world. note in your piece for "the nation," it was not prescott bushher who was a senator, but even his grandparents. talk about his grandparents. >> he comes from the bluest blood. samuel bush, prescott bush, uncles. he comes from a family that occupy the highest echelons of episcopalian capitalism in its most expansive period, when finance, industry, and energy extraction and militarism were interlocking and fusing together. bush was born into that in 1924 in connecticut. he was sheltered during the great depression. he went to phillips academy and yale. is interesting sociciologically about bush, is his move to west texas. that move represents the broader shift of american capitalism from the east coast to this new

center of gravity, more ideological, hostile, which becomes the basis of the new right amid the basis of ronald reagan and george w. bush and even a lot of the forces that back trump. amy: we're going to go to break and come back to this discussion. we will be joined by ariel dorfman, celebrated chilean writer. our guests are greg grandin and jose luis morin, one of the first lawyers to bring a lawsuit against the bush administration for the u.s. invasion of panama back in 1989. stay with h us. ♪ [music break]

amy: this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman with juan gonzalez. coverage ofue our the death of president george h.w. bush, particularly looking at his involvement in latin america. we're joined by their claim novelist, playwright, human rights activist ariel dorfman. in 1973, he served as a cultural adviser to chilean president salvador allende's chief of staff.

he went into exile. salvadoreath of allende. his to appease for the guardian is titled, "george h.w. bush thought the world belonged to his family. how wrong he was." he teaches at t duke university and joins us from north carolina. as you watch the reporting onn geororge h.w. bush, as he lays n state and washington, the major funeral will be tomorrow in washington then one in houston on thursday before he is laid to rest. can you talk about the corporate media's assessment of him and your experience of him, ariel dorfman? >> welcome a first, i'm very glad to be with you again, amy and juan commitment or friend and former colleague greg grandin. i'm glad to be participating with him in this. are so inat we

despair because of donald trump that there is a tendency to say, oldmy gosh, oh, if only bush were in charge of this, things would be different. so there is a sort of nauseating nostalgia for the past, which ends up being amnesiac about the past, as you have just so brilliantly exposed. -- on the george elder bush is a very special one because i had a very special experience, which is what i speak about in my piece in the guardian. it turns out that i spent with my wife angelica, two nights in very close proximity -- in fact, just a wall away -- f from formr president bush was sleeping. i was in sydney, australia, in the end of october, 2001, just

six weeks after 9/11. i was given this -- i was giving this lecture. they had given us the best room overlooking the bay, looking at the opera house. we were asked the day after we arrived if we would not mind changing our room for security reasons. we said, no, we of the best room, why would we possibly give it up? was georgened out it w. bush -- george h g w bush, bush senior, who was there for the carlyle group, this enormous group of international capital, which was a meeting thehere were holding in austrtralia. ladent, to divest the bin family of everything in the carlyle group. we would find that out later. but when we heard that george bush was the one who was trying to get our room from us, my wife

and i were just t filled with glee. we were saying, oh, boy, we are taking the room away from george w. bush -- from amy: george h.w. bush. >> bush sr.. we have reasons, some of which have just been explained for protesting him, but in particular, because of our chilean connection we thought this is a little bit of ironic history because here is the man 1977, presiding over the cia when the following thinings were happening - -- opereration cocondor, whihich gg grandin just mentioned, which is basically a series of death squads. but he was also presiding over chet hadwhen pino concentration camps openn, torturing people, execututing people, persecuting people, and killing people overseas. one of t those persons was in

they were blown up by actually and death squad. it turns out bush sr., president bush, the one we're talking inut, he was complicit leaking information saying to chileess that pinochet of had nothing whatsoever to do with this. and only was he complicit, he was trying to steer the press away from the chileans who had perpetrated this terrorist act in washington, d.c., and blamed the cubans for having blown up -- there are many reasons why we were so happy to be taking the room away from bush, right? we felt, a tiny victory against him. a very strange coming together. afterwards, i was a bit worried because as my wife told me, what if something happens to the sky?

who are they going to blame? the chileans havave all of the reasons, these revolutionaries have all of the reasons to have perpetrated some sort of assault upon him. the next day i saw him walking along the marina, and i have an anecdote about that as well, if you want me to tell it to you. amy: g go ahead. yes, go ahead. >> i was sort of doing the yoga exercises in the morning. the reason why it matters is i had not seen bush until that moment. but i was sort of looking at the bay and enjoy myself fairly in the morning. all of a sudden, he appears with an entourage of people around him. all of them sort of around him. therere was this bedecked mility men. yet so much medal i thought he was one of falling to debate it was so heavy. bush comes along with his golfing things. he is walking. and all of a sudden, he does the following gesture for the general or whoever this officers

behind them, he goes like that. he snaps his finger in the air like that. this military man, this officer, takes out a little piece of cream and hands it to him. bush does not say thank you or anything like that. against to lather himself like that and hands it back to him. and i have been haunted by that imperial gesture. that sense of arrogance, that , and that "i own the world i can do whatever i want." sense. there is that they speak about his decency and civility. i have no doubt he was decent and civil to many, many people. certainly much better than what we have now. "thehere was that sense of world is mine. i do with it what i want. i will squeeze panama like i squeeze this. i will squeeze chile like i squeeze this.

i own n the world." the irony is his son then went on to destroy the world,d, righ, with the iraq and afghanistan invasions, then with the destruction of the u.s. economy. of course, that ended up somewhat softening my image of the elder bush because i said to myself, at least he is not his son, right? then w when trump p came along e say, least tea isn't trump. bush did s some thingsgs that we really appraise. the terrible things did -- the american disabilities act, he lowered the threat of nuclear war, and there are some other things, but basically, we should remember the terrible pain that he wrought. he's not really dead. he is alive in its sense that so many of his victims are alive, including myself and many other people. juan: of course, you gave us -- he gave us clarence thomas as a supreme court justice. >> please, don't start -- one: i want to ask greg grandin

-- >> very strongly. juan: i want to ask -- >> and let's don't even speak about his attitude toward eggs. he told gays that they should change their behavior as if they were to blame for the fact that aids was decimating them. don't forget that he was the vice president of reagan. my gosh, that would be enough to condemn him to the hall of infamy. juan: i want to ask greg grandin , the issue of the sector of the republican party of the american elite that bush represented were was essential to, vis-a-vis the trump administration and those who are in power in the republican party today? iel pointedy, as ar out, there's a lot of nostalgia and your earning and the praise of george h.w. bush has to do with the politics today and bush seen as the opposite of trump will step there is a

continuation. , the rock that george h.w. bush represented. cia, coming to power in 1988, was a big deal a cia director -- this was like a fulfillment of the national security state taking power. nobody even tatalks about that anymore. amy: the first, cia director became president. >> the rock that bush represented -- it delivered us to trump. there is a tendency to posit these two people as opposites am a trump's grass thing and is grotesque for this whole shtick. but inin some ways, the mirror image of each other. you go back to the bush family, in two grandfathers embedded brown brothers. their economic deals with foreign countries, including russia, would just -- were just as sketchy and unaccountable and corrupting as what trump is accused of.

there might have been a moment of reform that separated those two that makes trump seem unacceptable, but in some ways, there is a continuation. and certainly, the catastrophe that the first gulf war, the second gulf war, that his son diluted on to us, has laid the groundwork for the complete debasement of american politics. it is not a question of this or that, comparing these two things as if they are separate, but understanding how this led to that, how bush led to trump. juan: jose, in terms of the impact of the panama invasionn how u.s. policies regarding internationally in terms of the ability of the united states to act in such a unilateral form, to just come in and invade a country? >> one thing that happens almost immediately, the international ,ommunity rejects the invasion

the united nations said this was a flagrant violation of international law. the oaoas also condemn it. and yet t the united statetes proceeded as if it t had all authority to go ahead and do something like this. it was really continuatition of that long history o of u.s. intervention in latin america. looking at latin america as its backyard, and in panama, of course, we know it was the united states that helped even create the country. the hannah montana that created treatyntry -- ththe panamama that created thehe country did t even -- mccook the inter-american commission decision that just took place, what doeoes it mean for papanamanianans echo will reparations be paid with -- will the u.s. is in respect -- >> i recall distinctly the victims s telling me, one of the things we need is an authoritative d decision by an

internationally respected body that could say, yes, the united states has violated the human rights of civilians in this invasion. i thought that was the most imimportant thing. they knew from the very beginning, any reparations from the united states -- getting reparations from the united be very unlikely. now we have a decision. amy: greg grandin, i want to ask about mexico and what is happening today. the new president andres manuel lopez obrador was sworn in saturday. tens of thousands gathered in the central square of mexico city. the first leftist president in decades. in his inaugural speech, amlo addressed security and vowed to end corruption and impunity in -- and you are at the introduction to his book? you wrote a blurb for it? talk about the significance of where mexico is today. >> it is historic for mexico and

for the region, historic in terms of u.s.-mexican relations. i was the, the crisis on the border that has been prompt and by the trump administration, but also has deep structural roots will play out with this hope thatat amlmlo repepresents. latin american left has been defeated everywhere else. amlo is isolated. brazil, colombia, argentina, these are all major countries that are ruled by right-wing governments. in some ways, it reminds me when travis conduct power and was elected in 1998 and 1999. there was nobodydy else. it was not until lula was elected that chavez had an ally. amlo stands alone on the hemisphere. yes, to the north and these rabid right-wing countries too the south. so i think there is room for maneuver is greatly curtailed -- he is room for maneuver is greater curtailed. he has an ambitious agenda but

also known as a pragmatist and realist. is going to decriminalize a lot of low-level criminal categories commode just great, the promising to get tough on violent crimes. that he i is and a cabinett is 50% womomen. >> y yes. what he can do in terms of the mexican oligarchy, and its deep ties with the c cartels, , and e military and security forces, we will see how much room he has to maneuver. won withlection -- he an overwhelming mandate, never certainly something. amy: ariel dorfman, we're going to give you the last word. >> i just wanted to say that the problem with bush and how he's being treated d now is the incapacity of most americans to look at themselves in the mirror and recognize what they have done to thee world, which is one

ofof the things ththat bush was doing to the world. and i think that is the main problem. the main problem is, we need to be able to look at ourselves and say, well, what was done there, what was that gesture, that imperial gesture -- which he does like this, snaps his fingers in the air -- and thinks there is impunity in relation to that, he can do it everyone's. we cannot live with a country that does that, because that country ends up having somebody ke trump, which is the -- president bush. amy: ariel dorfman, best-selling author, playwright, poet and teaches at duke university. professor, and jose luis morin is a professor at john jay college of criminal justice. democracy now! is grilli accepting applications for full-time social media manager. details at democracynow.org.

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( music ) narrator: in 1990, the national gallery of art in washington marked the 350th anniversary of the death of the painter sir anthony van dyck with an extraordinary exhibition of about 100 paintings and oil sketches, gathered from collections around the world. born in 1599, van dyck's remarkable career took him from his native flanders to italy, and then to england as court painter to charles i, before the artist's death there in 1641. works shown here represented the full range of van dyck's artistic creation,