Should Panamanian authorities want to talk to this man?

You can find a less impressionistic version of this man's mug shot if you refer to the FBI's recently created 'Most Wanted Terrorists' list. In our News section this time, you will find some reasons why Panamanian police and prosecutors should want to talk to some of the people on that list, or to people who know about their alleged activities. However, The Panama News doesn't solve the 1994 bombing of a Colon to Panama City commuter flight - for one thing, most of the folks whom we approached to talk about it didn't want to discuss the matter, so the story you will find is mostly based upon public documents and reports in other media. Even if the subject is taboo, any Panamanian government pronouncements about a commitment to fight terrorism seem awfully incongruous when there's no progress on this investigation. The question again becomes timely not only due to the events of September 11, but more importantly because Argentine courts are hearing cases that may be related to the Panama bombing.

Unrelated terrorism - if one can agree that the t-word has any proper use, and upon what that use may be - also rears its head in our news briefs. The government of Venezuela has changed its mind, and now wants anti-Castro Cuban activist Luis Posada Carriles. Panama won't extradite him to Cuba, where he would face the death penalty, but Venezuela wants him as a prison escapee and as an alleged participant in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger airliner, which took off from Caracas and blew up over Barbados, killing all aboard. There are, of course, people in Miami who argue that this bombing was not the act of terrorists, but of freedom fighters.

Those kinds of semantic differences are the bane of our Colombian neighbors' existence. The leftist FARC and ELN rebels have long occupied positions on the US government's list of terrorist organizations, and the Bush administration recently added the right-wing AUC paramilitary to the roster. Now, if truth and consistency are strictly applied, that creates some moral and political problems in Washington and Panama. First and foremost, if the AUC are terrorists - and their recent massacres of dozens of non-combatant rural villagers at a time continue a record that puts more blood on their hands than that which stains Al-Qaeda - there is ample evidence that they are state sponsored, by the government of Colombia.

The AUC has threatened to kill Panamanian police officers, alleging that they help FARC. A long history of gun running through Panama to all sides in Colombia's civil conflict tends to support that claim, and some versions of strange happenings within Mireya's presidential guard may lend further credibility to such conclusions.

And then there is a member of our Legislative Assembly, the PRD's Pedro Miguel Gonzalez, with a US arrest warrant for terrorism outstanding against him. If some American zealot chose to draw that conclusion, it could be argued that the legislature's payroll makes Panama a state sponsor of terrorism.

Fortunately, though he seems to be resolute in the face of a terrible provocation, US President George W. Bush doesn't seem to be a fanatic about the issue of terrorism. That has allowed him to build a broad world coalition against the criminals who attacked the United States on September 11. That has maintained his public support even when the counter-offensive that he has ordered is shown to cause much death and suffering among innocent civilians who just happened to be in the way. Such is the inevitable result of war - it's not glorious, even when it is necessary. Let us hope that this conflict ends sooner rather than later, with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban counted among the casualties.

Our Opinion section this time is mostly by various human rights groups, including a long analysis of the Taliban's suppression of the press by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders. Amnesty International opines on a Belgian investigation of a war crime in Lebanon. Human Rights Watch weighs in on the International Criminal Court treaty that neither Panama nor the United States have ratified. The Committee to Protect Journalists balances an Argentine ex-president's right to privacy against the public's right to know about public business. I write about what happens to your right to be informed when reporting is subject to duress from public or private institutions.

We have a larger-than-usual Review section in this issue. It should have been larger yet, but for the second war-induced postponement of a play by the Theatre Guild of Ancon. However, Roxanna Cain reviews Deepak Chopra's latest book, I review Panama's new funny pages and Internet sites are noted as usual.

The Dining page take us out for Chinese fast food, our Science section considers Mexican farmers' problems sustaining mescal production, hitting the Outdoors button will lead you to consider the fate of sea turtles and their eggs, and our Travel and Letters sections revisit the subject of cruise ship tourism. Our Business section feature may well have gone into the Community pages, and the things that come up when you hit the Community button could also have fit into other sections.

And meanwhile, the core of this publication, a summary of the news from Panama, is as always found in two places, the News and Business sections' briefs. I hope that you find the effort worthy.