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Panama News Briefs

Enforced secrecy about the old Tropical Test Center

by Eric Jackson

People searching on the Internet for old Army friends from Panama have been receiving strange warnings that indicate that they are being watched with high-powered surveillance systems that only the US military and intelligence agencies would have.

For decades the US Army ran a Tropical Test Center (TTC) down here, mainly at Fort Clayton but also with operations at Fort Sherman, to test how the tropical elements affect various war materials. A lot of the work there was about innocuous stuff, like how long various paints would hold up under the heat and humidity, what materials are most durable for Army boots, how long it takes for various pieces of equipment to break down from rust and so on. Another big subject of study was the rate at which exposure to tropical humidity would turn bullet and cannon shells, mortar rounds and other munitions into duds.

But the defoliant Agent Orange and other military chemicals used in the Vietnam era were also tested at the TTC, and a combination of anecdotes from veterans and their relatives and a ruling in favor of veterans who said they were sick because of toxic exposures at the facilities in the 60s and 70s indicate that the place was the scene of a toxic horror story whose results are still unfolding.

The Panama News has been told by several veterans or family members that someone --- apparently in the Bush administration --- has put a clamp of secrecy on this old story. Units that had worked at the TTC used to have their own web pages, but these have disappeared. More unusually, people who have gone surfing the web for information about the center or people who worked there --- in many cases just to look up old Army buddies to talk about old times, have received mysterious emails warning them by name that they have been detected searching for this information and that they must cease and desist from all such inquiries.

Under former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the Pentagon adopted policies aimed at stretching the military budget by cutbacks on health care for veterans, and the wall of secrecy that has gone up may be part of an effort of that sort. Also under the Bush administration, a lot of official information that used to be unclassified has been reclassified and withdrawn from public view, some critics say for petty political or nonsensical reasons rather than as part of any genuine tightening of security after the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States.

There might also be a diplomatic reason for the information block. US forces were under a treaty obligation to remove all hazards from the former Canal Zone "insofar as is practicable" before leaving at the end of 1999. The Panamanian government, almost until the end having accepted US assurances about the extent of problems, now has a long-running disagreement with Washington about several firing ranges that the Americans said could not as a practical matter have been cleared of unexploded munitions. Several Panamanians have died or been injured on the ranges or in incidents involving artifacts taken off of them. If a substantial number of toxic-related illnesses and deaths at the TTC can be substantiated according to records available to the public, then that is also likely to suggest to somebody in Panama that the residue of that legacy might still be in the ground today and that in addition to firing ranges that arguably should have been cleaned but were not the US Armed Forces also left this country with some hazardous toxic hotspots that in accordance with the 1977 treaties should also have been cleaned. Moreover, the Torrijos-Carter Treaties might not be the only international agreements applicable to toxic problems at the TTC, because the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which both Panama and the United States are parties, also might arguably apply.