Word: canals
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...General Colin Powell was all but declaring victory. As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney looked on approvingly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff boasted that a 24,000- man U.S. force had "decapitated" Manuel Antonio Noriega's army and seized control of strategic facilities along the Panama Canal. Though the crafty dictator was still on the loose, Powell said that it was only a matter of time before U.S. soldiers tracked him down. The only bad news in Powell's rosy report was the uncertain fate of a dozen American hostages, seized by fleeing Panamanian irregulars as they...
...plan called for overwhelming American forces to intimidate and neutralize the P.D.F. while special units secured vital dams and the electrical facilities powering the Panama Canal. Once organized resistance had been shattered, military police and other units trained in MOUT -- military operations in urban terrain -- would undertake the house-to-house battle against the Dignity Battalions. At Southern Command Headquarters in Panama City, the arrival of General Maxwell Thurman last Oct. 1 brought a marked change in mood. Unlike his predecessor, General Frederick Woerner, Thurman saw Noriega as primarily a military rather than a political problem. According to Pentagon sources...
TASK FORCE ATLANTIC. Made up of 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers from Fort Bragg, N.C., and Seventh Infantry troops from Fort Ord, Calif., backed by special units, it raced to secure vital facilities at the Caribbean end of the canal, near Colon. It took over Madden Dam, which stores water used to raise and lower ships in the canal's locks, and seized control of the electrical distribution center at Cerro Tigre. The task force encountered stiff resistance from a P.D.F. naval infantry unit on the northern coast. This force also freed 48 P.D.F. prisoners at Gamboa prison...
TASK FORCE SEMPER FIDELIS. Essentially a blocking force deployed on Panama City's western border, its Marine rifle company and light armored infantry company occupied the Bridge of the Americas, which spans the canal, to prevent a P.D.F. counterattack on the crucial Howard Air Force Base...
...resistance persists for long, Operation Just Cause may lose some of its sheen. As the Pentagon boasted, immense force was speedily dispatched to Panama, the canal was quickly protected, key P.D.F. installations were overrun or neutralized, and Noriega was removed from any effective power. The cost, however, may have been a distressingly high loss of life among Panamanian civilians. An unofficial check of hospitals showed that more than 200 noncombatants had died. A drawn-out struggle with rising American casualties also loomed. At week's end, as 2,000 more troops were sent into Panama, the Pentagon conceded that...