There’s a scene in the award-winning documentary film, The Panama Deception, in which what is purported to be Manuel Noriega’s desk is shown, littered with drug paraphernalia and pornography, ostensibly demonstrating what a depraved man he was, and why George Bush Senior had to attack his consequently unacceptably misled nation.

Then a U.S. citizen with abundant Latin American experience appears on screen.

He relates how, back in the early ‘70s, photographs of that same desk were produced to slander Chile’s duly-elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who was violently deposed by a rightwing coup in which the CIA and major corporations were proven to have been heavily complicit.

Noriega was certainly an unsavory figure, but his true crime, like that of Saddam Hussein, was that he finally became unwilling to abet Washington and Wall Street’s long-standing, profiteering machinations against his own country and people.

Had both figures remained dutiful pawns, neither would have incurred U.S. wrath, and they’d have been entirely free to wallow in the personal decadence of their choosing, while retaining their status as “friend”.

The Panama Deception goes on to show how hysteria whipped up against Noriega was manipulatively used to completely obscure the Bush administration’s blatantly imperialist purpose, and to hide the terrible fact that a withering U.S. invasion to supposedly “get” one person entailed mass carnage and war crimes about which few U.S. citizens are even remotely aware.

Even though they’re still the subject of abiding outrage in the rest of the world.

“What happened in El Chorrillo in 1989?” is a question that will elicit only blank stares throughout the United States.

That a densely-packed barrio was brutally shelled and burned, at a dreadful cost of hundreds if not thousands of innocent Panamanian lives, has been effectively hidden by our imposed, singular fixation on a particular “strongman,” who’d been propagandistically likened to the Devil himself.

Most Americans will never see footage of whole families crushed alive in their cars by U.S. tanks, apartment buildings being torched in savage succession, or weeping survivors crowded around mass graves from which their blackened, shrapnel-riddled loved ones were grimly extracted.

Likewise, we have no realistic image of what’s actually occurring in George Bush Junior’s similarly misrepresented war, where authoritative estimates put the overall Iraqi death toll at roughly 1.2 million souls.

Repentant Iraq veterans recently tried to tell us about pervasive atrocities they themselves had committed, but their “Winter Soldier” testimony was censored by the mass media.

Meanwhile, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to be portrayed in that dark light through which we saw Noriega and Saddam.

He’s presented as the epitome of evil, and we’re afforded no countervailing information that might compel us to favor diplomacy over yet another gratuitous, unprovoked conflict in which multitudes of noncombatant men, women, and children would needlessly be killed.

Of course, we’re conditioned to not even think of potential civilian casualties in the countries we attack.

The only deaths that seem to matter are those of our “hometown heroes,” whose sacrifice is always couched in the most glorious terms imaginable, never mind the ugly realities of neo-colonialism being forced on

nation after nation by the objectively miscreant United States.

If only we could appreciate who the “bad guys” in this world actually are.

But no, we’ll evidently continue to send our sons and daughters to kill somebody else’s kids — and their parents as well — just so American plutocrats and gangster capitalists can will exploitatively derived fortunes to their pampered progeny.

No obscenity — certainly not that which was fraudulently attributed to Noriega and Allende via that contrived black-ops desk — can begin to compare to a criminal American foreign policy that’s increasingly indistinguishable from Hitler’s world-dominance ambition.

What have Iranians ever done against us, other than angrily seizing our embassy when we refused to return the hated, deposed Shah to face justice for his copious crimes?

We’re the ones who overthrew Iran’s populist leader Mossadegh in 1953, replacing him with the Shah’s brutally repressive regime. We shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in 1988, killing all 209 aboard. We backed Saddam in waging a devastatingly costly war on Iran.

And now, in preparation for a murderous onslaught that many analysts say will certainly be launched before Dubya leaves office, that same old Panamanian wool is being pulled over our eyes once again.

When will we ever learn?