On the same day the United States invaded Panama last December, the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence from the overall Soviet party. In an article on Dec. 22, 1989, I pointed out that the news from Lithuania had been "little noticed among the headlines" about Panama.

In the same article, President Bush was urged to provide quick and "convincing evidence" in support of a major reason he had given for the invasion — "eminent danger to the 35,000 American citizens in Panama" from the government controlled by Manuel Antonio Noriega.

As usual, both in the press and in the public mind, the dramatic use of armed force in Panama was rewarded with greater attention (and an inflated poll standing for Mr. Bush) than were nonviolent and faraway political events. But more than three months later, it's clear that the first step in Lithuania's movement for national independence was of more lasting importance than any of the  sins and threats of General Noriega.

It's not so widely realized that Mr. Bush has not yet provided the evidence to prove his claim of "eminent danger" to Americans in Panama. In the continued absence of such evidence, or any White House effort to provide it, it's reasonable to conclude that there isn't any, or not much.

The trigger for the invasion was the killing of a single U.S. soldier while he was running a Panamanian roadblock in a restricted zone. That was deplorable but insufficient cause either to envision a real threat to the lives of 35,000 other Americans, or to warrant a costly military invasion of a sovereign nation.

Mr. Bush and administration spokesmen also spoke of danger to the Panama Canal. But Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pointed out that 14,000 U.S. troops, a force "quite adequate" to defend the canal from General Noriega, were in Panama before the invasion. That force, on the face of it, also seems adequate to the defense of all American residents apinst whatever threat existed.

Nor was the operation a necessary anti-drug action. Even if General Noriega was up to his neck in illicit drug traffic as late as 1989, the huge dollar cost of a military operation involving 24,000 troops would have been better devoted to providing drug treatment slots in the United States. Now additional millions must be spent to make up for economielosses inflicted on Panama by the United States during and before the invasion.

No wonder, then, that William Webster, the director of Central Intelligence, has said that "we made a mistake in overemphasizing the importance of Noriega." And no wonder that lawyers for the dictator charge that Operation Just Cause — the ludicrous code name for the invasion — was "outrageous" and "the first time the United States has invaded a country and leveled it to arrest one man."

Such drastic "justice," they might have said, was never considered in the cases of the brutal Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, or any of the several murderous generals who have ruled Guatemala, or Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti.

General Noriega's lawyers further claim that because of these circumstances all charges against him ought to be dismissed. But an illegal arrest — which is essentially what the defense contends the general suffered — has never been grounds for dropping charges against a defendant; and recently the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not protect a foreigner against the actions of U.S. agents in a foreign country.

Sending 24,000 troops to bag Manuel Noriega nevertheless is likely to stand in the history of overkill higher even than Ronald Reagan's Grenada operation. This long after the invasion, for example, Washington is not able to state with any certainty how many Panamanian citizens died; some estimates range into the thousands and most of them substantially exceed the U.S. death count — 202 civilians and 314 soldiers.

Even taking the latter figures at face value, and adding the 23 American soldiers killed in the invasion, 539 people lost their lives as the primary human cost of putting handcuffs on one thug. But when a defense lawyer referred to "indiscriminate" U.S. firepower, Judge William M. Hoeveler protested that "a war was going on — why do you say it was indiscriminate?"

He did not say what word would have been better, or how a ham-fisted exercise in executive muscle-flexing could be distinguished as a war.

Tom Wicker, "Overkill in Panama," The New York Times, April 5, 1990, p. A29.