Architect of Death: Negroponte in Iraq
by Sander Hicks
Broadcast: 4/23/04
On Thursday, the White House announced plans to make controversial Iran-Contra
figure John Negroponte the United States' ambassador to the new Iraq.
Negroponte currently is the US ambassador to the United Nations and will
head a Bagdad "super-embassy" with 3,000 employees.
From 1981 to 1985, when Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras, the US-backed
Honduran military committed 185 murders. According to a staff assistant,
Negroponte suppressed the embassy's own 1982 report on human rights abuses.
Under Negroponte, US military funding to Honduras went from four to seventy-seven
million dollars. The Reagan White House used Honduras as a staging ground
for the illegal arming of the Contra rebels.
Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch/America, called Negroponte
the "ostrich ambassador," for his willingness to look the other
way, making military objectives a higher priority than human rights.
Institute for Public Accuracy
Friday, February 18, 2005
Negroponte Appointment: Topping a Career of Human-Rights Violations
DIANNA ORTIZ, diortiz@tassc.org, http://www.tassc.org, http://www.speaktruth.org/defend/profiles/profile_09.asp
Sister Dianna Ortiz is the executive director of Torture Abolition and
Survivors Support Coalition International. She was abducted and tortured
in Guatemala while teaching indigenous children to read. She said today:
"For those of us who work in the area of human rights, this is yet
another sad day. The Bush administration seems determined to promote persons
whose careers have been closely associated with torture. Could the administration
not find one person for the job who has a demonstrated concern for defending
human rights? Certainly, John Negroponte does not fit that bill. His nomination
is appalling and an insult to those who have survived torture -- one more
slap on the face by the current administration."
LAETITIA BORDES, lbordes@jps.net, www.afrocubaweb.com/negroponte.htm
Sister Laetitia Bordes led a campaign during Negroponte's nomination as
ambassador to the United Nations. She traveled to Honduras on a fact-finding
delegation during his tenure there and met with him. She said today: "During
his nomination to the U.N. ambassadorship, we carried out a public information
campaign detailing how Negroponte gave the CIA-backed Honduran death squads
an open field when he was ambassador to Honduras. His hearings, however,
were held a couple of days after the 9/11 tragedy, so he was hurriedly
confirmed as people did not want prolonged hearings in that environment.
That's how he got confirmed the first time. ... Negroponte collaborated
with human-rights violators everywhere he has been; his record is public.
Our Congress is letting us down again: Negroponte is once again being
promoted instead of being held accountable. ... During Negroponte's tenure,
U.S. military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the
U.S. launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors; and
the U.S. trained Honduran military to support the Contras." [An Associated
Press story states: "During 2001 confirmation hearings for his U.N.
ambassadorship -- an appointment that was delayed for six months because
of the controversy over his tenure in Honduras -- Negroponte testified
that he did not believe death squads were operating in Honduras."]
ROBERT PARRY, secrecyprivilege@aol.com, www.consortiumnews.com
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s as a reporter
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He said today: "The choice
of John Negroponte to be the first U.S. intelligence czar -- following
Elliott Abrams's promotion to be deputy national security adviser -- marks
the continued reemergence of officials tied to the darkest moments of
Central American violence in the 1980s. There's also irony entrusting
Negroponte to oversee objective intelligence analysis, since either he
was oblivious to illicit behavior going on around him as U.S. ambassador
to Honduras or he was complicit in a wide range of human rights abuses."
PETER KORNBLUH, pkorn@gwu.edu, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/index.html
Kornbluh is senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington,
D.C. He was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director
of the Archive's project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. He is the co-editor
of "The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History." He said
today: "The documents ... showed that Negroponte helped clear the
way for a secret agreement under which the United States would provide
more CIA money to Honduran army generals and additional military and economic
aid to the country. In exchange, Honduras agreed to allow the Contras
to continue operating on Honduran soil."
RAY McGOVERN, rmcgovern@slschool.org
McGovern is a 27-year veteran of the CIA. He said today: "Negroponte's
record does not inspire confidence that he will tell the president anything
that is likely to disturb him, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld. The upshot is that
there is likely to be simply one more bureaucratic level at which intelligence
can be politicized."
LARRY BIRNS, coha@coha.org, http://www.coha.org
Birns is director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. He said today:
"Affidavits and testimony by Honduran survivors have reported on
his involvement in sanctioning, protecting or covering up these death
squads. Also, during the time Negroponte spent at the Tegucigalpa embassy,
millions of dollars in bribes were paid to corrupt Honduran officials
to allow room for the U.S.-backed Contras to stage attacks on the Sandinistas
in neighboring Nicaragua. Negroponte has claimed that he did not recall
any human rights violations ever having taken place in the country during
his time there. ... Bush had made a brilliant if demonic appointment.
Negroponte will likely get the job done, but at an insupportable cost
to this and other countries' democratic institutions as he brings his
well-tested authoritarian personality to the job."
February 19 / 20, 2005
John Negroponte, Dirty Warrior
The Return of the Contra Gangsters
By JENNIFER ROESCH
NEGROPONTE NOT ALL THAT INTELLIGENT
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
AMERICAN PROGRESS - Negroponte has precious little intelligence experience.
And the experience he does have has been characterized by abject failure.
As an ambassador to the U.N., he pushed inaccurate intelligence about
Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war.
In December 2002, he called an Iraqi declaration that they didn't have
any weapons of mass destruction "an insult to our intelligence."
In January 2003 he said, "we are convinced that Iraq maintains and
continues to pursue its WMD programs." At the same press conference,
asked whether the administration knew Iraq was using aluminum tubes to
enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons program, Negroponte replied, "the
answer is definitively yes."
NEGROPONTE RAN ROGUE SPY OP IN IRAQ
www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/negr-f18.shtml
WORLD SOCIALIST - Ironically, while Negroponte is ostensibly tasked
with unifying the disparate intelligence agencies, he has been accused
of launching his own rogue intelligence operation in Iraq. The US think
tank Stratfor, which has close links to US military and intelligence circles,
reported that Negroponte ran his own "parallel intelligence service"
in Iraq, because he did not trust the CIA's Baghdad station chief.
There has been a proliferation of such informal intelligence services,
Stratfor noted, most famously the Pentagon's "counter-terrorism evaluation
group," created to substantiate the bogus claims of ties between
the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda.
The spread of such off-the-books operations, Stratfor noted, "sets
up the new national intelligence director - yet to be appointed - for
failure As long as government agencies and on-the-side intel projects
undermine each other, the NID will not be able to bring all intelligence
efforts under one umbrella. The proliferation of small, separate intelligence
groups also hurts collection efforts by impeding the governmenT's ability
to paint a clear picture of the realities on the groundóin Iraq
and elsewhere."
Negroponte's objective was just that - to counteract the assessment
of the CIA, whose station chief filed an end-of-the year report giving
a bleak assessment of the US occupation and warning that resistance could
spiral out of control. Negroponte answered the assessment with a lengthy
dissenting report of his own, painting a far rosier picture of what is
widely seen as a debacle, not only in the CIA, but within the State Department
and military as well.
As national intelligence director, Negroponte will doubtless continue
along these lines, pressing the CIA and other intelligence agencies to
tailor their assessments to meet the political needs of the administration.
In this regard, he will be aligned with the new director of the CIA, Peter
Goss, who issued a memo to the intelligence agencyís employees
last November warning them not to "identify with, support or champion
opposition to the administration or its policies."
DAVID JOHNSTON, NY TIMES - Under pressure from the White House,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to adopt the recommendations
of a presidential commission and will allow the director of national intelligence,
John D. Negroponte, to help choose a powerful intelligence chief at the
F.B.I., Bush administration officials say.
The appointment would for the first time in the bureau's history give
an outsider a significant role in the selection of a high-level official
at the F.B.I., an agency long regarded by its critics as fiercely protective
of its turf and resistant to change. The intelligence chief, who will
be chosen jointly by Mr. Negroponte and the director of the F.B.I., Robert
S. Mueller III, would have the tentative title of associate director for
intelligence and in effect be the third-ranking official at the bureau.
www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/politics/12fbi.html
?hp&ex=1118635200&en=fa8bf5042f1f6822&ei=5094&partner=homepage
AMERICAN PROGRESS - Negroponte has precious little intelligence
experience. And the experience he does have has been characterized by
abject failure. As an ambassador to the U.N., he pushed inaccurate intelligence
about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction as a justification for
war. In December 2002, he called an Iraqi declaration that they didn't
have any weapons of mass destruction "an insult to our intelligence."
In January 2003 he said, "we are convinced that Iraq maintains and
continues to pursue its WMD programs." At the same press conference,
asked whether the administration knew Iraq was using aluminum tubes to
enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons program, Negroponte replied, "the
answer is definitively yes."
www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124597
WORLD SOCIALIST - Ironically, while Negroponte is ostensibly tasked
with unifying the disparate intelligence agencies, he has been accused
of launching his own rogue intelligence operation in Iraq. The US think
tank Stratfor, which has close links to US military and intelligence circles,
reported that Negroponte ran his own "parallel intelligence service"
in Iraq, because he did not trust the CIA's Baghdad station chief. There
has been a proliferation of such informal intelligence services, Stratfor
noted, most famously the Pentagon's "counter-terrorism evaluation
group," created to substantiate the bogus claims of ties between
the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda.
www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/negr-f18.shtml
WIKIPEDIA - From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras.
During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from
$4 million to $77 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an
elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. .
Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where
Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US, and which critics say was used
as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001,
excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans,
who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.
Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred
to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion
3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and
killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that
Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued
to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress. . .
The question of what John Negroponte knew about human rights abuses
in Honduras will probably never be answered definitively, but there is
a large body of circumstantial evidence supporting the view that Negroponte
was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by
the Honduran government with the support of the CIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte#Ambassador_to_Honduras
MARYKNOLL GLOBAL CONCERNS - In addition to his work with the Nicaraguan
Contra army, Negroponte helped conceal from Congress the murder, kidnapping
and torture abuses of a CIA-equipped and -trained Honduran military unit,
Battalion 3-16. No mention of these human rights violations ever appeared
in State Department Human Rights reports for Honduras. The Baltimore Sun
reports that Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, then a delegate in the Honduran
Congress and a voice of dissent, told the Sun that he complained to Negroponte
on numerous occasions about the Honduran military's human rights abuses.
http://www.maryknoll.org/GLOBAL/ALERTS/no_negroponte.htm
GHALI HASSAN, COUNTERPUNCH, 2004 - At the time Mr. Negroponte was
in Honduras, Honduras was a military dictatorship. Kidnapping, rape, torture
and executions of dissidents was rampant. The military top and middle
ranks were U.S-trained at the School of the Americas, the Harvard version
of the CIA, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. According to Human Rights
Watch, graduates of the SOA are responsible for the worst human rights
abuses and torture of dissidents in Latin America. Some of its 60,000
graduates are notorious Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama. .
.
http://counterpunch.org/hassan06042004.html
Bush Nominates Terrorist for National Intelligence Director
by Frank Morales
"He will be a key figure in US counter-terror operations."
--BBC News, Feb. 17, 2005
"I think he could have stopped all these assassinations and torture...
We're against this nomination. If he didn't see human rights violations
in Honduras, it's possible he won't see human rights violations anywhere
in the world." --Leo Valladares Lanza, former head, Honduran Human
Rights Commission, quoted in New York Times, March 29, 2005
On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte,
65, to be the United States' first National Intelligence Director."
According to various published reports, Negroponte will be the president's
"primary briefer" in the area of global and domestic intelligence
and counter-terror operations, coordinating and overseeing the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National
Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other
agencies.
His upcoming Senate confirmation seems assured, and that is a scary
prospect. Why? Because Negroponte has a long and bloody criminal history,
dating back to the early 1960s, of overseeing the training and arming
of death squads, schooled in the techniques of torture, "forced
interrogation," assassination and, as we shall see, even genocide.
He has been described as an "old-fashioned imperialist," active
for nearly four decades in Vietnam, Central America, the Philippines,
Mexico and most recently Iraq. He got his start back in the days of
the CIA's Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese
"subversives."
According to Bush, the ultra-rightist Negroponte has a real grip on
today's "global intelligence needs." Indeed he does. Negroponte's
long career in the "foreign service" has equipped him well
to fulfill the requirements of global and domestic counterinsurgency.
So while newly-installed Attorney General Gonzales supplies the legal
basis for torture (as he did as a Bush White House counsel), and recently-installed
Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff acquiesces (as he did as a Justice
Department pointman on the post-9-11 sweeps), Negroponte is now in a
position to ratchet up the repression domestically, and further the
dissolution of democracy at home.
Although Negroponte's office will be in its own projected $200 million
headquarters, Bush has said that Negroponte "will have access on
a daily basis." Negroponte has actually had close presidential
access for awhile. Not quite four years ago, on Sept. 18, 2001, as the
embers were still smoking at Lower Manhattan's Ground Zero, Negroponte
was appointed U.S. Representative to the United Nations. His mission
was to work the floor and backrooms in preparation for Colin Powell's
infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN making the case for war
on Iraq--which even Powell now admits was based on falsehoods. Then
in April 2004, with a counter-insurgency war in Iraq rapidly spreading,
Bush nominated Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador to that occupied nation
following the June 2004 hand-over of "sovereignty" to as-yet
"undetermined Iraqi authorities."
RAP SHEET
Negroponte was born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek-American shipping
magnate. A graduate of Yale University, raised on New York's Park Avenue,
he was a "career diplomat" between 1960 and 1997, serving
in eight countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, as well as holding
positions in the State Department and White House. From 1971 to 1973,
Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam at the National Security
Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger, having worked as a "political
affairs officer" (read: CIA) at the US Embassy in Saigon starting
as early as 1964. At that time, he shared a room with Richard Holbrooke,
then an official for the Agency for International Development, later
US ambassador to the UN under Clinton. Negroponte and Holbrooke both
became members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the oldest
and most prestigious of U.S. foreign policy think-tanks. Following Vietnam,
Negroponte went on to "serve" for a number of years as an
"economics officer" working out of the US Embassy in Ecuador.
Negroponte was appointed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan to head
up the U.S, Embassy in Honduras, where he stayed quite busy through
1985. From 1987-1989, he was deputy assistant to the president for national
security affairs, reporting to Colin Powell. From 1989-1993, he was
ambassador to Mexico. Following a stint as ambassador to the Philippines
from 1993-1997, he "retired" from the diplomatic corps and
took a well-paid position as vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill,
the big publishing company.
In 1981 President Reagan authorized paramilitary operations against
the leftist government of Nicaragua. As ambassador to Honduras from
1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in establishing that country
as a base of operations for the CIA's "Contra" guerilla army
then attempting to destabilize Nicaragua, with a 450-square-kilometer
stretch along the border virtually turned over to the US-backed Nicaraguan
rebels. He was also instrumental in the reign of terror then being overseen
in Honduras by security chief Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, his good
friend. Between 1980 and 1984, US military aid to Honduras jumped from
$3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to facilitate the crushing
of popular movements through a covert "low intensity" war.
Although the high-level planning, money and arms for this repression
flowed from Washington, much of the on-the-ground logistics was run
out of the Embassy in Tegucigalpa. So crammed was the tiny country with
US military troops and bases at this time, that it was dubbed the "USS
Honduras." The captain of this ship, Negroponte, was in charge
of the US Embassy when--according to a 1995 four-part series in the
Baltimore Sun--hundreds of Hondurans deemed "subversives"
were kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret
Honduran army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Pentagon
and the Central Intelligence Agency.
BATTALION 316
In addition to internal repression in Honduras, Battalion 316 also participated
in the CIA's covert war against Nicaragua. Members of the Battalion
were conscripted by the CIA for such sensitive missions as training
the Contra terrorists and even mining Nicaragua's harbors. Negroponte
worked closely with Gen. Alvarez in overseeing the training Honduran
soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, torture and kidnapping.
Honduras was the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the
hemisphere at this time after neighboring El Salvador. Increasing numbers
of both Honduran and Salvadoran soldiers were sent to the U.S. Army's
School of the Americas to receive training. In El Salvador, the death
squads were headed up by Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, a 1972 graduate
of the School of the Americas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, one
of his classmates at the US "torture academy," was a founder
and commander of Battalion 316.
Through his support of Battalion 316, Negroponte is directly complicit
in the murder of at least 184 Honduran civilians officially found to
have been killed by the death squad by a 1994 Honduran truth commission.
The unit used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept
prisoners naked--and, when no longer useful, killed them brutally, and
buried them in unmarked clandestine graves. Women were raped, often
in front of their families.
Negroponte was likely involved in a number of other like paramilitary
formations throughout Central America, as compliant and "stable"
Honduras served as a base for U.S. operations throughout the region.
Recently, the New York Times (March 8, 2005) reported that the Organization
of American States (OAS) has reopened an investigation, "based
on new forensic evidence," into the massacre of "hundreds
of peasants" at El Mozote, El Salvador in 1981--when 800 unarmed
men, women and children were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers "from
a battalion trained and equipped by the United States." Reports
of the massacre were published at the time in the New York Times and
the Washington Post--reports that were "dismissed" by Negroponte
and other "officials of the Reagan administration."
Covert operations in Central America were paid for in part through the
sale of cocaine. "CIA officials," according to the New York
Times (July 17, 1998), "involved in the Contra program gave relatively
low priority to collecting information about the possible drug involvement
of Contra rebels"--while of course giving high priority to covering
it all up. Ambassador Negroponte acquiesced in shutting down the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras
was emerging as an important base for CIA-facilitated cocaine trans-shipments
to the United States, with profits going to the Contras. According to
a 1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative report, "elements
of the Honduran military were involved in the protection of the drug
traffickers."
In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established
a regional military training centers there for Central American forces,
principally directed at improving the lethal effectiveness of the Salvadoran
military--at a time when the Salvadoran army was carrying out massacres
such as the one at El Mozote, and army-linked death squads ratcheted
up a death toll of at least 800, according to El Salvador's UN-backed
Truth Commission. Much of the training in these "anti-subversive"
techniques--i.e., kidnapping, torture and murder--was done at El Aguacate
air base in eastern Honduras. Established in 1984, the base was also
used as a secret detention and torture center. In August 2001, excavations
at the base uncovered 185 corpses, including those of two U.S. citizens--church
workers involved in aiding the Honduran peasant movement--thought to
have been killed and buried at the site.
In 1994, when the Honduran Human Rights Commission documented the torture
and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents in the previous
decade, it specifically accused John Negroponte of complicity in a number
of human rights violations. The Baltimore Sun reporters found that in
1982 alone, during Negroponte's first full year as ambassador, the Honduran
press carried at least 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the
military. The US Embassy, however, certified the country's record on
human rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that
they were writing about Norway, not Honduras. Rick Chidester, a former
aide to Negroponte, revealed to the Sun that his supervisors had ordered
him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of
the 1982 human rights report.
Jack Binns, who served under president Jimmy Carter as the ambassador
to Honduras prior to Negroponte, made numerous complaints about human
rights abuses by the Honduran military. Recently, he stated regarding
Negroponte, "I think he was complicit in abuses, I think he tried
to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress
about those activities." (NYT, March 29, 2005) In one early '80s
cable, Binns reported that Gen. Alvarez was modeling his campaign against
suspected subversives, on Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s,
which, in turn, had been modeled on the techniques of European fascism
in the 1930s and 40s--perhaps after having received some pointers from
certain elements who fled there with US support after World War II.
Recall that Adolf Eichmann, overseer of the apparatus of Jewish extermination
during the Nazi era, was captured in Bueno Aires in 1960.
In May 1982, Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who had worked for ten years
in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate
the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled
to Honduras in 1981 after the death-squad assassination of El Salvador's
Archbishop Oscar Romero the previous year. Negroponte claimed that the
Embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun,
Jack Binns said that a group of Salvadorans--including the women Bordes
had been looking for--were abducted on April 22, 1981, and savagely
tortured by the DNI, the Honduran secret police. They were later thrown
out of helicopters while still alive. The Sun's investigation found
that the CIA and US embassy knew of these crimes, but continued to support
Battalion 3-16 and ensure that the Embassy's annual human rights report
did not contain the full story. According to a 1996 BBC report, Negroponte
"knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and
killed alleged subversives." According to the Baltimore Sun report,
Negroponte "was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking
place. He knew everything that was going on."
NEGROPONTE'S REVISIONISM
When Bush announced Negroponte's nomination as ambassador to the UN
shortly after coming to office, the move was met with widespread protest.
Questioned at the time about whether he had turned a blind eye to human
rights abuses in Honduras, Negroponte rejected the suggestion. "I
do not believe then [sic], nor do I believe now, that these abuses were
part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe
that death squads were operating in Honduras."
Despite the protests, the Bush administration did not back down--and
even went so far as to silence potential witnesses who might have shed
some light on Negroponte's criminal history. On March 25, 2001, the
Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United
States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have
provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his then upcoming
Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deported Hondurans was none
other than Gen. Luis Alonso Discua, the former commander of Battalion
3-16, then serving as Honduras' deputy ambassador to the UN!
Upon learning of Negroponte's 2001 UN nomination, Reed Brody of Human
Rights Watch commented that "he looked the other way when serious
atrocities were committed" and that "one would have to wonder
what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human
rights by this appointment." Answer: What human rights? When queried
about these "serious atrocities," Negroponte told CNN, "to
the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections
and for democratic reform.... Frankly, I think that some of the retrospective
efforts to try and suggest that we were supportive of or condoned the
actions of human rights violators is really revisionistic."
In 1987, during the administration of George HW Bush, Negroponte returned
to the National Security Council (NSC) to work under Colin Powell as
deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within
two years, he was back in Latin America; appointed as ambassador to
Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he
officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and helped facilitate
Mexico's passage of the NAFTA treaty--as well as likely U.S. intelligence
operations that anticipated a popular reaction to the treaty. Negroponte
left Mexico just ahead of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.
APPOINTMENT TO THE UNITED NATIONS
Negroponte was sworn in as U.S. Representative to the United Nations
on Sept. 18, 2001. By November 2002, he was strong-arming a resolution
through the UN Security Council which called for the "disarming"
of Iraq. Standing in front of the Security Council with CIA director
George Tenet, Negroponte stated that "the Resolution makes clear
that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must
be disarmed. One way or another...Iraq will be disarmed." The New
York Times would later report (March 29, 2005) that "Mr. Negroponte
pressed on foreign colleagues American intelligence on Iraqi weapons
that turned out to be profoundly flawed. If he was miffed, Mr. Negroponte
never spoke out."
Negroponte also delivered a warning to other less hawkish members of
the Security Council, stating that, "if the Security Council fails
to act decisively in the event of a further Iraqi violation, this resolution
does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against
the threat posed by Iraq, or to enforce relevant UN resolutions and
protect world peace and security." As Stephen Kinzer, writing in
the New York Review of Books (September 2001), put it, "giving
him this job is a way of telling the UN: 'We hate you'."
When faced with contention over US intentions during the UN debate leading
up to the war in Iraq, Negroponte turned to grandstanding. In March
2003, Negroponte walked out of the General Assembly after Iraq's UN
envoy, Mohammed Al-Douri, accused the U.S. of preparing a war of aggression.
"Britain and the United States are about to start a real war of
extermination" he said, "that will kill everything and destroy
everything."
NEGROPONTE IN BAGHDAD
On April 20, 2004, Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq,
stating that, "he has done a really good job of speaking for the
United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and
peace." Calling him "a man of enormous experience and skill"
was all that our courageous Senators required in order to vote him in
by 95-3 on May 6. He was sworn in on June 23.
Negroponte's US Embassy in Baghdad, housed in a palace that once belonged
to Saddam Hussein, was and remains the largest embassy in the world,
with a "diplomatic staff" of over 3,000. Opting for the kind
of diplomacy he's most familiar with, he immediately "shifted more
than a $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army," diverting the funds
"from reconstruction projects" to military and intelligence
projects associated with "what intelligence officials describe
as the largest C.I.A. station in the world." (NYT , March 29, 2005)
On Jan. 2, 2004, the Washington Post stated that a "major challenge"
facing the diplomatic mission "will be sorting out the terms of
the US military presence, which is expected to exceed 100,000 troops
even after the occupation ends..." An un-named U.S. "official"
stated that "we have to determine what command American troops
will be under: Will it be part of some kind of multinational force,
under the United Nations, under NATO? Or will they be relatively independent
in an agreement with the Iraqi government? These are huge questions
to be answered in a very short amount of time." We can rest assured
that John Negroponte, the enforcer, made the Iraqi government an offer
they couldn't refuse in favor of the "relatively independent"
option.
Shortly after taking up the position, Negroponte was asked about eyewitness
statements that in late June 2004, Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad
Allawi had, in a gesture of steadfast loyalty, personally executed up
to six suspected insurgents in front of his US military bodyguards.
While Allawi denies the accusation, Negroponte did not. In an e-mail
to the Sydney Morning Herald, July 2004, he stated that "if we
attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business.
As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed."
Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey wrote of Negroponte's arrogant
side-stepping. "Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte's
record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of
Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing... This same man, with
an embassy regime of more than 1,000 American foreign service officers,
plus American advisers salted throughout Iraqi ministries, as well as
140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq.
Of course, 'the case is closed'."
By the first weeks of January 2005, Negroponte was said to be overseeing
the formation of death squads in Iraq, prompting media reports about
a "Salvador option." MSNBC reported on Jan. 8, 2005 that the
Pentagon was "intensively debating an option that dates back to
a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against
the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s.
Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the US government
funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called
death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.
Eventually, the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives
consider the policy to have been a success, despite the deaths of innocent
civilians..."
One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support
and possibly train Iraqi death squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish
Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents
and their sympathizers--even across the border into Syria, carrying
out assassinations or so-called "snatch" operations, in which
the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.
Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National
Intelligence Service, was quoted in a Jan. 8, 2005 Newsweek story on
the "Salvador Option," warning that the U.S. occupation has
failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The
insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population
there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqis
do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material
or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One
military source suggested that "new offensive operations"
are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The
Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to
the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is
cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Threatening everyone in a village with torture and death, if the village
is deemed a potential base insurgent operations can be a very effective
technique, whether the perpetrators are the Nazi SS in occupied Czechoslovakia,
the death squads in El Salvador, or whatever new force is invented in
Iraq. This strategy of tactical terror aims to sever an insurgency from
it's potential base of support.
At least one pro-occupation death squad is already in operation. On
Jan. 11, 2004, just days after the Pentagon plans regarding possible
"new offensive operations" were revealed, a new militant group,
"Saraya Iraqna," began offering big wads of American cash
for insurgent scalps--up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reported.
"Our activity will not be selective," the group promised.
CIA COUNTERINSURGENCY: PROJECT X
During Negroponte's Honduran ambassadorship, he worked closely with
Duane R. Clarridge, aka "Mr. Marone", a high-ranking CIA officer
based in Honduras, who was, according to a recent New York Times report
(March 29, 2005), "running the covert war against communism in
Central America." According to Clarridge, "Negroponte was
a big supporter of the agency's covert action mission" there.
At the time, the CIA utilized it's "Human Resource Exploitation
Training Manual" to teach young Honduran soldiers and others the
methodology of torture. Dated 1983, the manual, one in a series of recently
"declassified" documents, addresses, among other subjects,
"coercive interrogation" techniques utilized in "the
torture situation," which is, according to the manual, "a
contest between the subject and his tormentor."
The manual discusses inflicting pain or threatening pain, depriving
prisoners of food and sleep, making them maintain rigid positions for
long periods, stripping them naked, and keeping them blindfolded or
in prolonged solitary confinement. Disseminated throughout Latin America
during the early 1980s, the manual appears to have been compiled from
training courses given to members of the Honduran military. The manual
can be assumed to have been sanctioned by higher-ups, including Negroponte,
given, for example, its statement that, "illegal detention always
requires prior [headquarters] approval."
This secret manual was compiled from sections of an earlier 1963 training
manual entitled, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation."
This was a U.S. Military Intelligence field manual written as part of
the Army's Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program. According to the
manual, "all coercive techniques of interrogation are designed
to induce regression" to a state of abject submission. The tormentor's
"principal coercive techniques" are "arrest, detention,
deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar
methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility,
hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression."
In a March 1992 internal "report of investigation," which
was sent to then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, seven such interrogation
manuals used for years by the Pentagon's Southern Command throughout
Latin America were said to contain "objectionable" and "prohibited
material." Army investigators traced the origins of the instructions
on use of beatings, false imprisonment, executions and truth serums
back to a top-secret program run by the Army Foreign Intelligence unit
in the 1960s code-named "Project X." Written by US Army counterinsurgency
experts starting in 1965, the Joint Foreign Intelligence Assistance
Program used Project X to train U.S. allies in Vietnam, Iran, Latin
America, and elsewhere around the world.
The report to Cheney noted that the "offensive and objectionable
material" in the Project X manuals "undermines US credibility,
and could result in significant embarrassment." Cheney of course,
immediately embarked on a course of "corrective action," namely,
to "recall" and destroy as many of the manuals as possible,
shredding the "embarrassing" history--though some copies have
survived, or perhaps were meant to.
Meanwhile, a July 1991 U.S. Southern Command "confidential"
document records a phone conversation with a Captain Victor Tise, who
served in 1982 as a counterinsurgency instructor at the School of the
Americas (SOA). In it, Tise relates the history of the "objectionable
material" in the manuals and the training courses that he assembled
for use at the School. According to Tise, in 1976, following a decade
of SOA tutoring, use of the Project X material was suspended by Congress
and the Carter administration "for fear the training would contribute
to Human Rights violations in other countries." But the program
was restored by the Reagan administration in 1982, shortly after Negroponte
arrived in Honduras.
Tise described Project X as a "training package to provide counterinsurgency
techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries." These
"techniques" were undoubtedly derived from the Phoenix Program,
the CIA's assassination campaign which liquidated 40,000 Vietnamese
"subversives." The course materials Tise put together, including
the manuals that became the subject of the investigations, were sent
to Defense Department headquarters "for clearance" in 1982.
They "came back approved" and "UNCHANGED," despite
the fact that Tise sought to remove--or so he said--the "objectionable"
parts. Subsequently, hundreds of the unaltered manuals, "objectionable
material" and all, were disseminated for use throughout US-militarized
Latin America over the next nine years. Negroponte's role in this particular
bit of "objectionable" history remains shrouded, and shredded.
It appears that by 1965, the US intelligence community had seen fit
to formalize the hard-learned lessons of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam
by commissioning the top-secret Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence
Center & School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from
"field experience" to "provide intelligence training
to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history
prepared in 1991 and released in 1997. According to the Washington Post
(March 6, 1997), the Project X materials even suggested that "militaries
infiltrate and suppress even democratic political dissident movements
and hunt down opponents in every segment of society in the name of fighting
Communism..."
In the early 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center moved to Fort
Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to foreign
U.S. "military assistance groups." By the mid-1970s, the Project
X material was going to armies all over the world, in effect, a textbook
for global counterinsurgency and terror warfare.
In its 1992 review, the Pentagon also acknowledged that Project X was
the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons taught
at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained
in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political
opponents. But disclosure of the full story was blocked when Defense
Secretary Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records.
Nearly simultaneously, President George HW Bush pardoned six Reagan-Bush
administration figures of any wrongdoing in the Nicaragua operations.
These included former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and Duane
Clarridge, by then named as intellectual author of another sinister
murder manual, "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare."
Produced by the CIA, this booklet openly instructed in the assassination
of public officials, and was distributed to the Nicaraguan Contras.
That George W Bush's war on terrorism is really a global war of terror
directed against the entire world becomes inescapably clear with the
appointment of a man linked to this grisly history to head the entire
U.S. intelligence apparatus. Perhaps there is still time to apply pressure
on the Senate and halt this next step in the legitimization of torture
and state terrorism--if the citizenry, human rights community, clergy
and responsible voices in the media can join in a single cry: STOP NEGROPONTE!
DEDICATED TO ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO, BORN 1917, ASSASSINATED MARCH
25, 1980.
Adopted from an article in The Shadow, New York City, Spring 2005
http://www.shadow.autono.net/
