Negroponte: A veteran of US subversion and dirty wars

[IndianaGreen]

Bush names Negroponte as national intelligence director

A veteran of US subversion and dirty wars

By Bill Van Auken
18 February 2005

Negroponte’s qualifications for this position include his involvement in the covert operations of the CIA when, as US ambassador to Honduras, he was a central organizer of the “contra” war that claimed tens of thousands of lives in neighboring Nicaragua. He was implicated as well in the operations of death squads in Honduras itself. More recently, as US ambassador to the United Nations, he pushed for the passage of Security Council resolutions based on false intelligence that paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq.

In June 2004, Negroponte took over the American embassy in Baghdad, as the US wound up its Coalition Provisional Authority and installed a puppet Iraqi regime under an interim prime minister, the long-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi. While remaining largely behind the scenes, Negroponte played the role of colonial proconsul, overseeing the occupation of Iraq during a period that saw a steady escalation of US violence, including the destruction of Fallujah.

<snip>

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.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/negr-f18.shtml

[whathappened]

1. looks about right

jr. has gotten rid of anybody who talks back to him , so this jerk would fit right in with this bunch of crooks and liers

[Say_What]

2. Negroponte, Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, Iraq, and the School of the Americas

<clips>

This ran about the time * appointed Negroponte 'ambassdor' of Iraq--then we had the utter destruction of Fallujah and thousands of innocent people. History repeating itself.

<clips>

Negroponte's specialty, while ambassador to Honduras under Reagan (1981-1985) was to ensure that any resistance to US hegemony in Nicaragua would be utterly crushed. The ambassador carried out his duties with considerable success. A brief look at Negroponte's Central American period gives us a hint at what bodes for US-run Iraq.

..During the Reagan administration, and while Negroponte was ambassador to the country, 'Contra' militias were trained in Honduras. The Contras had hitherto made relatively small attacks across the border into Nicaragua until in 1982 thousands of marines arrived with up to 200 military advisers airstrips were built, arms supplied and radar stations erected, all courtesy of the US taxpayer.

The Contras were trained in some of the most gruesome guerrilla war techniques. Some were trained by military officers from Argentina's dirty war who knew nothing about the jungle but plenty about torture and execution. Others were trained in Florida and California while many others, like Honduras' military dictator, General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, were educated in torture techniques, execution and combat at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. While it was purported by Reagan that the Contras were fighting the evil scourge of communism, referring to them as 'freedom fighters,' the Contras raped, tortured and terrorised the civilian population throughout the subsequent decade, leaving the destroying the civilian infrastructure, leaving tens of thousands dead and many more displaced.

Negroponte's role in Honduras was crucial as it meant maintaining US dominance in the region. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Negroponte's predecessor at the UN once declared that 'Central America is the most important place in the world for the United States today.' Maintaining political control of the region meant controlling its vast and rich natural resources. The Sandinistas were beginning to take matters into their own hands and started to redistribute wealth and land in Nicaragua, thus threatening US dominance in the region. Panic in the Reagan administration reached feverish and sometimes surreal levels, with the president declaring that the Sandinistas were on the verge of invading the United States. The real cause for alarm among Reaganite neo-conservatives (including the virulent anti-communist Negroponte) was that the Sandinista revolution would spread throughout El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It had nothing to do with communism, just as the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with preventing terrorism. More, it was that the economic system the US had maintained in Central America since 1945 was falling apart it was simply untenable for the impoverished masses who barely had enough to eat. Washington's solution, like its present incarnation in the Middle East, was one of force and overwhelming military power in order to maintain US hegemony. Just as Negroponte acted as the strong arm of US imperialism in Central America in the 1980s he will protect US business and political interests in the Middle East, now the 'most important place in the world for the United States today.'

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/leaders/2004/0709negroponte.htm


From another aticle...

<clips>

...But it was during his tour as ambassador to Honduras that Negroponte earned his reputation for being soft on human rights abuses. From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras, where he helped prosecute the contra war against Nicaragua and helped strengthen the military dictatorship in Honduras. Under the helm of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was disappearing dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion. Negroponte's predecessor, Ambassador Jack Binns, had repeatedly warned Washington to take a stand to stop the killings. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua. President Reagan responded by removing Binns and putting in Negroponte, who, writes Eric Alterman in an MSNBC.com piece, "turned a deliberate blind eye to a murderous pattern of political killings."

On Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras" and that the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature."

Yet, according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military. In a 1995 series, Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

During Negroponte's tenure, U.S. military aid to Honduras, a country of five million, skyrocketed from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this largesse went to assure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against political leftists throughout Central America. Embassy reports to Washington singled out for particular praise army chief Alvarez, a School of the Americas graduate who was direct commander of Battalion 316.

http://www.fpif.org/republicanrule/officials_body.html#negroponte

[Say_What]

3. Career Itinerary of a War Criminal...

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Much of his career itinerary reads like a dossier for some future war crimes tribunal:

* 1964-68, political affairs officer at the US Embassy in Saigon;

* 1969-71, aide to Henry Kissinger in the Paris negotiations with the Vietnamese;

* 1971-73, officer-in-charge for Vietnam in the National Security Council, under Kissinger;

* 1973-75, assigned to the US Embassy in Ecuador (he reportedly quit Kissinger’s staff, opposing the Paris settlement as too favorable to the Vietnamese);

* 1980-81, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs;

* 1981-85, ambassador to Honduras;

* 1987-1989, deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, reporting to Colin Powell;

* 1989-93, ambassador to Mexico;

* 1993-97, ambassador to the Philippines.

After retiring from the diplomatic corps, he took a well-paid position as vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill, the big publishing company.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/cont-a01.shtml

[dbeach]

4. chikenhawk traitor and cia asset from way back ..

and has been on taxpayer funded welfare with all his govt jobs

negroponte means the black bridge..and hes the connection to the secret govt which runs all these puppetos..

[bemildred]

5. Negroponte did have a short tenure in Iraq.

I wonder if this is desperation (in finding an "intelligence czar",
something the adminsitration really needs, but not the way they mean)
or if he is somehow not needed in Iraq now.

One has to wonder who will replace him in Iraq, too?

An old piece on his previous "service":

http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2004/negroponte.html

[libodem]

6. He is a dirty evil man

What if Bill Clinton had done all those things? What if he'd tried to appoint someone who did. Everything is so partisan. God, they are the Nazis and the SS. How do they get by with everything and get anything and everybody they want. Why doesn't his record speak for itself? Life's a bitch and then you die.