Questions For John Negroponte

[RBHam]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00208.htm


by Toni Solo

excerpt:
In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just - the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.

Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.

Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.

[Octafish]

1. Negroponte's a bridge of death.

John Dimitri Negroponte
Newly-named Ambassador to Iraq

John Negroponte's expertise lies in running secret military operations which use illegal techniques - arbitrary detentions followed by torture, forced disappearances and extra-judicial execution of civilians - to "fight" insurgencies. The idea is to terrorize the population to such a degree that they neither could or would provide the infrastructure needed by the insurgent elements.

He is thought to have headed the secret Operation Phoenix in Vietnam in the late 1960's. Up to 50,000 Vietnamese civilians are thought to have been killed through this program.

In the 1980's he was the ambassador to Honduras where he carried out a similar program. Among other things he supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan death squads, from where it organized the repression. The base was used as a secret detention and torture center. In August 2001 excavations at the base discovered the first of the corpses of a total of 185 bodies found, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at this base.

During his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. The infamous Battalion 316, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people.

Negroponte was later named Ambassador to Mexico where he assisted the Mexican government in its war against the Zapatistas.

SOURCE:

http://www.torturers.net/us/admin/negroponte/



Wikipedia also pegs the greasy BFEE turd:

Speaking of Negroponte and other senior U.S. officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of U.S. activities in Honduras:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

[Octafish]

2. Hey Pro-Lifers! Catholic Nuns number among his victims...

It amazes me to think so many people fail to see these murderers for what they are.

From Wikipedia:

Ambassador to Honduras

From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was allegedly involved in "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the U.S., and which some 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 the Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including U.S. missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, 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 Archbishop Óscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. However, in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two together with a contact in the Honduran armed forces. The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any U.S. involvement, despite Negroponte's introductions of some of the individuals. Other documents detailed a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

CONTINUED...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte

[Octafish]

9. 'Leave No Witnesses' so they killed six Jesuits, a woman and her daughter

When it comes right down to it, the hands of the USA's political leadership are very dirty indeed.



Archbishop of San Salvador Arturo Rivera y Damas views the bodies of the six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter, murdered at the University of Central America in El Salvador on November 16, 1989

"Leave No Witnesses!"

by Fr. Michael Czerny, SJ

The first hours of November 16th, ten years ago, the full moon shed all its milky light on what was happening behind the Jesuits residence on the campus of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador.

The highest echelons of the military hierarchy had decided the day before that UCAs president Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, was to be killed and that they would "leave no witnesses!" With Ellacuría, five other Jesuits and two women also died that night.

I knew them personally, all except Celina, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Julia Elba, the community cook. "Nacho" Martín-Baró and I both studied at the University of Chicago; I met Amando López for the first time in Nicaragua in 1978 and often thereafter; Segundo Montes was a valued colleague in the work for human rights and refugees; Juan Ramón Moreno, a theologian of great spirituality; the popular educator Joaquín López y López, affectionately known as "Lolo"; and Ellacuría whom I respected enormously as a moral and intellectual leader.

The legal investigation began immediately but dragged on for nearly two years. American Jesuits put sustained pressure on the U.S. government, which did everything to obfuscate the issue and to protect the Salvadoran army and government while at the same time certifying human rights and continuing to grant high levels of military assistance.

CONTINUED...

http://www.companysj.com/v171/nowitnes.html

[Octafish]

5. Where are the Democrats?

For that matter, where are the DUers?

Scum Also Rises

The Bloody Career of John Negroponte

By DAVE LINDORFF

The nomination by President George Bush of John Negroponte for the new post of director of national intelligence, in charge of overseeing all the burgeoning intelligence operations of the United States, is both obscene and predictable.

Negroponte, currently the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and, unofficially, the head of the U.S. occupation of that country, is a career foreign service officer on paper, but in fact a veteran CIA operative responsible for some of the blackest crimes of murder and torture in Central America during that region's dark days of civil war, revolution and counter-revolution in the late 20th Century.

As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, Negroponte played a key role in organizing the military repression in that poorest of Latin American countries, and in creating and running the so-called Contra's, the U.S-organized military operation to undermine and overthrow the elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

What makes Negroponte the perfect candidate to be America's KGB chief is his refined cover. He has the Republicans on the Republican-dominated Intelligence Committee in his pocket anyhow, and as a career diplomat, urbane and fluent in five languages, he also appeals to the mushy national security state Democrats like John Rockefeller (D-W. VA), Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who will be asked to join in rubber-stamping his nomination.

If his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during hearings on his nomination for the post of ambassador to Iraq is any indication, he will breeze through this next "test." Democratic Senators Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.) gushed over him at those earlier hearings, and didn't ask anything about his role in promoting death squad activities or in covering up human rights abuses in Central America, which included the murders of several dozen priests and nuns.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff02182005.html

[Octafish]

6. Robert Parry pegged this necrophillic turd of the BFEE

Thank goodness for the Internets. Would more would use what they have available. Oh well. They must think that there'll be plenty of time to read and think after Bush orders Negroponte and FEMA to round everybody up who opposes them.

Negroponte's Blind Spots

By Robert Parry
February 19, 2005

George W. Bush’s choice of John Negroponte to be the first U.S. intelligence czar signals that Washington is heading down the same road that has led to earlier American intelligence failures and controversies – from politicizing analysis to winking at human rights abuses.

Though Washington insiders expect Negroponte’s nomination to sail through the Senate, one question that might be worth asking about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s is: “Were you oblivious to the Honduran military’s human rights violations and drug trafficking, or did you just ignore these problems for geopolitical reasons?”

It seems that Negroponte either oversaw a stunningly inept U.S. intelligence operation at the embassy in Tegucigalpa – missing major events occurring almost under his nose – or he is someone ready to tolerate atrocities – including torture, rape and murder – while slanting intelligence reporting to please his superiors in Washington.

Whichever it is – incompetence or complicity – it is hard to understand how Negroponte, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, can be expected to fix the intelligence flaws revealed by the Bush administration’s failure to connect the dots before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks or to avert the scandalous use of torture on Muslim suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bipartisan Praise

Despite the bipartisan praise Negroponte’s nomination is eliciting, a clear-eyed look at his record would suggest that the Bush administration intends to continue making two demands on the U.S. intelligence community: that analysts wear rose-colored glasses when assessing U.S. policies and that field operatives turn a blind eye to atrocities when committed by U.S. clients or American interrogators.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/021805.html

[Octafish]

7. Celerino Castillo IDs the murdering turd: 'Behold a Pale Horse'

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him". -- Revelation 6:7

The Atrocities of a Pale Rider-
John D. Negroponte

by Celerino Castillo 3rd
posted at DrugWar.com
Feb. 17, 2005

John Dimitri Negroponte

The above biblical quotation is the only way I can describe John Dimitri Negroponte because of the atrocities he's previously committed around the world.

From 1971 to 1973, Negroponte was the officer-in charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. During that period, former DEA Michael Levine was conducting undercover operations in Saigon, Thailand, and Cambodia where our government was smuggling heroin into the U.S. Our government was utilizing caskets and body bags of those "Killed In Action" to smuggled the heroin.

From 1981-1985, Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, where he illegally assisted the contra war and, most devastating, helped the Reagan administration in "disappearing" close to 300 political opponents in classic death squad fashion. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, which the Contras used as a secret detention and torture center. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two American missionaries. In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns who fled to Honduras in 1981. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in 1996, a U.S. newspaper interviewed Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns. Binns said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom was Bordes, who had been captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters, alive. Negroponte turned a deliberate blind eye to a murderous pattern of political killings. He orchestrated the famous death squad Battalion 316, which used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners were often kept naked and when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. We have seen similar pictures of those atrocities committed by our service men and women in Iraq.

From 1989 to September 1993, he was also ambassador to Mexico where he directed our U. S. intelligence services in assisting the war against the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. Furthermore, he was there obstructing the war on drugs. Seven Mexican drug agents were gunned down in an ambush by 100 members of the Mexican army on the payroll of a drug cartel; Negroponte dismissed the slaughter as "a regrettable incident." The slaughter had been videotaped by the DEA from another plane, which had also been strafed by the army unit.

CONTINUED MUST-READ....

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonegroponte.shtm

America! Snap out of it! DUers! Wake up! These are not neo-conservatives we are talking about here.

[Octafish]

10. Necroboy and BFEE want to do the SAME to YOU and YOURS!

Learn to discern. From Counterpunch:

John Negroponte, Dirty Warrior

The Return of the Contra Gangsters

By JENNIFER ROESCH
February 19 / 20, 2005

Over the course of a long career, John Negroponte has served his nation in eight countries spanning three continents. He's held important leadership posts at both the State Department and the White House. As my representative to the United Nations, John defended our interests vigorously. He spoke eloquently about America's intention to spread freedom and peace throughout the world. And his service in Iraq during these past few historic months has given him something that will prove an incalculable advantage for an intelligence chief: an unvarnished and up-close look at a deadly enemy. -- George Bush on the nomination of John Negroponte for the newly created position of Director of National Intelligence

Clearly, Bush has no shame. First it was his friend Alberto Gonzales - the man who created the legal justification that led to the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib. He was rewarded with an appointment to the post of Attorney General. Then Condoleeza Rice was promoted to Secretary of State. Now he has tapped John Negroponte, currently service as the US "ambassador" to Iraq, for the newly created position of Director of National Intelligence. In an administration that rewards lies and promotes those who diplomatically turn a blind eye to torture and human rights abuses, Negroponte will fit right in.

In the next few weeks we are likely to hear a chorus of praise for Negroponte from the mainstream media and politicians. In recent years his reputation has been rehabilitated and today he is hailed as a seasoned diplomat and skilled negotiator. A quick review of his history tells a different story. Negroponte's career was made as the U.S. ambassador in Honduras. Some highlights of his tenure there include:

• Supervising the creation of a death squad unit (Battalion 316) that has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of Hondurans;

• Crafting human rights reports that carefully exclude a pattern of torture and human rights violations covered by the entire Honduran media and later documented by the CIA;

• Brokering a steady stream of U.S. aid to Honduras in exchange for the right to use the country as a launching pad for the U.S.-backed Contra attack on Nicaragua.

This is a man who should have seen his career go down in flames when the Iran-Contra scandal broke out in the mid-1980s. Not only have human rights groups extensively documented his role in the "dirty wars" of Central America; the CIA has even compiled reports that could serve as the basis for a war crimes indictment. But Negroponte has never lacked for work and has been appointed to diplomatic posts under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.com/roesch02192005.html

[Octafish]

11. What's next for BFEE-PNAC's World War for Oil Agenda

Next Phase of Washington's Global Agenda: From the 'War on Terrorism' to the 'War on Tyranny'

A Peek Behind Bush II’s ‘War on Tyranny’

by F. William Engdahl
www.globalresearch.ca   13 February 2005

Part I:

Control all ’tyrannical’ world oil chokepoints

In recent public speeches, George W. Bush and others in the Administration, including Condi Rice, have begun to make a significant shift in the rhetoric of war. A new ‘War on Tyranny’ is being groomed to replace the outmoded War on Terror. Far from being a semantic nuance, the shift is highly revealing of the next phase of Washington’s global agenda.

In his 20 January inaugural speech, Bush declared:

 "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."


Bush repeated the last formulation, ‘ending tyranny in our world’ in the State of the Union. (author’s emphasis). In 1917 it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy," and in 1941 it was a "war to end all wars."

The use of tyranny as justification for US military intervention marks a dramatic new step on the road to Washington’s quest for global domination. Washington, of course today, is shorthand for the policy domination by a private group of military and energy corporate giants, from Halliburton to McDonnell Douglas, from Bechtel to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, not unlike that foreseen in Eisenhower’s 1961 speech warning of excessive control of government by a military-industrial complex.

Congress declared World War II following a Japanese aggressive attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. While Washington stretched the limits of deception and fakery in Vietnam and elsewhere to justify its wars, up to now it has always at least justified the effort with the claim that another power had initiated aggression or hostile military acts against the USA. Tyranny has to do with the internal affairs of a nation: it has to do with how a leader and a people interact, not with its foreign policy. It has nothing to do with aggression against the United States or others.

CONTINUED...

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ENG502A.html

[RBHam]

3. kick

nobody wants to remember...

[Octafish]

4. Negroponte Means Necrophilia

Hey DU! This is no peabrained killer. He wants to do to America the same thing he's done everywhere he's "served."

Not even the Big Time Democrats seem to give a rat's tahootie. What gives? From the time he got appointed Viceroy of Baghadad...

Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointment

By Democracy Now!
April 28, 2004

EXCERPT...

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, 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.

A former official 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. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

CONTINUED...

http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/demsignore.html

[Octafish]

12. Deadman's also a PNACer.

THE HORROR OF
JOHN DIMITRI NEGROPONTE
AND EVERYTHING HE REPRESENTS

May 28, 2004
by: S.R. Shearer

"My concern is that our government, in attempting to assure the security of our citizens, will so roll back all human rights safeguards (in Iraq and elsewhere) that the CIA will in fact receive a broad green light for engaging and collaborating in acts of torture (there) ..." -- Jennifer Harbury (Quoted in Latin America Solidarity newsletter Interconnect, September 2002. Harbury's husband was killed by CIA directed death squads in Honduras while John Negroponte was U.S. ambassador there. Harbury is an American citizen.)

INTRODUCTION

On April 19, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte to become U.S. Ambassador to Iraq following the projected June 30, 2004, handover of sovereignty to as yet undetermined Iraqi authorities. The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Dick Lugar (R-Ind) is backing the nomination and has indicated that he will work closely with Secretary of State Colin Powell to provide a prompt public hearing for Negroponte.

Most observers take this as a sign of the "beginning of the end" of the American occupation of Iraq; that the expanding furor over the incidents of prisoner torture and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison and the swelling Islamic insurgency has all but beaten the Americans, and soon now they will be slinking home - tails between their legs - amidst a chorus of knowing "I told you sos" from the "effete," "prissy" Europeans and the "milksops" at the United Nations.

BUT THE VERY CHOICE OF NEGROPONTE and his two assistants - James Jeffrey, who will become the deputy chief of mission, and Ron Newman, who will become senior defense attaché (both with intelligence and special forces backgrounds) - together with the very size of the new embassy the Americans are building in Baghdad (a massive, fortress-like structure encompassing one of Saddam Hussein's gargantuan Baghdad palaces) arguers something else altogether. It's an ominous and very foreboding sign that the Americans are planning AN EXTREMELY BRUTAL AND MURDEROUS, "ANTI-INSURGENCY CAMPAIGN" (I.E., A PHOENIX-STYLE OPERATION) AGAINST THE IRAQI PEOPLE BASED ON THE SWEEPING AND VERY SAVAGE USE OF DEATH SQUADS - the kind of campaign pursued by the very person they have now put in charge in Iraq (i.e., Negroponte) when he was ambassador to Honduras during the bloody Contra Wars of the early to mid-1980s.

Moreover, the very fact that the Americans are working so feverishly to "pass off sovereignty" to the Iraqis at the end of June (which will be sovereignty in name only) is the biggest sign of all of the homicidal campaign to come. What the Americans are doing here is constructing the necessary facade behind which they can conduct this war clandestinely, "underneath the radar" and out of the American public's eyes; a "false front" behind which they can claim "PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY" for the HORROR to come. There is a lot of REALPOLITIK "in play" here, the kind which the "milquetoasts" and "wimps" in Europe and the "pantywaists" in the United Nations find inconceivable to contemplate and impossible to fathom.

SNIP...

PNAC was formed in 1997 by such Christian, Jewish, and financial elitists as Elliot Abrams, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Dick Cheney, Vin Weber, Norman Podhoretz, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Paul Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfield. Essentially, these were the same men (and women) who - operating behind such "front groups" as the "Committee for the Free World," "Prodemca," "Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America" and the "Institute for Religion and Democracy" (IRD) - had helped America fight and win its "dirty war" in Central America in the early to mid-1980s. Indeed, there is some evidence that the idea of putting Negroponte in charge in Iraq came from Bush the Elder, who was Negroponte's connection to the White House during that time.

CONTINUED with Lots o' Links...

http://www.antipasministries.com/oldnews/negroponte.html

What's next? Death camps at home? Naah! They're GOOD people. Right?

[two gun sid]

8. My question to Negroponte: How do you live with....

yourself you sick, fuckin' prick?