FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record

[G_j]

FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2452

MEDIA ADVISORY:
Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record

February 22, 2005

George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly
created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of
media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little
attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

>From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a
country that was being used as a training and staging ground for the
CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who relied on a terrorist strategy
of targeting civilians. Those years saw a massive increase in U.S.
military aid to Honduras, and Negroponte was a key player in organizing
training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the armies that the
United States was building in order to topple the socialist Nicaraguan
government (Extra!, 9-10/01).

Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal:
the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that
tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one
U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular reporting of
such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports of
Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics
contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been acknowledged,
U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which
could have jeopardized the Contra operations.

Many reports included brief mentions of Negroponte's past. The New York
Times (2/18/05), for example, noted that "critics say" that Negroponte
"turned a blind eye to human rights abuses" in Honduras. But the Times
(like most mainstream reports) quoted no critics on the subject; to get a
sense of what Negroponte's critics actually said, you had to tune into
Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now (2/18/05), where Peter Kornbluh of the
National Security Archive said that Negroponte "essentially ran Honduras
as the Reagan administration changed it from a small Central American
country into a territorial battleship, if you will, to fight the Contra
war and overthrow the Sandinista government. He was really the head person
in charge of this whole operation, which became a massive paramilitary war
in the early 1980s."

Kornbluh added that declassified documents from those years show
Negroponte had "stepped out of being U.S. ambassador and kind of put on
the hat of a C.I.A. station chief in pushing for the Contras to get more
arms, in lobbying and meeting with very high Honduran officials to
facilitate U.S. support for the Contras and Honduran cooperation, even
after the U.S. Congress terminated official support for the Contra war."

The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully
understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News
(2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran
record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of
ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While
Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one
could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against
Nicaragua." The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests
that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning
America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting
that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured
diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in
Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel
death squads."

Some reporters simply soft-pedaled the history; as CNN reporter Kitty
Pilgrim put it (2/17/05), "During his four-year stint as U.S. ambassador
to Honduras, he had a difficult balancing act in the battle against
Communism in the neighboring Sandinista government in Nicaragua."
(Sandinista Nicaragua, of course, was not Communist, but a country with a
mixed economy and regular elections, one of which voted the Sandinistas
out of power in 1990.) Pilgrim's CNN colleague, Paula Zahn (2/17/05),
complained that "the critics are already out there sniping at him."

Fox News reporter Carl Cameron (2/17/05) noted that "the only partisan
criticism noted Negroponte's role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the
'80s, when he played a key role in the Reagan administration's covert
disruption of Communism in the Nicaragua." In this case, "covert
disruption" stands in as a euphemism for a bloody guerrilla war that took
the lives of thousands of civilians. Cameron went on to note that the
"partisan" remarks "came from a member of the House, which has no vote on
his nomination."

NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly made similar observations (2/17/05), noting
that previous confirmation hearings generated "a lot of questions about
the role he played during the early '80s when he was the ambassador to
Honduras." Kelly seemed aware of this history, but thought it a settled
matter: "He has already dealt with those issues and obviously answered
them satisfactorily-- he was confirmed for that job at the United
Nations."

Some pundits were remarkably lenient in the standards by which Negroponte
should be judged. Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer
explained (2/17/05) that "he was the ambassador in Honduras during the
Contra war. So he clearly knows how to deal with clandestine operations.
That was a pretty clandestine one for several years. And he didn't end up
in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others
practically did."

In general, right-wing pundits and commentators were much more likely than
mainstream news reporters to cite Negroponte's shady past-- as proof that
he is the right man for the job. On CNBC (2/17/05), Tony Blankley happily
summarized Negroponte's human rights record: "Negroponte is not just some
ambassador. He has a track record. Starting in Honduras in 1981, he was
the ambassador who oversaw the management when the Argentines turned over
the covert operations against the Nicaraguans. He took over that
responsibility. He managed it operationally. The CIA was very impressed
with the way he handled that."

After James Warren of the Chicago Tribune disagreed (calling the Contra
war an "at times slimy operation"), Blankley offered a blunt response--
"Well, we won"-- which host Lawrence Kudlow endorsed: "We did win. Thank
you, Tony. I was just going to say, you know, the forces of freedom
triumphed with a little bit of help from the right country."

Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes took the same line (2/19/05): "I would say
on Central America, I give John Negroponte credit, along with people like
Elliott Abrams and President Reagan, for creating democracy in all those
countries in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and in
Honduras, where Marxists were going to take over, they fought them back."
By way of balance, Fox pundit and NPR correspondent Juan Williams noted
that while he didn't "have any love for Marxists," it was important to
note "what death squads do to people, and you understand that nuns were
involved, Fred, then you think-- wait a second-- excess is not to be
tolerated in the name of democracy." Barnes' response: "Well, now that we
have democracy, there are no death squads

[peacetalksforall]

1. Everyone of the Iran-Contra operatives got a cabal reward under

Bush II except Ollie North.

Even Poindexter got a special kind of computer. Others were more up front - Powell, Rice, etc. Took awhile for Elliot.

Reward. Revenge. Betrayal.

That is what this Party is about - at our expense and oh yes, the world's expense.

The Catholic Church was way too silent about those atrocities.

Long live the memory of all those martyrs and may their memory become more well known for the sake of this earth.

[G_j]

3. Good Article From 2003, The Sequel Unfolds

A BIGGER, BADDER SEQUEL TO IRAN-CONTRA

Jim Lobe, AlterNet

Just like Ollie North and his cohorts, a small network of officials are pursuing a covert foreign policy agenda -- except their aims are vastly more ambitious.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16597

The specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Some of the people and countries are the same, and so are the methods ? particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy.
Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an "off-the-books" operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. The picture being painted by various insider sources in the media suggests a similar but far more ambitious scheme at work.

Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what is already on the public record suggests the existence of a disciplined network of zealous, like-minded individuals. Centered in Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's office and around Richard Perle in the Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon, this exclusive group of officials operates under the aegis of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

This network includes high-level political appointees, such as Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who are scattered around several other key bureaucracies, notably in the State Department, the NSC staff, and most importantly, in Cheney's office.
...more..

MARCH 19 & 20: THE WORLD SAYS NO TO WAR: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=2688

[anarchy1999]

2. On this most "recent appointment" of Negroponte to be the "Czar"

of National Security, there should be nothing but a national and world wide outcry of condemnation. I know I personally am in an outrage about it, anyone else?

I think we may need to consider a media focus on this issue.

on edit:

As in the past, Bush will make this a recess appointment as he has done with other controversial figures. At least we can stand up and try to make our voices be heard.