John Negroponte’s Dark Past
By Robert Parry
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/negropontedarkpast03mar05.shtml
March 3, 2005John Negroponte’s Dark Past (July 31, 2007)
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1998/
The case against Bush’s new intelligence czar
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.
Although Negroponte’s nomination is expected to sail through the Senate, one question that might be worth asking about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 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?”
Negroponte either oversaw a stunningly inept U.S. intelligence operation at the embassy in Tegucigalpa—missing major events occurring under his nose—or he tolerated atrocities that included torture, rape and murder, while slanting intelligence reports 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 9/11 terror attacks or to avert the scandalous use of torture on Muslim suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite the bipartisan praise Negroponte’s nomination has elicited, a clear-eyed look at his record suggests 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 committed by U.S. allies or American interrogators.
A history of oversight
Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him.Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.
In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”
It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.
Negroponte’s ambassadorship also coincided with the evolution of the Nicaraguan contra forces from a small band under the tutelage of Argentine intelligence officers into an irregular army supported by the CIA, and later by a secret operation inside the White House run by National Security Council aide Oliver North.
Recent revelations
Despite several investigations into what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, many documents about Negroponte’s involvement remained classified, outside public knowledge. Some of that information bubbled to the surface in September 2001 when Negroponte was facing confirmation to be Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations.In a Senate floor speech before Negroponte won confirmation, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said, “The picture that emerges in analyzing this new information is a troubling one.” Summarizing the new documents from the State Department and CIA, Dodd said the evidence pointed to the fact that from 1980 to 1984, the Honduran military committed most of the country’s hundreds of human rights abuses. The documents reported that some Honduran military units, trained by the United States, were implicated in “death squad” operations that employed counterterrorist tactics, including torture, rape, and assassinations against people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas in El Salvador or leftist movements in Honduras.
Dodd criticized Negroponte’s earlier Senate testimony. In response to questions about one of these units, Battalion 316, Negroponte had said, “I have never seen any convincing substantiation that they were involved in death squad-type activities.”
“Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s.”
“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” Dodd said. “The Court found that ‘a practice of disappearances carried out or tolerated by Honduran officials existed between 1981-84’ … Based upon an extensive review of U.S. intelligence information by the CIA Working Group in 1996, the CIA is prepared to stipulate that ‘during the 1980-84 period, the Honduran military committed most of the hundreds of human rights abuses reported in Honduras. These abuses were often politically motivated and officially sanctioned.’ ”
However, when Bush nominated Negroponte to be ambassador to Iraq in 2004, Dodd and other Democrats largely dropped their objections. The National Catholic Reporter, which had covered the right-wing persecution of Catholic clergy in Central America during the ’80s, was one of the few publications still questioning Negroponte’s fitness.
In an April 2004 article, the magazine recounted a statement from Society of Helpers’ Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had gone to Honduras and approached Negroponte about the “disappearances” of 32 women who had fled to Honduras after rightist death squads in El Salvador assassinated Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.
Later, these women, including one who had been Romero’s secretary, “were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared,” Sister Laetitia Bordes said. “John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. … Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the U.S. embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government.”
The National Catholic Reporter noted, “Years later, the Baltimore Sun would reveal that Negroponte apparently knew more than he was letting on. In fact, charge his many critics, the ambassador oversaw an exponential increase in military aid to the Honduran army, deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.”
Many congressional Democrats, as well as Republicans, consider those two-decade-old concerns about Central America stale and irrelevant to Negroponte’s nomination as the nation’s first National Intelligence Director. But his tenure as ambassador to Honduras raises questions not only about his moral judgment and integrity, but his capacity to assess information and to ensure that political pressures don’t influence intelligence reporting.
As the first person chosen to hold this post—with oversight responsibility for all U.S. intelligence activities—Negroponte might legitimately be expected to represent something other than tolerance of death squads and politicization of intelligence information.
Robert Parry
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the '80s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered here. A version of this article originally appeared on Consortium News.
Previous Coverage of John Negroponte
In These Times has been following the career of John Negroponte for many years. Here is some of what we have reported.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2010/
Supplementary March 3, 2005
Previous Coverage of John Negroponte
In These Times has been following the career of John Negroponte for many years. Here is some of what we have reported.CIA’s Covert Activities Are in the Open
May 4, 1983
By Jack Epstein and J.H. Evans
The decision to move against Nicaragua was probably taken shortly after Reagan took office. Judging by his campaign rhetoric, the Sandinistas were seen not only as bad examples, but also as willing proxies for Soviet and Cuban support of all leftist insurgent activity in the region. The destruction of the Nicaraguan revolution was perceived as crucial to the maintenance of U.S. hegemony in Central America. …
Honduras, specifically the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, the capital, was chosen as the headquarters for the operation. The embassy was hurriedly upgraded from a low priority class 4 to class 2, and as many as 50 CIA operatives were sent in under official cover to analyze data flowing in from spies. Subsequent press accounts have said that more than 150 agents are now working in Honduras, with dozens more in neighboring countries. This includes between 50 and 60 U.S. military personnel, most of them of Cuban or Puerto Rican descent, who are in charge of daily contact with counter-revolutionary fighters.
To oversee the operation Reagan appointed a former Saigon political officer, John Negroponte, who like his counter part in Guatemala 30 years earlier, John Peurifoy, has become the theater commander of the CIA’s war.
Negroponte immediately began to work closely with Honduran Army Commander-in-Chief General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, an Argentine and U.S.-trained officer known for his almost messianic anti-Communist views. … Negroponte and the CIA worked through Argentine advisers who helped train the counterrevolutionary groups and launder financial support.
Bush’s pick for U.N. Ambassador has some spooky stuff on his resume
April 2, 2001—In From the Cold War
By Terry Allen
Like spooks from an abandoned B-Movie graveyard, officials of the Reagan-Bush era are emerging from the dirt and showing up inside the George W. Bush administration. The latest resurrection is John Negroponte, whom Bush recently nominated as ambassador to the United Nations. …
U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $ 3.9 million in 1980 to $ 77.4 million by 1984. So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground.
The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. … Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras. …
Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of U.S. involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that “some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic.” …
Negroponte … annually filed State Department reports from Honduras that gave the impression that the Honduran military respected human rights. But in an interview with In These Times, Negroponte’s predecessor as ambassador, Carter appointee Jack Binns, tells a different story: “Negroponte would have had to be deliberately blind not to know about human rights violations.” … In the summer of 1981, Binns recalls, “I was called unexpectedly to Washington by Tom Enders, the assistant secretary of state. He asked me to stop reporting human rights violations through official State Department channels and to use back channels because they were afraid of leaks.” … Binns did not agree to use back channels and when he returned to Honduras, he received no further reports of human rights violations from the CIA. “I was deliberately lied to,” says Binns. …
The lessons Negroponte has learned from the past may shed light on what kind of U.N. ambassador he will be if his nomination is approved by the Senate. When he appeared in 1981 before a Senate committee for confirmation as envoy to Honduras, he said, “I believe we must do our best not to allow the tragic outcome of Indochina to be repeated in Central America.”
The tragedy to which he referred, of course, was the defeat of the United States, not the devastation and death caused by U.S. intervention.
Déjà Violence
June 21, 2004
By Joel Bleifuss
For all the hooha over the horror of U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the fact is such torture has been the rule, not the exception. Indeed, this scandal features a cast of characters who were in power the last time the U.S. sanctioned torture. … Who could forget John Negroponte? Between 1981 and 1985, he was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras … overseeing the construction of El Aguacate airbase, which was used as a U.S. training camp for the Nicaraguan Contras and as a torture center for Battalion 316, a Honduran army intelligence unit. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that Battalion 316, which was trained and supported by the CIA, used “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.” In August 2001, a mass grave was unearthed at El Aguacate containing 185 corpses, including two Americans.
Negroponte will become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in July. Judging by his record, he is the man for the job.
The use of torture by the Honduran army under U.S. guidance was not an aberration but a matter of policy. … The U.S. Army used CIA-prepared torture manuals to train foreign military officers both at the School of the Americas and on-site in Latin America. One of these, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual — 1983, had these tips:
The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. … A threat should be delivered coldly, not shouted in anger. … If a subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out. The torture situation is an external conflict, a conflict between the subject and his tormentor.
The CIA’s training manual does caution, “The routine use of torture lowers the moral caliber of the organization that uses it and corrupts those that rely on it.”
Look no further than the Bush administration.