[Mb-civic] Negroponte's Dark Past

[Michael Butler]

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    Negroponte's Dark Past
    By Robert Parry
    In These Times

    Wednesday 03 March 2005

    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' Š 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. Š 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.

 

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