Bush to Tap Negroponte as Intel Director
ABC News | February 17, 2005
Current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Would Be First to Fill New Post
President Bush plans to tap John Negroponte, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as his nominee to become the nation's first national intelligence director, ABC News has learned.
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If confirmed by Congress, Negroponte, 65, would be charged with coordinating the activities of 15 U.S. intelligence agencies in a position created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Negroponte also would control the flow of spy information and the purse strings for intelligence.
Bush is expected to announce his choice of Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, at a 10 a.m. news conference.
Bush signed the bill creating the position of national intelligence director on Dec. 17, and White House spokesman Scott McClellan explained why the president took his time choosing a nominee.
"This is a position of critical importance and the president wanted to make sure he gets it right," The Associated Press quoted McClellan as saying. "This individual will have the full authority to do the job that needs to be done and will have the full confidence of the president of the United States."
Bob Callahan, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, declined to confirm the appointment of Negroponte as intelligence director.
"As far as we know Negroponte continues to serve here in Iraq at the pleasure of the president," Callahan said.
But a senior official directly involved confirmed Negroponte will be nominated.
"We don't even have a short list yet" on his replacement as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the senior official said.
An Exquisite Danger
Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control.
Guardian/UK | June 2, 2004
by Duncan Campbell
Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. These are some of the key issues that will face John Negroponte, US ambassador to the United Nations, when he takes over this month as US ambassador to Iraq.
Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. Those were some of the key issues that faced John Negroponte 20 years ago when he was US ambassador to Honduras. So it is worth examining how he reacted then when faced with evidence of extra-judicial killings, torture and human rights abuses.
Central America in the early 80s was, for a few years, the center of the world in much the way that the Middle East now is. There had been a revolution in Nicaragua in which a dictator had been removed by the Sandinistas, who had then embarked on a political path that was anathema to the US.
The country became a magnet for the international left, who saw hopeful signs in the revolution. El Salvador and Guatemala were in turmoil as leftwing guerrillas battled with the military in their efforts to overturn years of military oppression and corruption. In those days the enemy, as far as the US was concerned, was international communism rather than al-Qaida, but the rhetoric of "good" versus "evil" took a similar pattern to today's.
Into this world in 1981 came diplomat John Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras. At the time, the US was covertly backing the contras, the counter-revolutionaries who opposed the Sandinistas. Honduras was a vital base for them. An air base was built at El Aguacate, where they could be trained and which was used, according to Honduran human rights activists, as a detention center where torture took place. It was also used as a burial ground for 185 dissidents, whose remains were only discovered in 2001.
Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, was appointed by Jimmy Carter. He had made public his concerns about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Binns has since affirmed that when he handed over to Negroponte he gave him a full briefing on the abuses. Negroponte has always denied having knowledge of such violations.
A former Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which re-examined the behavior of the US in 1995, of Negroponte and other US officials: "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."
For their cooperation with the US in its long-running battle to remove the Sandinistas - who, it should be remembered, won the election in Nicaragua in 1984 - the Honduran government was royally rewarded. Military aid increased from $4m to $77m a year. Had Negroponte reported to the US Congress that the military were engaged in human rights abuses, such aid would have been threatened. No report of such abuses was allowed to interfere with the US destabilization of Nicaragua.
Negroponte was one of a group of officials involved in Central America at that time who have since - to the astonishment of the international diplomatic community - been rehabilitated by President Bush. His behavior in Honduras would have come under scrutiny when he was appointed as US ambassador to the UN in 2001, but his appointment hearing came in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when there was little appetite for such an inquiry and when there was a desire to have such a key post filled speedily.
"Exquisitely dangerous", is how Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs described Negroponte this week in a conversation from Washington. He called Negroponte's role in Honduras "eerily familiar to the Bush administration's present goal in Iraq". Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch had this to say when Negroponte was appointed ambassador to the UN: "When Negroponte was ambassador [in Honduras] he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed. One would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights."
The US policy in Central America in the 80s was essentially that the ends justified the means, even if the ends involved misleading Congress, dealing with the supposedly hated Iran, the illegal mining of harbors and the promotion, funding and encouragement of rebel forces. Many of those involved in the atrocities in Central America were graduates of the School of the Americas (which has since changed its name to the anodyne Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) where interrogation techniques of the kind that have come to light in Iraq were taught. When Negroponte was ambassador in Honduras his building in Tegucigalpa became one of the nerve centers of the CIA in Latin America with a tenfold increase in staff. In Baghdad, he will have a similar role.
Negroponte represented the US during one of the most corrupt periods of its foreign policy, presided over by Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior. He had an opportunity to challenge what was happening, but chose not to.
His new appointment is one of a number that fly in the face of reason. Bush made Henry Kissinger head of the commission to investigate the events leading up to 9/11. At the time, many found it bizarre that a man of such limited international credibility and such impressively flexible standards of morality should have been entrusted with such a task. Kissinger accepted the post as an opportunity to serve his country - until it transpired that it would interfere with his lucrative consultancy business, at which point he bowed out. Now a man who has been accused of not spotting human rights abuses taking place in front of his eyes in Honduras is being sent to Iraq at a time when allegations of human rights abuses are at the heart of the occupation. As a policy, the appointment of Negroponte at this point in the history of Iraq seems "exquisitely dangerous" indeed.
Negroponte, a Torturer's Friend
The Progressive | April 21, 2004
by Matthew Rothschild
Bush's announcement that he intends to appoint John Negroponte to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq should appall anyone who respects human rights.
Negroponte, currently U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and was intimately involved with Reagan's dirty war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Reagan waged much of that illegal contra war from Honduras, and Negroponte was his point man.
According to a detailed investigation the Baltimore Sun did in 1995, Negroponte covered up some of the most grotesque human rights abuses imaginable.
The CIA organized, trained, and financed an army unit called Battalion 316, the paper said. Its specialty was torture. And it kidnapped, tortured, and killed hundreds of Hondurans, the Sun reported. It "used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."
The U.S. embassy in Honduras knew about the human rights abuses but did not want this embarrassing information to become public, the paper said.
"Determined to avoid questions in Congress, U.S. officials in Honduras concealed evidence of human rights abuses," the Sun reported. Negroponte has denied involvement, and prior to his confirmation by the Senate for his U.N. post, he testified, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."
But this is what the Baltimore Sun said: "The embassy was aware of numerous kidnappings of leftists." It also said that Negroponte played an active role in whitewashing human rights abuses.
"Specific examples of brutality by the Honduran military typically never appeared in the human rights reports, prepared by the embassy under the direct supervision of Ambassador Negroponte," the paper wrote. " The reports from Honduras were carefully crafted to leave the impression that the Honduran military respected human rights."
So this is the man who is going to show the Iraqis the way toward democracy?
More likely, as the insurgency increases, this will be the man who will oversee and hush up any brutal repression that may ensue.
