Reply #32: A gloomy assessment by the CIA's departing chief in Baghdad [View All]

[sattahipdeep]

Descending into chaos - Dec. 8, 2004
A gloomy assessment by the CIA's departing chief in Baghdad contradicts Bush's claim that
conditions in Iraq will improve after its election.

As station chief, the unnamed CIA official supervised more
than 300 operatives, the largest intelligence operation since the
Vietnam War, and their assessment carries authority. While the senior U.S. military
commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey Jr., initially raised no objections to the CIA
assessment, the New York Times reported that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John
Negroponte, had filed a lengthy message of dissent in which he argued that the U.S. had
made considerable progress in controlling the insurgency.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/iraq/

Negroponte
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.

http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx042004.html

John Negroponte served as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. As
Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, he played a key role in supporting and supervising
the Nicaraguan Contra mercenaries who were based in Honduras. The cross
border Contra attacks into Nicaragua claimed some 50 000 civilian lives.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO404E.html

During the same period, Negroponte was instrumental in setting up the
Honduran military death squads, "operating with Washington support's,
assassinated hundreds of opponents of the US-backed regime." (See Bush
Nominee linked to Latin American Terrorism, by Bill Vann,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/VAN111A.html

Special Ops Task Force Threatened Government Agents
Who Saw Detainee Abuse in Iraq, Documents Obtained by
ACLU Reveal
December 7, 2004

NEW YORK - Documents released today by the American Civil Liberties
Union reveal that a special operations task force in Iraq sought to silence
Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who observed abusive
interrogations and that the Department of Defense adopted questionable
interrogation techniques at Guantanamo over FBI objections.

"The more the government is forced to reveal, the more we learn that
individuals in U.S. custody, many of whom have not been accused of
wrongdoing, were tortured and abused," said ACLU Executive Director
Anthony D. Romero. "These documents tell a damning story of sanctioned
government abuse -- a story that the government has tried to hide and
may well come back to haunt our own troops captured in Iraq."

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17156&c=206