WP: Papers Illustrate Negroponte's Contra Role: Newly Released Documents

[DeepModem Mom]

Papers Illustrate Negroponte's Contra Role
Newly Released Documents Show Intelligence Nominee Was Active in U.S. Effort

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 12, 2005; Page A04


The day after the House voted to halt all aid to rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte urged the president's national security adviser and the CIA director to hang tough.

The thrust of the envoy's "back channel" July 1983 message to the men running the contra war against Nicaragua was contained in a single cryptic sentence: "Hondurans believe special project is as important as ever."

"Special project" was code for the secret arming of contra rebels from bases in Honduras -- a cause championed by Negroponte, then a rising diplomatic star. In cables and memos, Negroponte made it clear that he saw the "special project" as key to the Reagan administration's strategy of rolling back communism in Central America.

As Negroponte prepares for his Senate confirmation hearing today for the new post of director of national intelligence, hundreds of previously secret cables and telegrams have become available that shed new light on the most controversial episode in his four-decade diplomatic career. The documents, drawn from Negroponte's personal records as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, were released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post....

***

Overall, Negroponte comes across as an exceptionally energetic, action-oriented ambassador whose anti-communist convictions led him to play down human rights abuses in Honduras, the most reliable U.S. ally in the region....The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Jack R. Binns, who was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1981 to make way for Negroponte, is striking. Before departing, Binns sent several cables to Washington warning of possible "death squad" activity linked to Honduran strongman Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Negroponte dismissed the talk of death squads and, in an October 1983 cable to Washington, emphasized Alvarez's "dedication to democracy."...


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44944-2005Apr11.html

[0007]

1. This wasted piece of protoplasm must be stopped immediately!

John Negroponte is a Iran/Contra convict that few pay no attention too!

[Rose Siding]

2. That's amazing

Of course, it won't fit a cable sound byte, so it never happened.

This guy messed with Congress 20 years ago! How INCREDIBLY stupid can Republicans be???

snip>
The secret message traffic suggests that Negroponte was highly attuned to the political and public relations ramifications of embassy and State Department reporting. He occasionally berated colleagues for their lack of discretion and worked hard to maintain the fiction that Honduras was not serving as the logistical base for as many as 15,000 anti-Sandinista rebels known as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, or FDN.

"We request that Department no longer clear out cables for Codels which of late almost invariably have included 'meet with FDN' or 'visit contra camps,' as one of the desired schedule items," Negroponte cabled then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz in July 1984.

The cables show that Negroponte was unremittingly skeptical of a regional peace initiative for Nicaragua known as the Contadora process, which would have left the Sandinista government in power. In a private cable to Shultz in May 1982, six months after taking over as ambassador, he expressed fears that peace negotiations could lead to the consolidation of communist influence in Nicaragua.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. And why didn't the WP run the story on page one, especially...

since they apparently sought the release of the documents?

"The documents, drawn from Negroponte's personal records as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, were released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post."

[AlCzervik]

4. Thats a good question that we'll never have the answer to

but hopefully it'll hurt him.

[DoYouEverWonder]

23. Because most Bushbots don't read

Then BushCo can say the public knew but didn't care, because the story had been published.

[Zorra]

5. John "The Butcher" Negroponte: Head of all US Intelligence Agencies.

OK. I'm scared shitless - how 'bout you?

Gosh, why would the (appointed) pResident of the US choose someone justifiably nicknamed "The Butcher" to be the Grand Wazoo of all US Intelligence Agencies?

Do the letters "KGB" mean anything to you?

Ask yourself: Would Bush, the PNAC, and John "the Butcher of Latin America" Negroponte kill innocent American "pinko commie libruls" without a second thought if it served the RW agenda?

Duh...that's a no brainer. Of course they would...in a shrews' heartbeat.

Wikipedia on Negroponte:

Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the U.S., and which some critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and the Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including U.S. missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Óscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. However, in a 1996 interview with The Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two together with a contact in the Honduran armed forces. The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any U.S. involvement, despite Negroponte's introductions of some of the individuals. Other documents detailed a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte

[DeepModem Mom]

11. Thanks for this additional info, Zorra. nt

[UpInArms]

15. will Negroponte become America's Heimlich Himmler

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/himmler.html

excerpt:

In 1933, he had set up the first concentration camp in Dachau and in the next few years, with Hitler's encouragement, greatly extended the range of persons who qualified for internment in the camps. Himmler's philosophical mysticism, his cranky obsessions with mesmerism, the occult, herbal remedies and homeopathy went hand in hand with a narrow-minded fanatical racialism and commitment to the Aryan' myth. In a speech in January 1937, Himmler declared that "there is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people." The mission of the German people was "the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world who are in league against Germany, which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture: they mean the existence or non-existence of the white man; and we guide his destiny."

...more...

[teryang]

6. The technician for Murder and Fraud, Inc.

Who could be more qualified? Bolton is a Neaderthal compared to this man.

[Flammable Materials]

7. Morning kick. n/t

[hue]

8. Clearly Negroponte is a killer-- underestimated and unknown

Is there any way to stop him?
Negative publicity doesn't seem to phase anyone especially him. (He prob gets off on it!)
He has been around for SO long and getting away with whatever he does! :evilfrown:

[Toucano]

9. He belongs in prison. Recommended. n/t

[UpInArms]

10. Negroponte and Battalion 316

http://www.progressive.org/webex05/wx021805.php

excerpt:

An inescapable feature of U.S.-Central America policy in the 1980s was support for torturers. Here, Negroponte did his part.

In particular, he knew about and supported Battalion 316, the Honduran intelligence unit, trained by the CIA that killed at least 184 people. One of those was the former secretary to Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, himself the victim of a CIA-funded death squad in 1980. The secretary, who fled to Honduras, was abducted by Battalion 316, and they threw her from a helicopter to her death.

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun ran a prizewinning series on Battalion 316. It concluded that Negroponte knew about the tortures and murders and covered them up. Under his direct supervision, the embassy prepared reports to Congress that never mentioned the brutality of the Honduran military, the Sun reported. This omission allowed Honduras to keep getting U.S. funding.

“I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras,” Negroponte testified before Congress in 2001.

Oscar Reyes begs to differ. He was living in Honduras at the time. “On July 8, 1982, some military people went to our home, ransacked it, detained us, and brought us to the torture house,” he told me last year. “There were a lot of people being tortured that night. You could hear the screaming. They used electrical shock on my body and my genitals, and they hanged me by my hands and were hitting me almost all night long. Then they put me in front of a tree and gave me a fake execution. . . . On my wife, they used electrical shock in her vagina. It was so bad that she had permanent damage to her ovaries, and she had to have a hysterectomy.” (See “America’s Amnesia,” The Progressive, July 2004.)

...more...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-negroponte1a.story

When a wave of torture and murder staggered a small U.S. ally, truth was a casualty.
Was the CIA involved? Did Washington know? Was the public deceived? Now we know: Yes, Yes and yes.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The search for Nelson Mackay Chavarria - family man, government lawyer, possible subversive - began one Sunday in 1982 after he devoured a pancake breakfast and stepped out to buy a newspaper.

It ended last December when his wife, Amelia, watched as forensic scientists plucked his moldering bones from a pit in rural Honduras. Spotting a scrap of the red-and-blue shirt her husband was wearing the day he disappeared, she gasped: "Oh my God, that's him!"

Along with Amelia Mackay, the nation of Honduras has begun to confront a truth it has long suspected - that hundreds of its citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in the 1980s by a secret army unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The intelligence unit, known as Battalion 316, used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.

...more...

Negroponte belongs in a cell at the Hague.

[DeepModem Mom]

12. Thanks for this additional info, UpInArms. nt

[UpInArms]

13. more information

excerpt:

55 The documents were: a February 19, 1985 memo to President Reagan from McFarlane concerning a proposed letter to President Suazo of Honduras, which President Reagan approved; a February 20, 1985 memo to McFarlane from North and Raymond F. Burghardt of the NSC staff, and a notation from Poindexter; a October 30, 1985 memo to McFarlane from North with a notation by Poindexter indicating President Reagan's approval of reconnaissance overflights of Nicaragua, with attachments concerning the air-drop of recoilless rifles to the contras; a February 22, 1985 memo to McFarlane from Burghardt seeking authorization to carry a presidential letter to U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte in Honduras to be transmitted to President Suazo; a February 11, 1985 memo to McFarlane from North and Burghardt regarding a special emissary to Honduras to brief President Suazo on ``conditions'' for expedited assistance, with a handwritten notation from Poindexter to McFarlane regarding who the emissary should be, and attaching a memo to Secretary of State George P. Schultz, Weinberger, Casey and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John W. Vessey describing an agreement for expedited aid to Honduras ``as an incentive to the Hondurans for their continued support to those in jeopardy along the border;'' and an April 25, 1985 memo from McFarlane recommending that President Reagan call President Suazo, bearing President Reagan's handwritten notations of the call.

...more...

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_02.htm

[redqueen]

14. Anyone who ignores his background is complicit.

Who in Congress is willing to make a stink about this?

Does anyone have the courage?

[JohnnyBoots]

17. That's the million dollar question......

[UpInArms]

16. kick

:kick: back to the top

[hue]

18. More about Negroponte (LA Times 2001)

Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch/Americas, called Negroponte "the ostrich ambassador. He never saw anything wrong. He never heard about any serious human rights violations. It was like he was living in a different country."

Activists such as Honduran Human Rights Commissioner Leo Valladares have been pursuing the truth since the late 1980s, making hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents. The U.S. government has released thousands of pages to him and other petitioners over the years, but the documents are heavily redacted, blacked-out page after blacked-out page.

"They gave me thousands of pages, but they didn't give me anything," Valladares said. "I trust the U.S. Senate to look at the original documents. Perhaps they will help determine if there are other American citizens who can perform better than Negroponte because they don't have a past of knowing about human rights violations and keeping silent about them."

If questions remain, there is one person who could know the answers: Gen. Discua Elvir, a founder of Battalion 3-16. Honduran President Carlos Roberto Reina sent Discua to the U.N. in 1996, in part to give the general diplomatic immunity from investigations into the battalion's past--and in part to protect himself from a feared military coup.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0325-03.htm

[DeepModem Mom]

19. Thanks, hue! nt

[Placebo]

20. bump

[hue]

21. Looks like Negroponte will be confirmed!

From watching the news today it looks like he's got the support he needs!

[enough]

22. kick