Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq
Iraqi ambassador pick grilled on hand-over
By Steven Weisman
The New York Times
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for ambassador to Iraq on Tuesday defended the limits that would be placed on Iraqi self-rule, particularly those on control over security forces, asserting that after June 30 Iraqis will have "a lot more sovereignty than they have right now."
Facing skeptical questions about the new constraints emerging in the long-planned transfer of power before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nominee, John Negroponte, said he saw his major challenge as trying to avert conflicts if the new Iraqi government objected to U.S. military actions. "These are the kinds of questions that I think our diplomacy is going to have to deal with," said Negroponte, who is now ambassador to the United Nations.
The toughest questions came from Democrats, but all the senators said they would support Negroponte's confirmation, which the committee could approve on Thursday. Senate aides said Negroponte could be confirmed by the full Senate as early as next week.
Negroponte said that any decisions on whether to attack rebel strongholds, as the United States is threatening now in Fallujah and Najaf, would require "great political sensitivity" even though American s will nominally be in charge of such decisions.
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04282004/nation_w/161439... Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq
Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointmen
As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.
Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.
As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.
A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/040428.html Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq
Negroponte's "embassy" in Baghdad will, according to press reports, constitute the largest US "embassy staff" in the world with some 3000 employees, including up to 1,000 Americans.
Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military.
Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html In a cruel irony, the Bush administration has appointed a bona fide "terrorist" to wage its "war on terrorism" in Iraq.
It should come as no surprise that "on the day he was appointed to Iraq, Honduras decided to bring its troops in Iraq home." (Financial Times, April 21, 2004)
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2... Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors
On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's." This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.
Reich, unlike Negroponte, is primarily a lobbyist and anti-Castro activist rather than a diplomat. He is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba and works for some of America's favorite industries: liquor (Bacardi), tobacco (British-American Tobacco), and weapons (Lockheed Martin). He also serves as vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry-backed group characterized by union activists as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.
In the 1980s, he headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit, staffed with CIA and Pentagon psychological warfare specialists, reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to win support for administration policy in Central America. They wrote op-eds under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders and attacked those who differed with Reagan's policies. The Congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal identified numerous illegalities which led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.
Reich followed up these activities by serving as ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination.
While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Ironically, he will be overseeing the Helms-Burton Act, which he helped to draft, which the administration has just decided not to carry into effect.
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?
The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?
Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04178.ht... US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
October 28, 2003
By TONI SOLO
US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4
In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.
Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.
Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.
Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.
Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/solo10282003.html Minstrel Boy
Ambassador of Death & Drug Smuggling: George Bush's Plan for Iraq
There's some interesting stuff here, to be read in context of Sibel Edmonds', and others, fingering a nexus of drug-trafficking, gun-running and and money-laundering behind 9/11.
Ambassador of Death, Right-Wing Death Squads, Drug Smuggling: George Bush's Plan for Iraq.
by Glen Yeadon
June 22
...
Just as the Iran-Contra scandal evolved to include drug smuggling, the Iraq War also is closely related to drug smuggling. While the Bush regime has so far managed to keep the drug smuggling aspects of the war from reaching the media, evidence is beginning to emerge. The evidence comes largely from a former FBI translator turned whistle-blower, Sibel Edmonds. Hired to translate intercepted messages soon after 9/11 this Turkish lady first blew the whistle on the FBI for dragging its feet. She has state emphatically that she has seen documents that prove the Bush administration was fully aware of the terrorist attack before 9/11. While Attorney General John Aschroft has imposed a gag order on her, this courageous lady has only been able to speak in generalized terms. However, she has repeatedly stated that when viewed as an international drug smuggling operation the picture becomes clear.
Sibel Edmonds has provided a huge clue in her generalized statements, a clue that points directly at the Bush family and Dick Cheney. Haliburton the oil services company formerly headed by Cheney has a long history of involvement in drug smuggling and gunrunning especially through its Brown and Root subsidiary. Brown and Root also has a long history of providing cover for CIA agents. In the late 1970s Brown and Root was implicated in drug smuggling and gunrunning from oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico built by Brown and Root and using ships owned by Brown and Root. In the 1990s Brown and Root was implicated in smuggling heroin to Europe through Russia. The heroin originated in Laos.
...
Right wing death squads and a hub for drug smuggling is Bush's vision of democracy in Iraq all orchestrated by the ambassador of death, Negroponte. The old Iran Contra gang are all in place once again ready to flood the streets of America and Europe with cheap heroin from Afghanistan. The Bush administration's reluctance to hand Saddam over to the interim government of Iraq maybe based not on a fear of Saddam's military capabilities but on a fear of him telling what he knows about drug smuggling. Saddam may have been removed for the same reason George the elder removed Noriega from Panama because of his demands of a too large of a cut in the cocaine traffic coming from Columbia.
Meanwhile Americans are dying in Iraq for what maybe no more than the greedy aspirations of the Bush drug smuggling family. For this reason the gag on Sibel Edwards must be lifted so she can speak freely and directly to the American people.
http://madiaq.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/8008.php Negroponte will now be free to set up right-wing death squads in Iraq and will be helped by some of the worst thugs that South America has to offer. Blackwater USA, a military contractor has hired mercenaries from Chile for security duty in Iraq. Blackwater began recruiting in Chile in the fall of 2003 and the first group consisted mostly of former Chilean military members trained under the fascist regime of Pinochet. The military under Pinochet was responsible for torturing and murdering thousands of citizens during his regime.
Just as the Iran-Contra scandal evolved to include drug smuggling, the Iraq War also is closely related to drug smuggling. While the Bush regime has so far managed to keep the drug smuggling aspects of the war from reaching the media, evidence is beginning to emerge. The evidence comes largely from a former FBI translator turned whistle-blower, Sibel Edmonds. Hired to translate intercepted messages soon after 9/11 this Turkish lady first blew the whistle on the FBI for dragging its feet. She has state emphatically that she has seen documents that prove the Bush administration was fully aware of the terrorist attack before 9/11. While Attorney General John Aschroft has imposed a gag order on her, this courageous lady has only been able to speak in generalized terms. However, she has repeatedly stated that when viewed as an international drug smuggling operation the picture becomes clear.
Sibel Edmonds has provided a huge clue in her generalized statements, a clue that points directly at the Bush family and Dick Cheney. Haliburton the oil services company formerly headed by Cheney has a long history of involvement in drug smuggling and gunrunning especially through its Brown and Root subsidiary. Brown and Root also has a long history of providing cover for CIA agents. In the late 1970s Brown and Root was implicated in drug smuggling and gunrunning from oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico built by Brown and Root and using ships owned by Brown and Root. In the 1990s Brown and Root was implicated in smuggling heroin to Europe through Russia. The heroin originated in Laos.
The Russian incident surfaced in 1995 after thieves stole sacks of heroin concealed as sugar from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo. Authorities were alerted to the problem after residents of Khabarovsk, a Siberian city became intoxicated from consuming the heroin. Alfa Echo is part of the Russian Alfa group of companies controlled by Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven. The FSB, the Russian equivalent of the FBI firmly proved a solid link between Alfa Tyumen and drug smuggling. The drug smuggling route was further exposed after the Ministry of Internal Affairs raided Alfa Eko buildings and found drugs and other compromising documentation. Under Cheney's leadership of Haliburton, Brown and Root received a taxpayer insured loan through the Export-Import Bank of $292 million dollars for Brown and Root to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by Alfa Tyumen. The Alfa Bank is also implicated in money laundering for the Colombian cocaine cartels.
This convoluted route from Laos to Europe through Russian was quickly set up after George Bush sent Richard Armitage as his special envoy to Russian in 1989 allegedly to help with economic development. Due to the internal strife inside Russia Armitage had to work out the bottlenecks to fix this route. Armitage a retired Associate Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA has repeatedly been link to drug smuggling from Southeast Asia.
Aschroft's gagging of Sibel Edwards becomes even clearer when George W's 2000 election campaign is examined. Alfa Tyumen's lead Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. coordinated a $2.2 million fund-raiser for Bush in June 2000 and agreed to recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign.
Moreover, the drug smuggling elements extend beyond Iraq. The Russian discovery of the drug route may have been the precipitating reason for starting the Kosovo War. The only reason George Bush, the father established the route through Russia was the instability in Yugoslavia. With the Russia discovery of the route a new route had to be established even if it took a war to do so. As a major military contractor Brown and Root was well positioned in Kosovo to assure itself a part of the profit in drug smuggling.
Indeed the Iraq War may well have been do to Saddam demanding too high of a kickback for smuggling opium from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Under the Taliban growing poppies was suppressed severely, but since George W. invaded Afghanistan and displaced the Taliban the poppy fields are once again in bloom.
Right wing death squads and a hub for drug smuggling is Bush's vision of democracy in Iraq all orchestrated by the ambassador of death, Negroponte. The old Iran Contra gang are all in place once again ready to flood the streets of America and Europe with cheap heroin from Afghanistan. The Bush administration's reluctance to hand Saddam over to the interim government of Iraq maybe based not on a fear of Saddam's military capabilities but on a fear of him telling what he knows about drug smuggling. Saddam may have been removed for the same reason George the elder removed Noriega from Panama because of his demands of a too large of a cut in the cocaine traffic coming from Columbia.
more
http://chile.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/21132.php Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict
Edwin Black
September 2004
New York Times and international bestselling author Edwin Black uncovers Iraq’s hidden economy and the companies that profit from its upheaval
Big business and global warfare have long been fiery and symbiotic forces in Iraq. Banking on Baghdad tells the dramatic and tragic history of a land long the center of world commerce–and documents the many ways Iraq’s recent history mirrors its tumultuous past. Tracing the involvement
of Western governments and militaries, as well as oil, banking, and other corporate interests in Iraq, Black shows that today, just as yesterday, the world needs Iraq’s resources–and is always willing to fight and invade in order to acquire and protect them.
While demonstrating that Iraq itself is partially to blame for its current state of turmoil, Black does not shy away from the uncomfortable truth that war and profit have also played an equal part in creating the Iraq we know today. Just as he did in IBM and the Holocaust, Black exposes the hidden associations between leading corporations, war, and oil–such as the astonishing connections between Nazi Germany, Iraq, and the Holocaust.
He exposes the war and race-based profiteering by some of the world’s most prestigious corporations, as well as the political and economic ties between the Bush administration and the companies that gain handsomely from its foreign policy. Just as he did in War Against the Weak, Black offers a compelling blend of history and contemporary investigative journalism that spans a century and eschews easy answers for complicated questions.
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http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471... 
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