Bush Nominates Iran-Contra Coke Smuggler and Honduran Death Dealer, John Negroponte t
Bush Nominates Iran-Contra Coke Smuggler and Honduran Death Dealer, John Negroponte t
Iran-Contra traitor and Iraq war engineer, John Negroponte. Before he was the American ambassador to the U.N. from 2001 to 2004 and top official in Iraq for much of the past year, he served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. It was there that Negroponte -- if a wealth of well-corroborated and documented evidence is to be believed -- covered up a pattern of gross human rights abuses by the country's CIA-trained forces. Under Negroponte's direction, military aid to Honduras rose dramatically, from less than $4 million to $77.4 million. To keep the aid flowing, the American embassy in Tegucigalpa needed to reassure Congress annually that Honduras was not a gross human rights violator. This he did. Negroponte's 1983 report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, argued that the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature" and that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras."
The snow job worked, and under Negroponte's watch "U.S. military aid [for Honduras] jumped from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. But in truth, as Sarah Wildman reported in The New Republic, the Honduran army, especially the U.S.-trained Battalion 316, engaged in widespread human rights abuses, including kidnapping, torture and assassination. Negroponte worked closely with the perpetrators and covered up their crimes, according to Ambassador Jack Binns, his predecessor." Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has noted that neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times mentioned Negroponte's connection to Battalion 316 in the months between Negroponte's being nominated as U.N. ambassador and his confirmation in 2001.
Likewise, the story of Battalion 316 was conspicuously absent from press coverage of Negroponte's nomination last week, with only a few stories casting a sufficiently critical eye on Negroponte's past. Despite the investigative firepower of major news outlets such as CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post, it was up to the AP to file the only story to fully take into account the outrage expressed across Central America over Negroponte's nomination.
Mainstream media coverage also largely ignored Negroponte's role in helping to cover up a horrific massacre conducted by U.S.-supported death squads in El Salvador in the town of El Mozote in the province of Morazan. The massacre was reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the eve of Congressional hearings on funding for the Salvadoran military, whose elite forces had carried out the massacre. Top Reagan officials, including most particularly Elliott Abrams, sought to discredit the reports with McCarthyite accusations, and were supported by their allies in the conservative punditocracy?which was then just a fraction of its current size and scope. They succeeded and the funding went through, in part due to the cooperation of then-Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte. The gruesome details of the massacre were later excavated by a Salvadoran truth commission, and reported on by the New Yorker's Mark Danner, with the dead numbering over 500 civilians. (Of the 143 human remains discovered in the sacristy of the Mozote church, 136 were judged to be children or adolescents, of whom the average age was six.)
During the controversy, State Department officials received a confidential cable from
Negroponte reporting on a visit by a U.S. embassy official and a House Foreign Affairs Committee staff member to a refugee camp, where many of the survivors of Morazan had fled. The cable described the refugees' account of "a military sweep in Morazan December 7 to 17 which they claim resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties and physical destruction, leading to their exodus." Negroponte himself noted that the "names of villages cited coincide with New York Times article of January 28 same subject." He noted that the refugees' "decision to flee at this time when in the past they had remained during the sweeps ... lends credibility to reportedly greater magnitude and intensity of ... military operations in Northern Morazan." The State Department, however, decided to keep this information secret. By the time of the second certification report?which appeared six months later, in July 1982?the massacre reports were ancient history.
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I can't tell you how I know this dick head, but when I saw this, I had a really bad day, or 5. :sadwave:
