Now Bush's Stalinesque KGB is in place. Negroponte, who has an "iffy" relationship with truth and human rights, might be the very one AG Gonzales and Bush had been waiting for: a man without conscience who wouldn't (perhaps) hesitate to make even Americans "disappear." Sen. Frist (GOP Senate Majority Leader) seemed to lay some ground work by advocating that conspiracy theory (actually dissenters) be labeled as "mentally ill." It boggles the mind to watch the president appoint some of the most sociopathic. criminal members of society to high ranking "security" posts. At the risk of disappearing into a Negroponte sanctioned gulag, I have to ask: was that the plan all along? -- Claudia
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
John Negroponte: See No Evil
Death Squad Cover-up/February 17, 2005
By Eric Alterman
Back in January 1982, the Reagan administration was desperate to cover-up evidence of a horrific massacre undertaken by U.S. supported military forces in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote in the province of Morazan, whom the U.S. was funding and training. The massacre was reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post by Raymond Bonner, and Alma Guillermoprieto, respectively, along with Susan Meiselas. As the reports appeared on the eve of Congressional hearings on funding for the Salvadoran killers, administration officials, like Elliott Abrams, sought to discredit the reports with McCarthyite accusations, and were supported by their allies in the conservative punditocracy—which, was 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, journalistically, by reporter Mark Danner. What follows is drawn from When Presidents Lie:
Bonner, Guillermoprieto, and Susan Meiselas returned and presented their evidence to readers, State Department officials received a confidential cable from U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte reporting on a visit by a U.S. embassy official and a House Foreign Affairs Committee staff member to a Colomoncagua 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. Enders now bragged of “many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting than last,” a trend he attributed to the fact that “many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.” Like its predecessor, the second certification resulted in a noisy hearing, but a solid majority backed the Reagan administration’s aid to the regime. This time military aid was more than doubled, from $35 million to $82 million, and economic aid increased to more than twice that amount.83 In 1993, Enders finally admitted to a reporter, “I now know that the materials that we and the embassy passed on to Congress were wrong.” It took a decade’s passing and the Salvadorans themselves to determine, definitively, what took place in El Mozote.
In the fall of 1992, investigators for the postwar Salvadoran Truth Commission spent more than thirty-five days digging through the burial sites filled with decomposed bodies, bones, skulls, and bullet cartridges. They identified more than five hundred human remains in El Mozote and its surrounding villages.85 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. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy.86 When all the forensics had been uncovered, the commission revealed at least twentyfour people had participated in the shooting and that every cartridge but one had come from a U.S.-manufactured and -supplied M-16 rifle.Of these, “had discernible head-stamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri.”87 No one has ever been officially charged or tried for any crimes associated with the actions taken in El Mozote, which were deemed by Danner to be “the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.” {Negroponte never said a thing in public.]
MORE ON NEGROPONTE HERE: http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=263
The Unintelligent Choice
At 10AM this morning, President Bush will name John Negroponte as the new Director of Intelligence for the United States.
Who is John Negroponte?
You may remember him best as one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. John Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. While there, he was directed the secret arming of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to help them overthrow the Sandinista government.
At the time, he also was “cozy” with the chief of the Honduran national police force, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. Martinez ran the infamous Battalion 316 death squad. Battalion 316 “kidnapped, tortured and murdered” dozens of people while Negroponte was ambassador. Negroponte, however, turned a blind eye to the death squad and ignored the gross human rights abuses so Honduras would allow bases for U.S.-backed Contras.
Negroponte maintained he knew nothing about them, leading to his nickname, “the ostrich ambassador.” The abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide
Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson
"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson
