Though Washington insiders expect Negroponte’s
nomination to sail through the Senate, one question that might be worth
asking about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s is:
“Were you oblivious to the Honduran military’s human rights violations
and drug trafficking, or did you just ignore these problems for
geopolitical reasons?”
It seems that Negroponte either oversaw a
stunningly inept U.S. intelligence operation at the embassy in
Tegucigalpa – missing major events occurring almost under his nose – or
he is someone ready to tolerate atrocities – including torture, rape and
murder – while slanting intelligence reporting to please his superiors
in Washington.
Whichever it is – incompetence or complicity – it
is hard to understand how Negroponte, the current U.S. ambassador to
Iraq, can be expected to fix the intelligence flaws revealed by the Bush
administration’s failure to connect the dots before the Sept. 11, 2001,
terror attacks or to avert the scandalous use of torture on Muslim
suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bipartisan Praise
Despite the bipartisan praise Negroponte’s
nomination is eliciting, a clear-eyed look at his record would suggest
that the Bush administration intends to continue making two demands on
the U.S. intelligence community: that analysts wear rose-colored glasses
when assessing U.S. policies and that field operatives turn a blind eye
to atrocities when committed by U.S. clients or American interrogators.
Given the human rights records of the Honduran
military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras in the
early 1980s, Negroponte will have no moral standing as a public official
who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal
counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that's one
of the reasons Bush picked him.
Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he
will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate
intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have
upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration during the
first half of the 1980s.
For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has
staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran
military in the 1980s.
In another move helpful to the Honduran military
and the contras in the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down
a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office at the U.S. Embassy in
Tegucigalpa just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for
cocaine transshipments to the United States.
“Elements of the Honduran military were
involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,”
according a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in
1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry. “These activities were
reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period.
Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by
stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign
assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever,
the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to
have ignored the issue.”
While it’s unclear what role Negroponte played
in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S.
ambassador from 1981 to 1985, it’s hard to imagine that a step of that
significance could have occurred without at least the acquiescence of
the ambassador.
Negroponte’s ambassadorship also coincided
with the evolution of the Nicaraguan contra forces from a small band
under the tutelage of Argentine intelligence officers into an irregular
army supported by the CIA and later by a secret operation inside the
White House run by National Security Council aide Oliver North.
Secret Documents
Despite several investigations into what
became known as the Iran-Contra scandal in 1980s, many documents about
Negroponte’s involvement remained classified, outside public knowledge.
Some of that information bubbled to the surface in September 2001 when
Negroponte was facing confirmation to be Bush’s ambassador to the United
Nations.
In a Senate floor speech before Negroponte won
confirmation, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said, “The picture that
emerges in analyzing this new information is a troubling one.”
Summarizing the new documents from the State
Department and CIA, Dodd said the evidence pointed to the fact that from
1980 to 1984, the Honduran military committed most of the country’s
hundreds of human rights abuses.
Some Honduran military units, trained by the
United States, were implicated in “death squad” operations that employed
counter-terrorist tactics, including torture, rape and assassinations
against people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas in El Salvador
or leftist movements in Honduras, the documents showed.
Dodd criticized Negroponte’s earlier Senate
testimony when the ambassador had responded to questions about one of
these units, Battalion 316. “I have never seen any convincing
substantiation that they were involved in death squad-type activities,”
Negroponte said.
“Given what we know about the extent and
nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was
less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being
generous,” Dodd said.
“I was also troubled by Ambassador
Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that – as a consequence of other
U.S. policy priorities – the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed]
up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights
abuses in the 1980s,” Dodd said.
“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had
no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during
its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras”
in 1987, Dodd said. “The Court found that ‘a practice of disappearances
carried out or tolerated by Honduran officials existed between 1981-84.’
…
“Based upon an extensive review of U.S.
intelligence information by the CIA Working Group in 1996, the CIA is
prepared to stipulate that ‘during the 1980-84 period, the Honduran
military committed most of the hundreds of human rights abuses reported
in Honduras. These abuses were often politically motivated and
officially sanctioned.’” [See the
Congressional Record, Sept. 14, 2001]
Dropped Objections
However, when Bush nominated Negroponte to be
ambassador to Iraq in 2004, Dodd and other Democrats largely dropped
their objections. The National Catholic Reporter, which had covered the
right-wing persecution of Catholic clergy in Central America during the
1980s, was one of the few publications still questioning Negroponte’s
fitness.
In an April 2004 article, the magazine
recalled a statement from Society of Helpers Sister Laetitia Bordes, who
had gone to Honduras and approached Negroponte about the
“disappearances” of 32 women who had fled rightist death squads in El
Salvador after the assassination of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero in
1980.
Later, these women, including one who had been
Romero’s secretary, “were forcibly taken from their living quarters in
Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared,” Sister Laetitia Bordes
said. “John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. …
Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He
insisted that the U.S. embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the
Honduran government.”
The National Catholic
Reporter noted that “years later, the Baltimore Sun would reveal that
Negroponte apparently knew more than he was letting on. In fact, charge
his many critics, the ambassador oversaw an exponential increase in
military aid to the Honduran army, deceptively downplayed human rights
violations, and played a key role in supporting the activities of
Battalion 316, a CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency
unit subsequently found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.” [National
Catholic Reporter, April 24, 2004]
Many congressional Democrats, as well as
Republicans, now consider those two-decade-old concerns about Central
America to be stale and irrelevant to Negroponte’s nomination as the
nation’s first National Intelligence Director. But the questions may
have new bearing not just on Negroponte’s moral judgments, but on his
capacity to assess information and to ensure that political pressures
don’t influence intelligence reporting.
As the first person chosen to hold this post –
with oversight responsibility for all U.S. intelligence activities –
Negroponte might be legitimately expected to represent something other
than tolerance of death squads and politicization of intelligence
information.