Promoting the 'Ambassador of Torture': Bush Nominates Negroponte for Intel Czar

[Guest guest]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/18/157206

 

 

Friday, February 18th, 2005

Promoting the 'Ambassador of Torture': Bush Nominates Negroponte for

Intel Czar

 

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3

Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript

Help Printer-friendly version Email to a friend

Purchase Video/CD

 

 

As President Bush nominates Ambassador John Negroponte, current U.S.

ambassador to Iraq, as the first Director of National Intelligence, we

look back at Negroponte's bloody history in Central America in the

1980s. [includes rush transcript] President Bush has nominated John

Negroponte - the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq - as the country's

first director of national intelligence. Bush made the surprise

announcement at a news conference yesterday in Washington.

 

* President Bush, news conference, February, 18, 2005.

 

John Negroponte will have daily access to Bush as his primary

intelligence briefer and would have authority over the budgets of the

15 U.S. intelligence agencies. He also will have the authority to

order the collection of new intelligence and information sharing

between agencies.

 

Creating the new top intelligence position was a central

recommendation of the 9/11 commission. It was included in an

intelligence overhaul bill that Bush signed into law in December.

 

Negroponte has been ambassador to Baghdad for less than a year.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said he was concerned " about

the message we are sending to Iraq and the rest of the world " by

removing Negroponte from Baghdad so soon after he took office in June.

 

Negroponte served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from

2001 to 2004. But it is his time as ambassador to Honduras from 1981

to 1985 that earned him a reputation for supporting widespread human

rights abuses and campaigns of terror.

 

He played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contras who

targeted civilians in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death

squad in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to

Honduras skyrocketed from 3.9 million dollars to over 77 million. Much

of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle

against popular movements throughout Central America.

 

The Senate must confirm Negroponte to the new post of national

intelligence director. In his confirmation hearings as UN ambassador

in (2001) two-thousand-one, he was asked whether he had supported

human rights abuses by death squads, which were funded and partly

trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. Negroponte testified that

he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran

government policy. He said, " To this day I do not believe that death

squads were operating in Honduras. "

 

* Peter Kornbluh, author of " The Pinochet File: A Declassified

Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. " He is a senior analyst at the

National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in

Washington.

* Sister Laetitia Bordes, Catholic nun with the Society of

Helpers, a Catholic community of women. She is talking to us from San

Bruno California.

* Andrés Thomas Conteris, program director for Latin America and

the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-Violence International.

He is Co-Producer of " Hidden in Plain Sight " He has promoted human

rights throughout Latin America for 25 years.

 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

 

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us

provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV

broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

 

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush has nominated John Negroponte, the current

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, as the country's first Director of National

Intelligence. Bush made the surprise announcement at a news conference

yesterday in Washington.

 

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm pleased to announce my decision to

nominate Ambassador John Negroponte as Director of National

Intelligence. The Director's responsibility is straightforward and

demanding. John will make sure that those whose duty it is to defend

America have the information we need to make the right decisions. John

understands America's global intelligence needs because he spent the

better part of his life in our foreign service and is now serving with

distinction in the sensitive post of our nation's first ambassador to

a free Iraq. John's nomination comes in an historic moment for our

intelligence services. In the war against terrorists who target

innocent civilians and continue to seek weapons of mass murder,

intelligence is our first line of defense. If we're going to stop the

terrorists before they strike, we must insure that our intelligence

agencies work as a single, unified enterprise. That's why I supported

and Congress passed reform legislation creating the job of Director of

National Intelligence.

 

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush speaking in Washington on Thursday. John

Negroponte will have daily access to Bush as his primary intelligence

briefer. He would have authority over the budgets of the 15 U.S.

intelligence agencies. He will also have the authority to order the

collection of new intelligence and information sharing between

agencies. Creating the new top intelligence position was a central

recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. It was included in an

intelligence overhaul bill that Bush signed into law in December.

Negroponte has been Ambassador to Baghdad for less than a year.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said he's concerned, quote,

" about the message we're sending to Iraq and the rest of the world by

removing Negroponte from Baghdad so soon after he took office in

June. " Negroponte served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. from 2001 to

2004, but it's his time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985

that earned him a reputation for supporting widespread human rights

abuses and campaigns of terror. Negroponte played a key role in

coordinating U.S. covert aid to the Contras who targeted civilians in

Nicaragua and shored up a C.I.A.-backed death squad in Honduras.

During Negroponte's tenure, U.S. military aid to Honduras skyrocketed

from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to insure the

Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements

throughout Central America. The Senate must confirm Negroponte to the

new post of National Intelligence Director. In his confirmation

hearings as U.N. Ambassador in 2001, he was asked whether he had

supported human rights abuses by death squads which were funded and

partly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. Negroponte

testified he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate

Honduran government policy. He said, quote, " To this day, I do not

believe the death squads were operating in Honduras. " To talk about

Negroponte's record as the Ambassador to Honduras, we're joined by two

guests. Sister Laetitia Bordes is a Catholic nun with the Society of

Helpers, a Catholic community of women. She's talking to us from San

Bruno, California. And on the line with us from Washington, we're

joined by Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security

Archive, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on

Atrocity and Accountability. Peter Kornbluh, I want to begin with you.

Can you lay out John Negroponte's record in the early 1980s?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: He was the pro-counsel. He essentially ran Honduras as

the Reagan administration changed it from a small Central American

country into a territorial battleship, if you will, to fight the

Contra war and overthrow the Sandinista government. He was really the

head person in charge of this whole operation, which became a massive

paramilitary war in the early 1980s.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Battalion 316? What was its role in

Honduras, and what did the U.S. government have to do with it?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: Battalion 316 was the Honduran military special forces

elite unit. It certainly became a death squad, contrary to what

Negroponte said. He must have been well aware that the C.I.A. was

working extremely closely with this particular unit, and the U.S.

special forces were providing extraordinary aid to this particular

unit. The Human Rights Ombudsman in Honduras, Leo Valladares, did a

major investigation of the atrocities of this unit and concluded it

was mostly responsible for the murders of up to 184 people, one of

them an American priest working in Honduras, Father Carney. And the

C.I.A. worked very closely with this unit, both to fight the left in

Honduras, and to sustain the Contra war. I should say that we have

many declassified documents from the Iran-Contra scandal, which do

show Negroponte's kind of odd role. He stepped out of being U.S.

Ambassador and kind of put on the hat of a C.I.A. station chief in

pushing for the Contras to get more arms, in lobbying and meeting with

very high Honduran officials to facilitate U.S. support for the

Contras and Honduran cooperation, even after the U.S. Congress

terminated official support for the Contra war.

 

AMY GOODMAN: I was just watching the Senate Intelligence -- head of

the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts. He was being asked

about the confirmation hearings for John Negroponte and asked if he

has enough intelligence background. He has diplomatic background, and

he said, no, he has both, because as ambassador, he is in charge of

the C.I.A. station chief, and so he always knows what's going on

around intelligence in his embassy. Of course, I think he was talking

about very much Iraq, but what about what Negroponte knew and when he

knew it in Honduras?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, you know, the interesting thing, Amy, is that

throughout the years, Ambassadors and the State Department have

complained that the C.I.A. has been the stronger force in these

smaller countries particularly where major covert operations are going

on, and that the Embassy head, the Ambassador, essentially gets cut

out of the loop. But in the case of Honduras, it was just the reverse.

In fact, the Ambassador was a major player not just in receiving

information from the C.I.A. station, but in really being the mover and

shaker on C.I.A. covert operations there. So, he was very much in the

loop even though those are not the, I think, the official duties. He

was in the loop and he was active in running this paramilitary war. I

would say that his strongest qualifications for this post were the

unofficial duties that he had as Ambassador in Honduras.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, and then when we come back, we'll

continue speaking with Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security

Archives. We'll also speak with Laetitia Bordes, the nun who met with

John Negroponte when he was Ambassador to Honduras in 1982 about the

fate of dozens of nuns who had gone to Honduras.

 

[break]

 

AMY GOODMAN: We continue to look at the early record of John

Negroponte, who has been nominated by President Bush to one of the

highest posts of the land. It's new. It's Director of National

Intelligence. We're looking at his record as Ambassador to Honduras

from 1981 to 1985. Our guests are Peter Kornbluh of the National

Security Archives, and Laetitia Bordes, an American nun, who met John

Negroponte in 1982. Can you talk about why you went to Honduras,

Sister Laetitia Bordes?

 

SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: Yes, I went to Honduras in May of 1982 on a

fact-finding delegation. As you know, Archbishop Romero had been

assassinated in El Salvador in 1980, and there were quite a few

members of Christian-based communities who were being picked up and

disappearing in El Salvador. So, a group of 32 women -- by the way,

these were not nuns. They were lay women, but they were members of

Christian-based communities who had been followers of Archbishop

Romero, had gone to Honduras to seek refuge from the repression that

was taking place in El Salvador at that time. These 32 women -- also

included were four children, by the way, in that group -- disappeared

in Honduras, and there were witnesses to their disappearance. Vans

pulled up in front of the safe house where they were staying, and they

were taken and never heard from again. And so, this was -- this

happened in April of 1981, and I went to Honduras in May of 1982 and

met with John Negroponte to find out what had happened to these 32

women. And John Negroponte said very clearly that the embassy in El

Salvador did not know what happened to those women, that we would need

to talk to the Honduran government to find out about their fate. We

went back. We did speak with the Honduran government. We had meetings

there, and they referred us very clearly to our American embassy and

sent us back to the American embassy and told us we would need to go

through them to find out what had happened to the women. We had two

meetings with John Negroponte. The first, and then we went to the

Honduran government, and then returned to John Negroponte with the

information that we had been given from the Honduran government, and

again, he denied clearly the whereabouts of these women. He was very

specific in saying that the embassy in Honduras did not interfere in

Honduran affairs. That was very, very clear. At the same time, we were

talking to different people in Honduras, and it was clear from the

people with whom we spoke that John Negroponte was working closely

with General Alvarez, who was Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras at

that time. And he was facilitating, really, the training of Honduran

soldiers and psychological warfare and sabotage, and many types of

human rights violations. And by the way, the co-founder -- the founder

and commander of battalion 316, who was General Discua, had been

trained at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, which is very

interesting. So, we see the close connections that there was there

between what was going on in Honduras and the American government.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Sister Laetitia Bordes, speaking of the School of

the Americas, we have just been joined on the telephone by Andres

Contreris. He is joining us from Chile right now. He is co director of

the film, Hidden In Plain Sight, which is about the School of the

Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia. He is also the person who, when John

Negroponte was going through his confirmation hearings as U.S.

Ambassador to Iraq, stood up in the hearing room and protested. We

welcome you to Democracy Now! Thanks for joining us Andres.

 

ANDRES CONTRERIS: Amy it's really good to be with you, and I'm glad

that you're really focusing on this very, very important issue. I not

only disrupted Negroponte last year in April, but also in September of

2001 when he was having his hearing to become Ambassador to the United

Nations. The reason that I stood up on both of those occasions is

because I was trying to be a voice for the voiceless in Honduras. The

sister of Manfredo Velazquez whose name is Venaida Velazquez, she was

the founder of the Committee of the Family Members of the Disappeared

in Honduras. She asked me to go to the hearing when Negroponte was to

be confirmed to be Ambassador to the United Nations, and to be a

presence there on his behalf. I did not plan to do anything at that

time, but when Negroponte said in sworn testimony that he had never

even heard of Battalion 316 until years after he left the post in

Honduras, I couldn't believe this incredible lie that he was

committing, which is a crime, and I decided to risk arrest by standing

up and telling him that the people of Honduras consider him to be a

state terrorist. This was two days after September 11. I was whisked

out of the room at that time. Then last year in April, when he was

being -- in the hearing to be confirmed to be Ambassador to Iraq, I

also returned at that time because it just seems incredible that this

man, who we consider to be a promoter of torture, knowing that that's

what was going on in Honduras and Central America, this is the man who

just before the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking -- he was being -- he

was under testimony then in the Senate, and he clearly went to Iraq

having had the experience of covering up U.S. involvement in torture

in Central America. So, this is a state terrorist that needs to be

confronted. He needs to be accused of war crimes. He needs to be taken

to trial.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive, can you

elaborate on what Andres is saying?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: I think Andres is absolutely correct that John

Negroponte misled the Senate in his confirmation hearings about his

knowledge of Battalion 316 about his knowledge of death squad

activity. The C.I.A. did report to him on various atrocities that took

place. There is some evidence in partially declassified C.I.A.

Inspector General's report about the Battalion and its atrocities and

about the reporting out of the embassy by both the C.I.A. officers and

diplomatic attaches there that seems to imply that Negroponte

preferred not to see honest, hard reporting going back to Washington

on atrocities being committed by our very strong allies in Honduras.

People have to remember, and certainly your listeners remember better

than anybody, that they -- your audience and many others in this

country -- made Reagan's policy in Central America controversial and

managed to get Congress -- push Congress to cut off aid to the

Contras. So, any negative reporting on our main allies' activities in

Honduras would have given further ammunition to the critics of

Negroponte's policies, Reagan's policies, et cetera. That's why there

are strong indications that he squashed this reporting. He certainly

was critical to the Contra war effort. What he had told the sister

about not interfering in Honduran affairs is quite frankly laughable,

because he was named essentially the Proconsul. He essentially was a

fallback to the age of gunboat diplomacy when the U.S. Ambassador ran

a Central American country. In the early 1980's, he was in that

position in Honduras. I'm holding a declassified White House document

which is from 1983, and it's a memo to the President of the United

States, Ronald Reagan. It begins, " Ambassador Negroponte, in

Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has recommended that we increase the number of

weapons issued to the F.D.N. forces. " The F.D.N., of course, was the

leading contra force and the one most strongly associated with massive

human rights violations of civilians in Nicaragua. And in his memo,

Negroponte has apparently recommended that the United States send

3,000 additional rifles to the F.D.N. forces, and his recommendation

is approved by the President. There are two little R.R.'s, Ronald

Reagan, and a yes box under the recommendation in his options memo.

So, you get a sense from these declassified records of how important

Negroponte was and the type of odd role he played, stepping out of his

position as ambassador, a diplomat, and essentially putting on the hat

of the C.I.A. station chief and pushing forward the Contra war.

 

AMY GOODMAN: When you heard, Peter Kornbluh, that John Negroponte had

been promoted yet again from U.N. Ambassador to Iraq Ambassador and

now to become the Director of National Intelligence, what was your

reaction?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, part of it is that this President, George Bush,

has resurrected many of the Iran-Contra criminals, if you will, or

people who certainly tarnished their own careers and the image of the

United States by their activities in the Iran-Contra operations. John

Negroponte was certainly one of them. You know, I -- I thought that

this was not the person that the 9/11 commission had in mind when they

wrote for the need -- described the need for us to reconfigure our

intelligence committee and have a very, very forceful person at the

top. John Negroponte's resume is a diplomatic one, aside from his

involvement in the paramilitary operations in Honduras, and he has no

deep background in the intelligence community, other than being a

State Department official who received intelligence during the course

of his positions as head of embassies in the Phillipines, Honduras,

Mexico, and at the United Nations, et cetera. So this was -- and

everybody is treating it as somewhat of a surprise. Obviously, not the

first choice of the President, either. We know that he went to three

other people before he finally arrived under pressure at picking John

Negroponte.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Apparently among them, Robert Gates, the former Director

of C.I.A.?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: Robert Gates, who had been already been D.C.I., of Central Intelligence, and apparently did not want to be

D.N.I., Director of National Intelligence.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Let me put that same question to Laetitia Bordes,

American nun, who met with John Negroponte in 1982 over the fate of

dozens of nuns in Honduras. Your reaction, as you have watched John

Negroponte's career as he moves up in the U.S. government?

 

SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: Yes. When I heard the news yesterday, I must

say I was devastated, absolutely devastated. I wondered, can things

get any worse, really, and I am frightened for our own country. I

think of what happened in Central America and countries like Honduras,

like El Salvador, like Guatemala, where ordinary people organized for

justice, for their basic rights and they disappeared. And I'm

wondering if that's the road that we are on now, when we hear the

President saying that John Negroponte's responsible for getting the

information that we need and gathering all of the intelligence, and

you know, stopping them before they stop us. That kind of language. It

really frightens me. Sometimes I feel that we're on a rollercoaster,

and we're headed down, and there's no one pulling the switch. And I

think that the switch ought to have been pulled on John Negroponte

years ago. When the Senate nominated him --approved his nomination to

be Ambassador to the U.N., that was their fault. When once again, they

approved his nomination as Ambassador to Iraq, I mean, they bear the

responsibility for that. Right now, his confirmation is going to come

before the Senate again. Are they going to approve this nomination? I

mean, when is all of this going to stop? That is what I'm asking. When

is it going to stop?

 

AMY GOODMAN: If I recall correctly, Democratic Senator Dodd of

Connecticut opposed the confirmation of John Negroponte as Ambassador

to the U.N. on the grounds of what he had done in Central America, but

when it came to his being nominated and confirmed as U.S. Ambassador

to Iraq, Senator Dodd backed off the protest he had made earlier. When

you heard Andres Contreris, about this nomination yesterday while you

were in Chile, what was your response, and do you think that there

will be Democrats who will raise the kinds of issues that you are

raising, Andres?

 

ANDRES CONTRERIS: You know, Amy, in terms of democratic protest, it

seems like what they will probably do again is have another

" love-fest, " which was the description of the last Senate committee

hearing when he was to become Ambassador to Iraq. Here in Chile,

they're very mindful of the role that the United States and C.I.A. had

in the coup of 1973, and as Sister Laetitia is talking, it seems in

some ways that our country is -- is practically a Chile in 1972, and

we are approaching more and more what could become an overt military

dictatorship with folks like Negroponte in power, with Elliot Abrams

being promoted, and all of the ones who have committed human rights

crimes are the ones who are being rewarded. Those who are the most

experts in what the C.I.A. engages in constantly as " plausible

deniability, " they are the experts in this horrendous kind of policy,

and they're the ones who are really going to be pushing the buttons in

terms of U.S. war making around the world. A month ago, Amy, we heard

that from Newsweek that Salvador option was being implemented in Iraq.

What we're seeing is that the U.S. military is losing the war there,

and so the Salvador option was really a policy of death squads. And

it's no coincidence that Negroponte, having been the Ambassador in

Honduras where he was very much engaged in this kind of support for

death squads was the Ambassador in Iraq and this is the kind of policy

that was starting to be implemented there, which is not just going

after the resistance itself, but targeting for repression and torture

and assassination the underlying support base, the family members, and

those in the communities where the resistance is. These kinds of

policies are war crimes, and these officials need to be called to

accountability.

 

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Andres

Contreris, if people want to find out about your film, Hidden In Plain

Sight, where do they go on the web?

 

ANDRES CONTRERIS: Thank you, Amy. They would go to

hiddeninplainsight.org. We are going to be screening the film here in

Chile tonight. We screened it at the World Social Forum in Brazil. I

have been traveling in the Southern cone of Latin America talking

about the role of the School of the Americas, and U.S. support for

torture.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive, if people

want to see the documents that the National Security Archive has on

this period, where can they go?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the National Security Archive has a very

prominent website, nsarchive.org. The key documents on Negroponte are

not up on the site at the moment, but they are in our collections, our

Iran-Contra collection. There is some citations to them, and use of

them in our book, the Iran-Contra scandal, the declassified history.

I'm sure they will be circulating around, and if there are any

Democratic Senators who wish to address Negroponte's role in Honduras,

during the questioning for confirmation of this post, they certainly

will have these documents in their hands.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Maybe even Republican Senators as well?

 

PETER KORNBLUH: I would doubt there are going to be very many of those

who will challenge his nomination, Amy. Hopefully you are right, and

there might be a few.

 

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us, as well as

Sister Laetitia Bordes, the Catholic nun with the Society of Helpers,

the Catholic community of women, speaking from San Bruno, California.

 

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here

for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

 

Amy Goodman's Speaking Events

2/18: Irving, TX

2/19: Austin, TX

2/23: Santa Cruz, CA

And More...

 

 

 

TODAY'S STORIES

* Headlines for February 18, 2005

 

* Promoting the 'Ambassador of Torture': Bush Nominates Negroponte for

Intel Czar

 

* The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Ward Churchill Speaks

 

 

bring dn to your community

 

Click here to buy Democracy Now! Videos, CDs, etc.

The Exception To The Rulers

Get Your Signed Copy Here

 

NEW: Read book excerpt on " Blowback "

 

Ask your local bookstore to stock Amy Goodman's first book, written

with her brother David Goodman

 

Spanish Edition

Now Available

 

Italian Edition

Now Available