John Negroponte haunted by Honduras

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=452b54b44e1efc98

Paul Laverty - The Guardian Wednesday 13th April, 2005

The trouble about writing fiction is that I spend too much time in a room by myself.

On occasions I wonder if I'm going nuts, or whether, just maybe, my quiet fury is a normal reaction from an average human being. On Sunday, much to my delight, Universal brought out a new DVD of Carla's Song, written by me and directed by Ken Loach, set against the backdrop of the US-financed war during the 1980s in Nicaragua, where I once worked for a human-rights organisation.

The team at Universal were genuinely enthusiastic and worked their pants off to pull it all together. Along with the new director's cut is a glossy booklet with photographs and excerpts from the introduction to my screenplay, written in 1996. I was on a film set when I got word that the text was going to print and I only had 10 minutes to glance over their summary. I faxed a one-paragraph postscript and that is when the trouble started.

Despite the best efforts of the young man at Universal to get my postscript in, he was informed by lawyers that they could not risk it. My agent received a phone call from a lawyer saying what I had written was deemed to be "contentious and inflammatory". I asked for a copy of the opinion but was told that it was "verbal". I asked who counsel was, and on what basis they reached their opinion. Not a squeak. Deadline passed. Postscript gone.
Here is the offending paragraph: "The man who was at the centre of the US experiment to tear Nicaragua apart in the 80s was Mr John Negroponte, once US ambassador to Honduras. He claims to be unaware of any US human rights abuse in Nicaragua or El Salvador during this time. In January of 2005 he was appointed head of national intelligence by George Bush Jnr. Each morning he should have no difficulty spotting a terrorist."

Although many continue to question how much Negroponte knew during his time in Honduras, his political rehabilitation has been marked. Last year, he was given the testing position of US ambassador to Iraq, making him head of the biggest diplomatic staff in the world.

David Corn, a US journalist, wrote in detail about Negroponte: "While he was in Honduras and for years afterwards, Negroponte refused to acknowledge the human rights abuses. In a letter to the Economist he said it was 'simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras'." Corn asks him to account therefore for a CIA report that states: "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and linked to "death squad activities". He also quotes from a Baltimore Sun series from 1995: "Time and time again... Negroponte was confronted by evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives."
more...

Can this man really be appointed our head Intel chief??? OMG!!!

[UTUSN]

1. *HE* Ain't the One "Haunted". It's Us. n/t

[saltpoint]

2. Leave it to THE GUARDIAN to do this story.

I bet it won't be a topic any time soon on the Larry King show.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Who is John Negroponte?

June 4, 2004

Ambassador to Death Squads
Who is John Negroponte?
By GHALI HASSAN

The White House has appointed Mr. John Dimitris Negroponte to be United States ambassador to Iraq. He will preside over the largest embassy in the world, and housed in the Republic Palace (misleadingly named Saddam's Palace by the U.S. occupation). He will be protected by high concrete walls, barbed wires and more than 150,000 occupation force, including several thousands of foreign mercenaries armed to the teeth with the most violent tools. Mr. Negroponte is Greek-American diplomat. He is currently leading the diplomatic war against the people of Iraq as the U.S. envoy at the United Nations (UN) in New York. Negroponte is Jewish. A friend in Spain expressed his deep concern to me recently: " to appoint a Jew as ambassador to the Arab country that has been devastated because of the will of a cabal of Jewish neocons headed by Wolfowitz ­ Bush is just an accessory -, is like trying to put off a fire using buckets of gasoline".

Mr. Negroponte has served as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985; a period during which the U.S. military aid to Honduras grew from $5 million to nearly $100 million, and more than $200 million in economic aid, making Honduras the largest aid recipient in the region. Honduras was the launching pad from which the Reagan administration runs its violent "war on terror" in Central American. The U.S-backed atrocities and terror were condemned by the International World Court in the Hague (1). Like most of his colleagues in the Bush administration, Mr. Negroponte is a "recycled reaganites".

At the time Mr. Negroponte was in Honduras, Honduras was a military dictatorship. Kidnapping, rape, torture and executions of dissidents was rampant. The military top and middle ranks were U.S-trained at the School of the Americas (SOA), the Harvard version of the CIA, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. According to Human Rights Watch, graduates of the SOA are responsible for the worst human rights abuses and torture of dissidents in Latin America. Some of its 60,000 graduates are notorious Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia and Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, Honduras security police chief and later Honduran top military commander.

In Honduras the army intelligence unit, Battalion 3-16, which was involved in kidnappings, rape, torture and killing of suspected dissidents. In 1995 Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson of The Baltimore Sun unearthed massive and substantiated evidence from various sources pointing the finger at Mr. Negroponte knowledge of the crimes. The reporters also found that hundreds of Hondurans "were kidnapped, tortured and killed in the 1980s by a secret army unit trained and supported by the CIA"(2). Reliable evidence from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Honduras alleged that Negroponte oversaw the expansion of U.S training camp and military base on Honduran territory, where US-trained Contras terrorists, and where the military secretly detained, tortured and executed Honduran suspected dissidents.
more
http://counterpunch.org/hassan06042004.html

[lovuian]

4. Thank you Seems like a Dream for that excellent article!!!

Do we know who the hell is going to be running our intelligence agency!!! This man is downright scary!!!