Does the Iraqi torture trace back to Honduras and Quatemala ?

[kentuck]

And Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte and Poindexter, of course. And I'm sure there are a couple of others...But, if we recall, there were reports of abuse in Honduras and Central America when we were assisting the Contras in the 1980's. Is there a connection?

[MargotMacomber]

1. Yes

And the connection is Negroponte. Negroponte has had his fine hand there before and it wasn't pretty. What was known as the School of The Americas gets a lot of flack for being a school that teaches dictators how to torture etc. It does a better job teaching how to have a better human rights record.

Negroponte on the other hand would like to see a return to the old days of Samoza. He is total bad news.

[newyawker99]

11. Hi MargotMacomber!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[LittleApple81]

2. If these three are now involved in Iraq, what other proof do you need?

They needed people with the right experience, is my guess.

[mike_c]

3. bingo....

This is one aspect of the Abu Ghraib story that will take longer to emerge, and when it does it likely won't be in the media spotlight. Abu Ghraib is just a glimpse behind the American foreign policy curtain. It will take a long time to really examine the filth behind that curtain, but removing the smoke screen of American moral superiority is a necessary first step.

[Karenina]

4. It WILL be in the media spotlight.

(I'm a psychic pundit! :-)) These guys are the most horrid of criminals running wild and loose around the globe. :puke:
You make such an excellent point, my dear. :toast:

[jayavarman]

5. No

Iraqi torture, in my opinion, comes from having too few untrained reservists going insane over there . . . . I read that there were like a dozen guards & thousands of prisoners. These people are obviously fucked up sadists (the torturers)

Anyway, my point really is that Negroponte is a career diplomat & both Dems & repubs seem to have alot of respect for the guy. At the end of the day the job of a foreign service officer is to implement the foreign policy of the US. I know that he was at the embassy in Hond. & Guat when some bad things happened, but the culpability for that goes to those who formulated the policy, not those who implemented it

I guess I just have alot of respect for the state dept. & if we had listened to the diplomats in the run-up to this war we would not be in the trouble we are in.

The real travesty of this whole thing is that state put together a long & detailed assessment of the challenges of post war iraq & the administration threw it out the window.

There was an excellent article about this in the Atlantic Monthly a while back . . . called "blind into baghdad"

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/fallows.htm

Very Long Aticle, but a great read

again, just my 2 cents

[kentuck]

6. "..both Dems & repubs seem to have alot of respect for the guy."

Because they have no historical memory...

[jayavarman]

7. Possibly so

I guess I need to look into it more, but as I said, I'm biased towards Foreign Service Officers & State Dept. & have tended to wonder whether the "Negroponte is scary" meme holds water or not.

Oh, well

[democracyindanger]

9. Oh really?

"Iraqi torture, in my opinion, comes from having too few untrained reservists going insane over there "

These MPs beg to differ:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.guard09may09,0,2180279.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

"The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.

But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.

They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.
"

[ThomWV]

8. No, It Traces Back To December 2000 and the Supreme Court

[mike_c]

10. I feel your pain, but that's just too simplistic....

Whistle-ass and his cronies didn't start this kind of crap-- they just let the cat out of the bag-- and created great new growth opportunies for institutionalized cruelty in the name of U.S. foreign policy. They deserve war crimes prosecution, but there are lots of folks from administrations stretching over the last 50 years who should be in the dock with them.