WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2001
ACTION ALERT! John Negroponte Nominated to be National Intelligence Director!
March 2001Call Senators Now to Demand a Full Investigation!
Negroponte is the "Worst Man for the Job"
Career diplomat John Negroponte has been nominated by President Bush to be the first National Intelligence Director. He would have authority over 15 intelligence agencies and be the President's chief advisor on intelligence. Negroponte's record on human rights and respect for international law makes him uniquely unqualified for this important posting.
• Negroponte was political officer at the US Embassy in Vietnam from 1964-1968, the height of the war, during a period of extrajudicial executions and gross human rights abuses, including massacres by the infamous "Tiger Force" of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.
• Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985 during which he oversaw a ten-fold increase in staff and an embassy that housed one of the largest CIA deployments in all of Latin America. He lied to Congress about his knowledge of the infamous Battalion 316 death squad, and managed illegal aid to the Contras fighting the Nicaraguan government in direct contravention of Congress' ban. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained the Contras. The base was used as a secret detention and torture center where, in August 2001, excavations at the base discovered the first of the corpses of the 185 people, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried there.
• Negroponte was ambassador to Mexico from 1989 to 1993, where he shepherded the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to its conclusion. NAFTA has caused one million Mexican farmers to lose their land and livelihoods and undermined labor and environmental protections in Mexico, the US, and Canada.
• Negroponte served as US ambassador to the United Nations from September 2001 until May of 2004. He is guilty of lying to the UN about justifications for the war in Iraq. He successfully pressured Mexico and Chile to fire their UN ambassadors after they clashed with him over the war.
• During Negroponte's tenure as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, a proposal was put forth to set up U.S. funded Central American-style death squads as a way to quell the insurgents fighting to end U.S. occupation. Negroponte's denial that he has been involved in discussions of the so-called "Salvador option" is not believable. Those forces may be gearing up for action as this is being written!
The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold hearings soon on this nomination. Negroponte's lack of democratic credentials and his record of support for, or turning a blind eye to, gross violations of human rights and international law delayed his nomination for UN ambassador in 2001. But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a quick approval vote on Sept. 12, 2001, rushing him through during the chaos following the tragedy of the day before. His appointment as ambassador to Iraq aroused opposition only from human rights activists.
We must not allow the Senate to sweep his terrible record under the rug a third time. Call in shows are discussing the Negroponte nomination. Call in and offer your opinion! Write letters to the editor of your local paper! Some reports are saying that hearings on the nomination will not be held until March. That gives us time to mobilize! If one of your Senators is on the Intelligence Committee (see list below), call and demand a thorough hearing and rejection of Negroponte's nomination. Set up a meeting with your Senators when they are at home over the Presidents' Day recess. Or call your Senators' offices. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121 or look in the blue pages of your phone book to find the local offices. If neither of your Senators is on the committee, call both Senators anyway and tell them to demand that Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KA) and Ranking Member Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) conduct a thorough hearing and reject the "worst man for the job."
Senate Intelligence Committee
REPUBLICANS
Pat Roberts, Kansas, Chairman
Orrin G. Hatch, Utah
Mike Dewine, Ohio
Christopher S. Bond, Missouri
Trent Lott, Mississippi
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia
DEMOCRATS
John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia, Vice Chairman
Carl Levin, Michigan
Dianne Feinstein, California
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Evan Bayh, Indiana
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
Jon S. Corzine, New Jersey
For more information, go to the web page of the Council on Hemispheric Relations and read these two articles: click here, and here.
As additional background, below is a personal account, written in July 2001 by Sister Laetitia Bordes, s.h. and published in the Nicaragua Monitor.
NEW RIPPLES IN AN EVIL STORY
John D. Negroponte, President Bush's nominee as the next ambassador to the United Nations? My ears perked up. I turned up the volume on the radio. I began listening more attentively. Yes, I had heard correctly. Bush was nominating Negroponte, the man who gave the CIA backed Honduran death squads open field when he was ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
My mind went back to May 1982 and I saw myself facing Negroponte in his office at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I had gone to Honduras on a fact-finding delegation. We were looking for answers. Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero's secretary. Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women.
John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. There had been eyewitnesses to the capture and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered. Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter. Facts, however, reveal quite the contrary. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.
John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country. The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.
In 1994, the Honduran Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents.
It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for. I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in1996 Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981 and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters. Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan's counterinsurgency policy.
Now in 2001, I'm seeing new ripples in this story.
Since President Bush made it known that he intended to nominate John Negroponte, other people have suddenly been "disappearing", so to speak. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on March 25 Maggie Farley and Norman Kempster reported on the sudden deportation of several former Honduran death squad members from the United States. These men could have provided shattering testimony against Negroponte in the forthcoming Senate hearings. One of these recent deportees just happens to be General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In February, Washington revoked the visa of Discua who was Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Since then, Discua has gone public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16.
Given the history of John Negroponte in Central America, it is indeed horrifying to think that he should be chosen to represent our country at the United Nations, an organization founded to ensure that the human rights of all people receive the highest respect. How many of our Senators, I wonder, let alone the US public, know who John Negroponte really is?
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