[R-G] Fw: [southnews] Hans: When John Negroponte Was Mullah Omar

[Tim Murphy]

     New U.S. ambassador to Iraq once provided an Afghan-style sanctuary 
for terrorists every bit as nasty as Osama and al Qaeda

Dennis Hans: When John Negroponte Was Mullah Omar
Monday, 3 May 2004, 12:22 pm
Opinion: Dennis Hans

     When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar:

     New U.S. ambassador to Iraq once provided an Afghan-style sanctuary 
for terrorists every bit as nasty as Osama and al Qaeda
     By Dennis Hans

     Remember Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, the Islamist movement 
that mis-governed the failed state of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001? He 
and the Taliban played host to Osama bin Laden, providing him and his al 
Qaeda organization a safe haven from where they could plot terror 
attacks and train recruits who came to Afghanistan from every corner of 
the globe.

     Well, it turns out that Mullah Omar has much in common with  may 
even have patterned his career after  John Negroponte, the veteran U.S. 
diplomat whos about to be confirmed as our Ambassador to Iraq, where 
hell oversee the largest embassy and CIA station in the world.

     You see, the most important chapter in Negropontes career took 
place in the failed state of Honduras. From 1981 to 1985 he was the most 
powerful figure in that banana republic, just as Mullah Omar was The Man 
15 years later in Afghanistan. And while Omar welcomed and protected bin 
Laden and al Qaeda, Negroponte arranged for Honduras to provide 
sanctuary for the nastiest terrorist group in the entire Western 
Hemisphere: the contras.

     Yes, the contras. You may remember them as the outfit hailed by 
President Ronald Reagan as the moral equivalent of the Founding 
Fathers. But the voluminous reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty 
International show that my characterization, not Reagans, is the 
correct one.

     Precise body counts are hard to come by, but the contras may well 
have killed more defensiveless civilians in the 1980s than al Qaeda has 
killed in its decade of terror  albeit one slit throat at a time rather 
than 3,000 blown up one day in New York and 2,000 another day in Africa, 
among other al Qaeda atrocities.

     Negroponte was dispatched to Honduras in 1981 to replace U.S. 
ambassador Jack Binns, who had provoked the wrath of the Reagan 
administration. Binns was concerned over escalating torture and killings 
by Honduran security forces at a time when U.S. policy was to hush up 
such crimes.

     From the Reaganites perspective, Binns just didnt have the right 
stuff to supervise what was about to become the largest U.S. embassy in 
Central America and the transformation of large chunks of Honduras into 
a sanctuary and training facility for cold-blooded killers.

     The Reagan team in 1981 had an unstated policy of regime change 
in Nicaragua, although it pretended to Congress and the media (yep, both 
were lapdogs then, just like now!) that its actual goal was to stop the 
alleged flow of Weapons of Minimal Destruction (small arms and the like) 
from Nicaragua, overland through Honduras, and on to El Salvador, where 
Marxist guerrillas had the audacity to resist a 50-year-old U.S.-backed 
military dictatorship that, in 1980-81 alone, had killed 20,000 or so 
civilians.

     But the arms flow was largely illusory (another parallel to the 
present), particularly by the time Negroponte arrived in Honduras. The 
Reaganites pretense that the contras mission was to interdict the 
alleged arms flow was a necessary lie to get a spineless and gullible 
Congress to fund the project. In fact, the Reaganites were all about 
regime change, and their chosen instrument would be led by former 
officers of the Nicaraguan National Guard  itself a U.S.-trained outfit 
that killed 30-40,000 Nicaraguan civilians from 1977-79 in a vain 
attempt to keep in power the long-time U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio 
Somoza.

     The new outfit came to be known as contras  short for 
counter-revolutionaries, for the regime the Reaganites wanted to change 
was the Marxist-oriented Sandinista government. Whether called Guardsmen 
or contras, these guys were darn good at killing nurses and teachers, 
and absolutely fearless in executing captured and disarmed enemy 
combatants  executions that were standard operating procedure. But the 
Guardia pedigree and cutthroat tactics prevented the contras from 
functioning as a true guerrilla force, where you live among the people 
youre ostensibly liberating and rely on them for food, shelter and 
information. Hence the need for a sanctuary in a neighboring failed 
state run by corrupt, authoritarian army officers and an imperious U.S. 
ambassador, John Negroponte.

     Without that sanctuary, the contras wouldnt have lasted a month. 
With it, they terrorized for a decade. Relying on the U.S. for food, 
intelligence, arms and assassination manuals, theyd maraud through the 
Nicaraguan countryside for a spell, then retreat to their safe haven 
when they needed a break from raping, torturing and killing. Actually, 
they also committed such crimes in their Honduran camps, albeit at a 
more leisurely pace.

     Unfortunately, the Nicaraguan government didnt have the firepower 
to blow up the contra camps. Probably just as well, for if the 
Sandinistas had wiped out the camps, the Reaganites would have destroyed 
Nicaragua and the U.S. media would have cheered the destruction. Thats 
because only the U.S. has the right to attack a state that harbors 
terrorists whove killed thousands of its citizens.

     Negropontes pretend job in Honduras was to implement the pretend 
U.S. policy of democracy promotion. (Sound familiar?) His real job was 
to prevent any meaningful democracy, and to ensure that key 
foreign-policy decisions were made not by the democratic fagade  the 
irrelevant Honduran president and legislature  but by two hard-nosed, 
hard-line SOBs: Negroponte and the head of the armed forces, General 
Gustavo Alvarez.

     Thus, in the name of democracy, Negroponte and the Reaganites not 
only supported military rule, they even prevented the military itself 
from ruling democratically! Alvarezs extremist views and repressive 
policies didnt reflect a consensus within the army. Many officers 
believed Alvarez had prostituted the nation, sold it body-and-soul to 
Uncle Sam. And there were rumblings over the escalating torture and 
killings perpetrated by a CIA-backed army unit, Battalion 316.

     So in 1984, right under Negropontes nose, a group of officers 
overthrew Alvarez! This was treated in the U.S. as a change of 
government, and rightly so. But democracies dont change government 
when army officers oust their boss, because in a democracy the army 
chief is not the government. If Negroponte and the Reaganites had 
believed their own rhetoric about Honduran democracy, Alvarezs ouster 
would not have been a big deal, because Honduras still had the same 
president and legislature. But it was a big deal. Really big.

     Negroponte and the CIA swung into action, confident they could 
marginalize the reformist army officers intent on reducing repression 
and re-claiming Honduran sovereignty. Using such time-honored 
democracy-enhancing and sovereignty-respecting tactics as bribery and 
arm-twisting, the U.S. team averted the crisis, cutting out the 
reformists and ensuring a smooth transfer of real power from Alvarez to 
a clique of corrupt senior officers who had long been on the CIA dole, 
according to a New York Times report by James LeMoyne.

     Negroponte and the Reaganites breathed a sigh of relief: Honduras 
would continue its role as hospitable host to the contra terrorists. The 
rape, torture and murder of Nicaraguans could continue.

     My guess is that when Negroponte long ago decided to pursue a 
career in diplomacy, he didnt anticipate an assignment where he would 
be required to subvert an impoverished countrys institutions to ensure 
rule by a corrupt, brutal military that would rent out its country to 
U.S.-trained terrorists. But the assignment came, and Negroponte carried 
it out. Hes obviously very bright and capable, but also amoral if not 
immoral.

     What will his real duties be in Iraq? Will he be promoting a 
transition to genuine Iraqi sovereignty and democracy, or merely the 
appearance? Hell be supervising a huge staff of diplomats and 
intelligence officers. Will they respect Iraqis, or will they engage in 
massive bribery and other dirty tricks to manipulate and subvert Iraqi 
institutions and individuals? Is the real goal to purchase influence 
over so wide a range of Iraqis that even a freely elected government in 
2005 will end up serving U.S. strategic and economic interests at the 
expense of Iraqs own legitimate interests?

     Negroponte is capable of promoting either real or fake democracy, 
and history shows that if asked to do the latter hell nevertheless tell 
Congress and the media hes doing the former. And that leads to our 
closing parallel: The current U.S. president, just like the one we had 
when Negroponte was in Honduras, has a great appreciation for underlings 
who make false or misleading statements to keep the U.S. Congress and 
citizenry in the dark. Iraq is not the only nation in need of a 
transparent and genuine democracy.

     ******************

     ) 2004 by Dennis Hans

     Bio: Dennis Hans is a freelance writer who has taught courses in 
mass communications and American foreign policy at the University of 
South Florida-St. Petersburg. Prior to the Iraq war he wrote Lying Us 
Into War: Exposing Bush and His Techniques of Deceit ( 
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html) and 
The Disinformation Age ( 
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00011.htm). He can be 
reached at HANS_D at popmail.firn.edu
_________________________________________
John Negroponte: Dorian Gray Goes To Iraq
Monday, 3 May 2004, 11:05 am
Opinion: Toni Solo

     John Negroponte: Dorian Gray Goes To Iraq

     by Toni Solo

     John Negroponte will be an appropriate appointment as US proconsul 
in Iraq for the current regime in Washington. Death-squad-friendly 
Negroponte is one of the suave-talking savages who misled the US 
Congress about US actions in Central America through the 1980s. That 
same group of people have now misled the US people into disaster and 
disgrace in Iraq.

     They represent the corporate plutocracy that has always swayed US 
foreign policy against the interests of the United States people. As 
ever, they are happy to commit grotesque waste of human, material and 
financial resources to deliver corporate welfare to companies like Dick 
Cheney's Halliburton and George Bush Sr.'s Carlyle group. Corruption, 
mass murder, torture are part of the package - none of this is new.

     Same old script, same old actors

     The betrayal of the United States people could hardly be deeper or 
more sharp. The script was written years ago in South East Asia and 
Latin America by the same ruthless ideologues who stole into the White 
House after the electoral fiasco in Florida in 2000. Now these 
white-collar barbarians - Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, 
Elliot Abrams and the rest - are unable to cover up the torture, murder 
and corporate corruption that invariably characterise colonial regimes 
such as theirs in Baghdad.

     Only a Rip Van Winkle could plausibly pretend to be surprised. 
Support for Israel, Plan Colombia, war in Afghanistan and Iraq - all 
these foreign policy commitments serve the needs of the corporate 
plutocracy that dominates politics in the United States. The murder and 
torture reported in Iraq (and in Guantanamo, and in the air bases at 
Bagram and Diego Garcia) are as much White House stock in trade as it is 
that of allies like the governments of Israel and Colombia. It always 
has been - from Guatemala and Vietnam through the Philippines and East 
Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti and Colombia, to Afghanistan and now Iraq.

     The bearable lightness of being John Negroponte's conscience

     It may have been a long trek politically for John Negroponte from 
proconsul in Honduras to proconsul in Baghdad. But for a man with no 
noticeable moral conscience the distance is a very short step. Along 
with his colleague John Maisto, now US Representative to the 
Organization of American States, Negroponte worked efficiently to 
cover-up and explain away atrocities and human rights abuses so as to 
expedite Ronald Reagan's terrorist war in Central America.

     In 1989, three years after the World Court judgement against the 
terrorist Reagan regime, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights 
finally got around to issuing a judgement on the matter of forced and 
involuntary disappearances. The test cases involved were not from 
Colombia, Chile or Argentina or Uruguay nor from Guatemala or El 
Salvador. The court ruled that Honduras was responsible for four 
disappearances (those of Francisco Fairen Garbi, Yolanda Solis Corrales, 
Saul Godinez Cruz and Manfredo Angel Velasquez).

     All four cases occurred between 1981 and 1983, when John Negroponte 
as US ambassador was assisting the Honduran army to destroy civilian 
opponents of the Honduran government. In fact over 180 students, trades 
unionists, human rights activists and others were disappeared by the 
Honduran death squads. The murders helped crush opposition to the 
presence of Nicaraguan Contra in Honduras. For people in the US, of all 
those many murders that of US Jesuit priest James Carney may be the most 
poignant.

     Non-abrasive AWOL journalism or totally Teflon armor?

     Carney was caught by the Honduran army in 1983. He was chaplain to 
a group of guerrillas entrapped by Honduran and US forces then on 
military exercises. Honduran government Human Rights Commissioner Leo 
Valladares investigated Carney's case through the 1990s and concluded 
that Carney was interrogated, tortured and murdered by the Honduran 
army. Some testimony suggested the participation of US military 
personnel in the interrogation.

     But Negroponte has never faced questions on the fact that the 
Honduran army at that time would hardly have murdered James Carney 
without the approval or knowledge of someone on Negroponte's embassy 
staff. Such approval or deliberate complacency might well have come from 
Negroponte himself. Given the general AWOL status of corporate media 
reporting he is unlikely ever to be directly challenged on his role in 
Carney's murder.

     With his well-documented record in Central America, Negroponte is 
certainly the right man to represent the Bush regime in Iraq. He is the 
very model of a totally Teflon torture manager. The fact that neither 
Congress nor mainstream media ever grill Negroponte seriously on his 
record in Honduras does much to explain the catastrophe in Iraq. We can 
try and hide the truth about ourselves in the attic like the portrait of 
Dorian Gray. But the ugliness and the horror remain there all the same.

Toni Solo is an activist based in Central America.
  Contact: tonisolo01 at yahoo.com

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0405/S00004.htm

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