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Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc
What was his involvement with the Contras?
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This article was high in my google search. It is from a far-left magazine/web site involving Alexander Cockburn, so while it is undoubtedly inaccurate in various respects, I think the vitriol for Negroponte speaks volumes:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hans05112004.html
When Negroponte Was Mullah Omar
The Bloody Career of the New Ambassador to Iraq
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 diplomat who the Senate has now confirmed for the post of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, where he'll oversee the largest embassy and CIA station in the world.
You see, the most important chapter in Negroponte's 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 Reagan's, 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 didn't 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 you're 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 wouldn't have lasted a month. With it, they terrorized for a decade. Relying on the U.S. for food, intelligence, arms and assassination manuals, they'd 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 didn't have the firepower or the gumption to blow up the contra camps and topple the <U.S.-controlled> Honduran cabal that sustained the contras. Probably just as well, for if the Sandinistas had done so, the Reaganites would have destroyed Nicaragua and the U.S. media would have cheered the destruction. That's because only the U.S. has the right to attack a state that harbors terrorists who've killed thousands of its citizens.
Negroponte's 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 facade _ 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.
[continued next post]