Negroponte to be Intelligence Chief

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by rubberneck

I think he is referring to the intra agency rivalry that seems to exsist between the CIA, NSA, DIA and the others. As an outsider he won't automatically be viewed by the various agencies under him as having a bias aginst them. I could have totally misunderstood what Huey meant. If that is the case I'll shut up and sit down.

State is a huge part of that problem.

[Huey14]

No, you're right rubberneck. That is what I meant. I didn't realise State was part of that problem- while I realise they do have their own intel machine.

Obviously I don't know anything, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway. If got chopped off, it got chopped off. I've learned something and God knows that's not easy

[CRad]

Some folks think that Negroponte's years as a diplomat make him a good choice since it'll take some diplomacy to coordinate 15 agencies. They are probably right.

I think it's his smarts and knowledge of the world in general that makes him a good choice. If he's going to have input from so many sources he has to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff. His record in the diplomatic corp has proven he has that ability. The guy has a first class mind which gives him the ability to see the bigger picture provided by separate bits of info.

His loyalty to the admin is also a plus.

NDD - Aside from Negroponte being a part of State what else do you have?

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

Prior involvement in what counselor?

Contras, etc.

[Roguish Lawyer]

NDD:

I agree that State is full of idiotic leftists, but is it your view that there are no career diplomats whatsoever who are right-minded? Surely there are a few rogues in there who have fought the power . . .

[NousDefionsDoc]

NDD - Aside from Negroponte being a part of State what else do you have?

Have you ever worked with State? It's enough.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

Contras, etc.

What was his involvement with the Contras?

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

NDD:

I agree that State is full of idiotic leftists, but is it your view that there are no career diplomats whatsoever who are right-minded? Surely there are a few rogues in there who have fought the power . . .

Mmm, how long could a rogue last bucking the system...

[CRad]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

Have you ever worked with State? It's enough.

Funny and a valid point that State is an issue in some (many) ways. On the other hand, the State Dept is simply another weapon in the arsenel, another way of dealing with problems.

Negroponte was suspected of having a hand in covert aid to the Contras. All the more reason for him to have the job, imo.

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

What was his involvement with the Contras?

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.

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[Roguish Lawyer]

[continued from prior post]

Thus, in the name of "democracy," Negroponte and the Reaganites not only supported military rule, they even prevented the military from practicing democracy ("one colonel, one vote") within its own institution! Alvarez's extremist views and repressive policies did not 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 Negroponte's nose, a group of officers overthrew Alvarez! This was treated in the U.S. as a "change of government," and rightly so. But democracies don't "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, Alvarez's 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 a faction of reformist army officers who supported the ouster of Alvarez and wanted the new army chief to reduce repression and re-claim Honduran sovereignty. Using such time-honored democracy-enhancing and sovereignty-respecting tactics as bribery and arm-twisting, the U.S. team averted the crisis. It was a slow process, but by late 1985 (at which point Negroponte had moved on) the reformers were isolated and army power rested with a clique of CIA-bought rightwing officers.

Negroponte's team also subverted contra-affiliated individuals and groups.

Edgar Chamorro, a contra PR official whose duties included bribing Honduran journalists, received praise from his CIA handlers when he lied to U.S. reporters about the goals of the contras. But he was read the riot act on those rare occasions when he let the truth slip out, either about real goals or the routine nature of contra atrocities. Sickened by the atrocities and his role as a paid deceiver, Chamorro resigned and told his story in a sworn affadavit to the World Court in 1985.

In a letter published in the Jan. 9, 1986 New York Times, he described the end results of one particular policy countenanced by the Reagan-CIA-Negroponte crowd: "During my four years as a 'contra' director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the [Sandinista] Government. Hundreds of civilian murders, tortures and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the contra leaders and their CIA superiors were well aware."

James LeMoyne reported in the June 7, 1987 New York Times on U.S. "support" for the Miskito faction of the contras: "Top Indian leaders and diplomats in Tegucigalpa [the Honduran capital] say that for the last five years, the CIA has relied on bribes, threats and the exile of selected Indian officials to prevent the Indians from choosing their own leaders, because it feared losing control of the Miskitos and also feared they might choose not to fight."

That is the reality behind the rhetoric of "promoting democracy," Reagan-style: thuggish tactics to prevent people from freely choosing their own leaders who would set their own course.

My guess is that when young Negroponte decided to pursue a career in diplomacy, he didn't anticipate an assignment where he would be required to subvert an impoverished country's 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. He's 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? He'll 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 Iraq's own needs and aspirations?

Negroponte is capable of promoting either real or fake democracy, and history shows that if asked to do the latter he'll nevertheless tell Congress and the media he's 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.

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'" and "The Disinformation Age". He can be reached at: HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu

[CRad]

RL - I think that whole article is a warped extremist view of what occurred in Honduras and Nicaragua. I hate it when people bring that crap up especially if they weren't there doing a hard job for good people.

Negroponte was appointed Ambassador to the UN after a six month hold-up to look into his back ground. If there was any truth to what Hans writes it would have been "ferreted" out at the time. Furthermore, he gets points for being the Ambassador during a trying time - when Bush was making the case for WMD in Iraq on faulty intel. That alone gives him good reason to want to do a better job than has happened in the past.

Those who have worked with Negroponte universally say he battles fiercely to change policy -- but never take his battles public. He often talks about making sure that military and political power are harnessed for the same ends.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/10945714.htm

NDD - I'm supposed to tell you that the SF tool box is not limited to sledgehammers for killing flies.

[Guy]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

Have you ever worked with State? It's enough.

Nevermind...I had rant a ready and decided against it!

NDD...
You had to be there at the time...

We had a State Dept employee faint durung CQB training and another run off the range when she heard the guys firing.

Had one get stuck in a cow-fence, how you do that is beyond me...fat bastard

Had another one yank the fucking steering wheel because a bunny rabbit ran across the road. Almost killed all of us that...PhD piano playing dumb fuck!

How the fuck do you get a PhD in piano playing? I'd laid out in the New Mexico desert with that liberal bastard for hours arguing politics.

Memories...Oh LORD!

[NousDefionsDoc]

Petroluem Industry liaison in a major oil produciing country. Been on the job for two years - never seen a drilling rig except in pictures.

[Trip_Wire (RIP)]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

State is a huge part of that problem.

The only experience that I have had working the State Department was as an LEO supervisor doing dignitary protection works on subjects, who were not covered by the SS. In every case that I worked with them I found them lacking!