With the news that the White House will replace genial neoconservative fanatic Paul Bremer as the top US official in Iraq with UN Ambassador John D. Negroponte, now is as good a time as ever to educate our readers on just who this total bastard is and how he got that way. For those who remember the shadowy Iranscam scandal of the bygone Reagan Era, Negroponte needs no introduction. For the rest of you, though, here's some helpful links identifying just how much you should throw up at the prospect of this man running anything.
John Dimitri Negroponte
Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. In that capacity, he was an apologist for and facilitator of the brutal right wing government's murderous war of aggression against the Honduran people. Negroponte was instrumental in the creation of the El Aguacate air base, at which Nicagaraguan Contra terrorists were trained by American agents. In August 2001, 185 bodies were discovered at the site, including those of two Americans. These were some of the victims of the death squads that used Aguacate as a headquarters.
Negroponte now says that there were no death squads in Honduras, but the CIA begs to differ. According to declassified reports, the CIA acknowledges that "death squads" committed "hundreds of human rights abuses" throughout the 1980s, while more than $1 billion in US aid went to the country's military.
Although Honduras is assuredly the centerpiece of Negroponte's career as a total bastard, it is not the only exhibit. From 1971 to 1973, he was in charge of formulating policy on Vietnam for Henry Kissinger's National Security Council. It was here that he would learn what it takes to force embassy officials to excise information about human rights violations in their reports home.
But don't take our word for it: Listen to Negroponte himself explain why the US had to tolerate "less than savory, from an American perspective" regimes in Latin America: the discredited domino theory (there's that Kissinger Vietnam training). You see, with Nicaragua already gone Socialist, why, El Salvador could have fallen to the FMLN and then there would be nothing keeping Castro out of Belize. Although this must seem like baffling bullshit to Americans born since the mid-1980s, I assure you that people actually took it seriously at the time.
In a famous expose in the Baltimore Sun (which doesn't seem to be online, sadly), Negroponte emerged as the chief architect of US policy in Honduras during the worst human rights abuses in that country's history. Negroponte swears that he tried his best by "promoting democracy," but former ambassador to Honduras Jack Binns, who preceded Negroponte, tells a different story. "Negroponte would have had to be deliberately blind not to know about human rights violations," told In These Times. Deliberately blind, or just dishonest?
Although, when compared to deliberately covering up the deaths of thousands and securing aid for their killers this seems trivial, MLWL fans from way back may remember the last time Negroponte streaked across our radar. It was about a year ago, and it was when Negroponte got State Department permission to spend $600,000 to remodel the kitchen at his private residence at the Waldorf Astoria, a suite that the taxpayers already foot the $168,000-per-month bill for. Nice use of public funds, Negroponte!
-Consider Arms, HNWIC (Head Negroponte-Watcher in Charge)
