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John Dimitri Negroponte

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Categories: US officials | Directors of National Intelligence

John D. Negroponte

John Dimitri Negroponte was nominated February 17, 2005, by President George W. Bush to be America's first Director of National Intelligence. In January 2007, he resigned that post to become the Deputy Secretary of State.

"Bush said that Negroponte understands global intelligence needs because he's had a long career in the foreign service. Bush also said that Negroponte will make decisions on the budgets for the various intelligence agencies. ... 'John will make sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information we need to make the right decisions,' the president said."

Although Negroponte's office will be "outside of the West Wing," Bush said that Negroponte "'will have access on a daily basis in that he'll be my primary briefer'. ... Negroponte said he plans to 'reform of the intelligence community in ways designed to best meet the intelligence needs of the 21st century.'" [1]

Since September 2001, Negroponte served as the United States Representative to the United Nations. On April 19, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Negroponte to become U.S. Ambassador to Iraq following the projected June 30, 2004, handover of sovereignty to as yet undetermined Iraqi authorities. [2] [3]

When, in early 2001, Negroponte was nominated by Bush to be appointed as United States Representative to the United Nations, human rights groups opposed, and a concerned Senate questioned, his nomination, causing a six-month delay in his ulimate appointment, which was acceeded to after September 11, 2001.

Despite his complicity in supporting Nicaraguan death squads during the Iran-Contra affair and his support of the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras, Negroponte's Senate confirmation as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq went smoothly.

The Senate confirmed the nomination by a vote of 95-3 on May 6. He was sworn in on June 23. Negroponte will head a U.S. embassy in Baghdad that will be temporarily housed in a palace that belonged to Saddam Hussein. When up and running, the embassy will be the largest in the world, with a diplomatic staff of over 3,000 personnel. [4]

Shortly after taking up the position, Negroponte was asked about eyewitness statements that in late June Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi had personally executed up to six suspected 'insurgents' in front of his U.S. military bodyguards. (Allawi denies the accusation). In an email to the Sydney Morning Herald, Negroponte did not attempt to deny the story. "If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed," he wrote. [5]

Contents

History

Negroponte was born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek-American shipping magnate. [6]

A graduate of Yale University, he was a career diplomat between 1960 and 1997 serving in eight countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America as well as positions in the Department of State and the White House.

According to Foreign Policy in Focus, from 1971 to 1973, Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger [7]

Among his more recent assignments Negroponte was: [8]

From 1997 to 2001 Negroponte worked as Executive Vice President for Global Markets of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

Negroponte's track record in Central America

Honduras

During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua.

When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Binns claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post.

In These Times writer, Terry Allen described Negroponte as a "zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador."

In a biographical profile Foreign Policy In Focus reported that "on Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was 'simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.' The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were 'no political prisoners in Honduras' and that the 'Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.'"

As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras. Between 1980 and 1994 U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America. [9]

"The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras … So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground. The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency," Allen wrote. [10]

According to the New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

Negroponte supervised the creation in 1984 of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. [11]

In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. "[12]

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing.

But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces.

The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras "Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed." [13] [14] [15]

The Sun's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story.

When President George W. Bush announced Negroponte's nomination as Ambassador to the UN shortly after coming to office, it was met with widespread protest. Questioned at the time about whether he had turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras, Negroponte rejected the suggestion. "I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy …To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras," he said. [16]

Despite the protests, the Bush administration did not back down and even went so far as to try to silence potential witnesses.

On March 25 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings. (1)

One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In the preceding month, Washington had revoked the visa of Discua who was Honduras' Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Nonetheless, Discua went public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16.

Upon learning of Negroponte's nomination, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch in New York commented: "When John Negroponte was ambassador he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed. One would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights by this appointment".

In interviews recorded with CNN in September and October 1997, Negroponte argued the case that events in Central America at the time needed to be seen in the context of the cold war. "It was a central American domino theory if you will: so that if it happened at first in Nicaragua then in El Salvador and if they (communists) succeeded in El Salvador, then presumably they would try to finish off the situation in Guatemala, which was rather ripe at the time, you may recall. And then maybe Honduras would have fallen of its own volition, without necessarily even having to make that much effort. That was the theory in any case, and it seemed a plausible hypothesis at the time," he said. [17]

He insists that US officials were advocating democratic reforms even though they had to work with repressive regimes. "We were all extremely focused on encouraging the electoral process in each of these countries. Certainly in El Salvador. ... Some of these regimes, to the outside observer, may not have been as savory as Americans would have liked; they may have been dictators, or likely to [become] dictators, when you would have been wanting to support democracy in the area. But with the turmoil that [was there] it was perhaps not possible to do that," he told CNN.

"So I don't think there was any thought on our part of supporting authoritarian behavior for some short-term expediency. To the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform," he said.

He also argues that claims that he and others ignored human rights abuses is a case of people rewriting history. "…Frankly I think that some of the retrospective efforts to try and suggest that we were supportive of or condoned the actions of human rights violators is really revisionistic," he claimed.

Negroponte not only defends the actions of the US at the time but argues that the alternative was worse. "But I think on balance if you look back at what we did, I think a good case can be made that there was actually less suffering in Central America as a result of the actions the United States took than there would have been if we had just folded our arms and done nothing," he told CNN.

Grenada

As for his role in or knowledge of the invasion of Grenada, Negroponte claims that he only became aware of it after it had occurred. "I was not involved and I don't remember much, but I remember one thing very vividly, which was that I basically learned about the invasion of Grenada from the president of Honduras," he told CNN'.

"In 1987, during the administration of George Bush the elder/(George Herbert Walker Bush), Negroponte returned to the NSC to work under Colin L. Powell as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within two years, he was back in Latin America; Bush appointed Negroponte ambassador to Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and directed, among other things, U.S. intelligence services to assist the war against the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas," Foreign Policy In Focus reported. [18]

"In 1996, when Negroponte was sent to Panama as the U.S. negotiator regarding military bases, the Human Rights Research Center of Panama objected. Negroponte, they said, covered up human rights abuses and, according to the BBC, 'knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives.' In a 1997 roundtable gathering at the Center for International Policy, Sun reporter Cohn noted that Negroponte was central to the human rights violations. Said Cohn, "He was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on."

Since 1997 Mr. Negroponte had been Executive Vice President for Global Markets of The McGraw-Hill Companies [19]

Right-wing defenders of Negroponte argue that he was correct, claiming that the defeat of leftist insurgencies has lead to more than a decade of stable democracies in Central America that today right-wing death squads are only to be found in countries like Columbia, where violent and terroristic left-wing insurgencies continue. But in fact Colombia has one of the longest histories of Negroponte-style counterinsurgency operations in the western hemisphere. If brutal repression were indeed likely to breed stability, Columbia should be expected to be "more" stable than other countries. Moreover, the "stability" that prevailed in Central America during the 1990s may have been merely a pause in the long history of cyclical political violence that has characterized Latin America for more than a century. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development:

Over the past several years, the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, encompassing Central and South America and the Caribbean, has faced increasing development challenges that threaten the national security and economy of the United States. Contracting economic growth rates, extensive poverty, unemployment, skewed income distribution, crime and lawlessness, a thriving narcotics industry and a deteriorating natural resource base continue to undermine the stability of the region. Civil unrest due to poor economic conditions threatens countries in Central and South America while political instability in Colombia, Venezuela, and Haiti continues unabated. Mediocre economic performance has caused per capita income in LAC countries to decline significantly since 1998 while poverty has increased. Roughly 44% of Latin Americans are now poorer--up from 40% in 1999, while 20% suffer extreme poverty. Unemployment has risen to more than 9%, higher than the 1980s level. These woes have brought discontent and political turbulence, raising questions about the health of democracy in the region, investment priorities, social sector policies, and the benefits of a decade of liberal reforms. [20]

Recent examples of political and institutional instability in Latin America and the Caribbean include the following:

Appointment to the United Nations

Negroponte was sworn in as United States Representative to the United Nations on September 18, 2001.

In November 2002, it was Negroponte that was U.S. point man steering a compromise resolution through the United Nations Security Council stepping up the pressure on Iraq. "As we have said on numerous occasions to Council members, this Resolution contains no 'hidden triggers' and no 'automaticity' with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA, or a member state, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12. The Resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. And one way or another, Mr. President, Iraq will be disarmed," he told the Security Council.

He also delivered a warning to other less hawkish members of the Security Council too. "If the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of a further Iraqi violation, this resolution does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq, or to enforce relevant UN resolutions and protect world peace and security, he said. [21]

Negroponte faced contention over U.S. intentions during the U.N. debate leading up to the war in Iraq. In March 2003, Negroponte "walked out ... after Iraq's ambassador accused the United States of trying to exterminate the Iraqi people. ... Iraq's U.N. envoy Mohammed Al-Douri charged that the United States had arranged for contracts to rebuild Iraq in 1997, six years before the U.S.-led war began [on March 19, 2003, and] had even planned the carving up of Iraq before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990." [22]. Once again, the matter of humanitarian aid was at issue. Al-Douri, described as nearly "spluttering", said that the "United States now was using the issue of humanitarian aid to hide its 'criminal aggression.' ... The Iraqi envoy urged the Security Council to halt the war in Iraq, saying ending the conflict was even more important than getting humanitarian assistance into the region." [23]

"'Britain and the United States are about to start a real war of extermination that will kill everything and destroy everything,' Al-Douri warned. 'And then their regret will be of no use. ... If the humanitarian issue is very important, it is more important' to halt the war, he said." [24]

Negroponte in Baghdad

Shortly after taking up the position, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that two eyewitnesses had stated that in late June Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi had personally executed up to six suspected 'insurgents' in front of four of his U.S. military bodyguards. Allawi's office denied the witness accounts stating that Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

In an email to the Sydney Morning Herald, Negroponte did not attempt to deny the story. "If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed," he wrote. [25]

Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Alan Ramsey, wrote of Negroponte's side-stepping. "Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte's record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing ... This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1000 American 'foreign service officers', plus American advisers 'salted throughout Iraqi ministries' as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq. Of course 'the case is closed', he wrote. [26]

Spook supremo

On Feb. 17, 2005, the White House announced that it "nominated John Negroponte as the first US director of national intelligence." And that "Mr Negroponte will take primary responsibility for delivering the president's daily intelligence briefing, Mr Bush said - and will set budgets for the intelligence agencies." [27] What has not been announced is whether he will forego his current "ambassadorship" position in Baghdad, or if he will fulfill both functions.

A Man of Leisure

On March 3, 2006, The Congressional Quarterly ran an article [28] stating that Negroponte was not exactly overwhelmed by his duties as DNI: "On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library." CQ speculates that he does not really have much control over the nation's Intelligence Community, and that the Department of Defense is more or less doing whatever it wants.

Affiliations

Related articles

External links

Retrieved from "http://localhost../../../j/o/h/John_Dimitri_Negroponte_48a8.html"

This page was last modified 03:31, 5 January 2007 by dKosopedia user Corncam. Based on work by dKosopedia user(s) Dmsilev, Allamakee Democrat and Lestatdelc. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.


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