Home > Negroponte’s dark past disqualifies him today
Attack-Terrorism Governments USA
The American public may take comfort in U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision last week to nominate John D. Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence (DNI). The position was created in response to recommendations put forth by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. It found coordination among the 15 different U.S. intelligence agencies lacking. The DNI will be tasked with mediating turf wars (between the CIA and FBI, among others), allocating funds and, perhaps most critically, preparing daily intelligence briefings for the president, something that will require Negroponte’s deciding what is worth mentioning and what is not.
These are huge responsibilities, and Negroponte seems well prepared to take them on. Currently U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte is a career diplomat with four decades of experience and a reputation for professionalism and loyalty. He is known to be tough and resilient, bureaucratically competent, and has bipartisan support. But elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East where the war on terror is being fought, the question is, At what cost will such competence come?
For many, Negroponte is a tarnished figure, compromised by the role he played in the Iran-Contra scandal and corrupted by the time he spent amid Central America’s "dirty wars" of the 1980s. He served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, and has been accused of abetting death squads, turning a blind eye to military torture, whitewashing State Department reports and lying to Congress. The cost of Negroponte’s competence, then, could be steep. That crucial gap between what to disclose and to withhold - so central to the new DNI post - is precisely where Negroponte faltered in the past, and what makes his nomination so unsettling today. The DNI job demands an independent mind and a strong will to cut through the chaff to get to the truth.
If Negroponte failed to convey the facts on the ground in Honduras because of ideology, or bureaucratic expediency, then he’s pretty much guilty of having shaped information to satisfy his political masters. Yet wasn’t avoidance of politically tainted intelligence precisely why the DNI post was created in the first place?
When Negroponte stepped onto the Honduran stage, Central America was on fire. Crackling with rebels, arms traffickers, drug runners and dictators, the region had become a newfound flashpoint for the cold war. The Sandinistas had already taken over Nicaragua and Marxist revolutionary movements were simmering in El Salvador and Guatemala. Honduras became a front in the Reagan administration’s confrontation with communism. On Negroponte’s watch, annual military aid to the small country of four million people jumped from $4 million to $77 million, turning a backwater banana republic into a key U.S. military ally and the eighth-largest recipient of American foreign aid.
A sizable share of that aid was spent terrorizing civilians, as hundreds of people, including students, journalists, lawyers, teachers, union leaders and activists were snatched off the streets of Tegucigalpa, never to be seen again. Tales of torture and murder began circulating; the families of the disappeared started making noise.
In 1995, The Baltimore Sun broke the Negroponte story in a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation. "Time and time again during his tour of duty in Honduras from 1981 to 1985," wrote reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, "Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran Army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing, and killing suspected subversives."
That unit, known as Battalion 316, functioned as a veritable death squad, using physical, psychological and sexual torture, and dumping the bodies of those assassinated into unmarked graves (a few of which were discovered in 1999). Though the Honduran press carried over 300 reports on these activities in 1982 alone, Negroponte has long denied knowing anything about Battalion 316. On several occasions he insisted there was no substantial evidence of torture or murder and that he had concealed nothing. Yet over the years the CIA’s own inspector general and numerous congressmen countered his claims of innocence. In response to the Sun investigation, Negroponte insisted that, "Compared to Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Honduras looked like a Jeffersonian democracy at the time." In a damning profile of Negroponte for The New York Review of Books, author Stephen Kinzer wrote that this vision of Honduras as a blossoming young democracy existed solely in the ambassador’s imagination.
Until five years ago, Negroponte was fast fading from public view. He retired from the Foreign Service and took an executive job at the publishing house McGraw-Hill. Then, in a surprise move, Bush nominated him as UN ambassador in early 2001. However, his confirmation hearings grew heated and dragged on as scrutiny over his record in Honduras resurfaced, so that he was only endorsed right after the Sept. 11 attacks. Having survived two high-profile hearings, he seems certain to pass the third, and dismisses allegations about his record in Honduras as "old hat."
How does his record matter? Other than the risk of Negroponte’s politicizing intelligence, his past will have an impact on what message the Bush administration wishes to send to a Middle East which it claims to want to democratize. The moral of Negroponte’s Honduran experiences are hardly reassuring in this regard. Many will associate Battalion 316 to the present U.S. policy of "rendering" and the holding of prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay. They will ask: Did the unit’s behavior find vague echoes in Abu Ghraib? Will tactics of military repression be glossed over in glowing reports of democracy on the make? Such questions are bound to arise with Negroponte in office, and his promotion suggests that ignoring human rights abuses actually pays off professionally.
More broadly, many will wonder if the U.S. intends to shake up the Middle East in the same destabilizing fashion it did Central America two decades ago. Bush does, after all, have a habit of recasting old narratives - the cold war gets grafted onto the war on terror, communism is reborn as Islamic fundamentalism. Are Iraqi insurgents the new Sandinistas?
Negroponte consistently paints himself as a great champion of the democratic process. On balance, he insists that conditions in Honduras improved in the 1980s because, above all, free elections took place. He has lately made the same arguments about Iraq. This makes him delusional or, worse, sinister; but either way far from realistic. And ignoring death squads is an awfully strange way of buttressing someone’s vision of freedom.
Kaelen-Wilson Goldie is on the staff of THE DAILY STAR.