BLAGAROON

TCD EMBRACES US EXECUTIONER-AT-LARGE



Trinity College Philosphical Society brought shame to Dublin this week by bestowing honorary membership on John Dimitri Negroponte, appointed Deputy Secretary of State by Buckfush last February in one of his out-the-door appointments as his term in the White House ends this year. Negroponte was in Dublin, Monday 17.11.08, prior to visiting Belfast.

Negroponte, born in London, 1939, son of a Greek-American shipowner, graduated from Yale University and has been a career diplomat since the 1960’s in several countries on behalf of the US State Department and also received several home appointments from the White House. Negroponte was active from !971-73 as an officer-in-charge for Viet Nam in the National Security Council. While in Viet Nam he associated with Richard Holbrooke who was later on Clinton’s fixer in Yugoslavia during the 1990’s brutal civil war there.

Negroponte’s more public appointments since were Ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, Assistant Secretary of State (Environment) 1985-87, Deputy Presidential Assistant, National Security Affairs,1987-89, Ambassador to Mexico, 1989-93, Ambassador to Phillipines, 1993-96, US representative at the UN from September 2001, and in April 2004, Ambassador to Iraq after the illegal US and British invasion; but his term as Ambassador in Honduras has attracted the most controversy and condemnation by human rights groups world-wide.

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became US President, Negroponte was appointed Ambassador to Honduras replacing Carter appointee, Jack Binns. Binns had been sending regular reports to Washington with serious complaints of human rights abuses by the Honduran Military which was led by Dictator, General Gustavo Alvarez Martanez. In public statements to newspapers at a later date, Binns declared that he had fully briefed Negroponte on these reports as he was leaving the US Embassy. Negroponte has claimed that he had no knowledge of these reports. A blatant lie, as he was a senior official in the State Department and the National Security Council since Viet Nam and would have been fully briefed in Washington before taking up his assignment in Honduras.

Binns also reported that Alvarez was receiving military assistance and training from the Argentinian military dictatorship which was in power in Buenos Aires at this time. The US was also involved in setting up the covert "Contra" terrorist militia which was used to attack neighbouring Nicaragua from Honduras at the behest of the CIA and the Reagan regime and as was revealed later was being financed by the illegal arms trade with Iran which became known as the "Iran-Contra Scandal".

Negroponte supervised the entire programme of planned subversion against Nicaragua and US military aid to the Honduran dictatorship which instituted its own ‘Death Squads’ in the form of “Battallion 3-16” and this outfit became equally as notorious as the Contras for brutality and mass murder. Negroponte organised the establishment of the US ‘El Aguacate’ air base in 1984 where the Contra gangs were trained for their murder missions and the base was also used as a detention and torture centre by the CIA and Honduran Dictatorship during the 1980’s. A Honduran Human Rights Commission, in 1994, documenting the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents in the previous decade, specifically accused Negroponte of complicity in a number of human rights violations. In 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses including two thought to be the remains of American missionaries who were opposing Washington’s policy at the time.

Battallion ‘3-16’ used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept prisoners naked--and, when no longer useful, killed them brutally, and buried them in unmarked clandestine graves. Women were raped, often in front of their families. Other prisoners were thrown alive from helicopters, a brutally inhumane tactic used by the Chilean and Argentinian military dictatorships from the 1970’s by officers and units trained at the notorious “School of the Americas” at the CIA’s headquarters in North Carolina.

Sister Laetitia Bordes, an American nun working in neighbouring El Salvador, went to Honduras in 1982 with a delegation to query the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women supporters who fled to Honduras in 1981 after the death-squad assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero the previous year. Sister Laetitia met with Negroponte at the US Embassy but reported that he claimed he knew nothing and advised them to meet with Honduran officials. The Hondurans referred them back to Negroponte.

The Baltimore Sun, in 1995, published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the paper "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." In a 1996 interview with the same paper, the former US Ambassador in Honduras referred to earlier, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans--including the women Sister Laetitia Bordes had been looking for--were abducted on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran secret police. They were later thrown out of helicopters while still alive. The Sun's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of these crimes, but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensure that the Embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story According to a 1996 BBC report, Negroponte "knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives." According to the Baltimore Sun report, Negroponte "was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on."

The Baltimore Sun reporters found that in 1982 alone, during Negroponte's first full year as ambassador, the Honduran press carried at least 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the military. The US Embassy, however, continued to certify the country's record on human rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that they were writing about Norway, not Honduras. Rick Chidester, a former aide to Negroponte, told the Sun that his supervisors had ordered him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of the 1982 human rights report.

UNDERMINING THE UN:

Negroponte was appointed as US Representative to the United Nations in September 2001 only days after the New York September 11 events. His tenure there consisted mainly of conditioning opinion to already hatched US plans for invading Iraq and seizing its oil resources under a puppet regime controlled by the US. Using a combination of bullying, intimidation, threats and alternatively, million dollar bribes of US aid, Negroponte tried to soften up likely opponents of the secret plans to invade Iraq. In November 2002, Negroponte was pushing the Security Council to impose sanctions on Iraq and declared. "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 Council.

This was a clear deception as the US had no intention of waiting for Security Council approval for military action against Iraq and Buckfush and Blairschmuck had already agreed between them to mount the invasion once the fake “intelligence” on “Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction” had been concocted for public consumption. The “New York Times” later reported (March 29, 2005) that "Mr. Negroponte pressed on foreign colleagues American intelligence on Iraqi weapons that turned out to be profoundly flawed. If he was miffed, Mr. Negroponte never spoke out." Negroponte showed only contempt for the UN and its procedures while he was there and made no positive proposals on any of the problems which came before the world body. When challenged by any criticism his only tactics were stonewall denials and failure to acknowledge any facts which were presented contradicting his cover-ups and moral relativism justifying US criminal acts on every continent.

GAULEITER OF IRAQ

Having accomplished his task at the UN, Negroponte was appointed as Ambassador to Iraq in April 2004, just a year after the brutal invasion which was to destroy the country’s infrastructure and result in the slaughter of more than a million of its citizens. It was business as usual in the Baghdad Embassy; intimidation, bribery, death squads and all the same abuses of human rights which have followed Negroponte throughout his career. Shortly after taking up the position, the “Sydney Morning Herald” reported that two eyewitnesses had stated that in late June, 2004 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 e-mail 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. Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Alan Ramsey, replied to Negroponte's evasions "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.

The disgrace and insult to the Irish people, who came out in massive protest against the US/Brit invasion of Iraq and its bloody consequences in March, 2003, is that this reprobate has been welcomed and received honours in one of our great centres of learning and promotion of the humanities, University of Dublin, Trinity College. Shame on the College Authorities for allowing this desecration of Dublin and our country’s long traditions of support for democratic government and peaceful relations between nations under the rule of law and the UN Charter.

FearFeasa Mac Léinn

Áth Cliath/DUBLIN, 19 Samhain/November 2008.