Reply #8: Bush nominee linked to Latin American terrorism

[L. Coyote]

Bush nominee linked to Latin American terrorism
By Bill Vann - 24 November 2001
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/reic-n24.shtml

As the Bush administration exhorts governments throughout the world to line up behind its “war on terrorism,” it is pressuring the US Senate to push through confirmation of a nominee to a key foreign policy position whose own links to terror and an illegal CIA propaganda operation have raised concerns even among the usually docile Democratic leadership.

The name Otto Reich topped the list of 18 nominees submitted last month by Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is one of a group of veterans of the illegal covert wars fought by Washington in Central America under the Reagan administration in the 1980s who are now reassuming key posts in the US foreign policy establishment.

John Negroponte, as ambassador to Honduras during that period, played a key role in supplying and supervising the CIA-backed “contra” mercenaries who were based in that country, and whose US-funded operations claimed 50,000 lives. During the same period, Honduran military death squads, operating with Washington support, assassinated hundreds of opponents of the US-backed regime.

Negroponte was quietly installed as US Ambassador to the United Nations just a week after the September 11 attack. The irony of appointing an individual so deeply implicated in savage acts of state-sponsored terror to serve as a principal spokesman for an international war on terrorism passed without notice in the US media.

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