Past trailing intelligence nominee

[struggle4progress]

Intelligence czar nominee John Negroponte is still hounded by questions about what he knew of human rights violations while ambassador to Honduras.

BY MICHAEL DOBBS
Washington Post Service

WASHINGTON - It has been two decades since John Negroponte left his post as ambassador to Honduras, but the man President Bush has chosen to become the United States' first intelligence czar is still being hounded by human rights activists like Zenaida Velasquez.

Their paths first intersected in 1983, when Velasquez asked for the ambassador's help in tracing dozens of Hondurans, including her brother, allegedly kidnapped by agents of the U.S.-backed Honduran military. Little came of the meeting, and the disappearances continued for at least another year.

Over the years, Velasquez has gotten the CIA, an official Honduran ombudsman and an international human rights court to acknowledge that the Honduran army was responsible for her brother Manfredo's kidnapping and presumed killing. But Negroponte has repeatedly insisted that military-backed death squads did not operate in Honduras while he was ambassador. <snip>

A review of hundreds of declassified State Department and CIA documents suggests Negroponte was preoccupied with ''managing perceptions'' about a country that had become a key U.S. ally in a decade-long campaign to stop the spread of communism in Central America. The documents show he sought to depict Honduras in a generally positive light in annual human rights reports to Congress and played down allegations of government abuse. <snip>

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