An endorsement that HRC should just not mention
By Charles P. Pierce
AUG 10, 2016
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In a statement provided by the Clinton campaign, Negroponte touted the former secretary of state's "leadership qualities" in his decision. "She will bring to the Presidency the skill, experience and wisdom that is needed in a President and Commander in Chief," he said. "Having myself served in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960, I am convinced that Secretary Clinton has the leadership qualities that far and away qualify her best to be our next President."
Well, that's special, isn't it? And what did Negroponte do while serving "in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960"? I'm glad you asked.
In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country's murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)
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In a Senate floor speech before Negroponte won confirmation, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said, "The picture that emerges in analyzing this new information is a troubling one." Summarizing the new documents from the State Department and CIA, Dodd said the evidence pointed to the fact that from 1980 to 1984, the Honduran military committed most of the country's hundreds of human rights abuses. The documents reported that some Honduran military units, trained by the United States, were implicated in "death squad" operations that employed counterterrorist tactics, including torture, rape, and assassinations against people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas in El Salvador or leftist movements in Honduras. Dodd criticized Negroponte's earlier Senate testimony. In response to questions about one of these units, Battalion 316, Negroponte had said, "I have never seen any convincing substantiation that they were involved in death squad-type activities."
"Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous," said Dodd. "I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte's unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987]," Dodd said.
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John Negroponte was in the middle of all of that. His endorsement should be as worthless as the promises he made to the Americans who came to him pleading for the lives of the people with whom they worked.
And if anyone thinks I'm going to drop this because Donald Trump is a crazy person, by all means, find another shebeen.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a47517/hillary-clinton-john-negroponte-endorsement/
It's not her fault he endorsed her, but he really is a shameful example of Republican "foreign policy" at its worst.
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