The career criminal
The most important of the three appointments is that of Negroponte to the UN. Negroponte spent his entire working life in the service of American imperialism, participating in many of the bloodiest crimes of the post-World War II, including nine years as a State Department official during the Vietnam War and five years in Central America.
Much of his career itinerary reads like a dossier for some future war crimes tribunal:
* 1964-68, political affairs officer at the US Embassy in Saigon;
* 1969-71, aide to Henry Kissinger in the Paris negotiations with the Vietnamese;
* 1971-73, officer-in-charge for Vietnam in the National Security Council, under Kissinger;
* 1973-75, assigned to the US Embassy in Ecuador (he reportedly quit Kissinger’s staff, opposing the Paris settlement as too favorable to the Vietnamese);
* 1980-81, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs;
* 1981-85, ambassador to Honduras;
* 1987-1989, deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, reporting to Colin Powell;
* 1989-93, ambassador to Mexico;
* 1993-97, ambassador to the Philippines.
snip:
During Negroponte’s tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million. Maintaining this aid required the US Embassy to regularly certify that Honduras was in compliance with human rights requirements set down in American laws. Although Jack Binns, who preceded Negroponte as ambassador, had warned about the repressive measures undertaken by the military-controlled regime, Negroponte consistently denied the existence of death squads, political prisoners or politically motivated killings by the Honduran Armed Forces.
snip:
The American CIA created the infamous Battalion 3-16 to carry out the murder of Honduran political opponents of the Contra war against Nicaragua. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was the founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. According to a detailed investigation in 1995 by the Baltimore Sun, Battalion 3-16 kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of Hondurans. The unit used “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.”
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 extrajudicial attacks by the military. The US embassy, however, certified 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, revealed to the Sun that his supervisors had ordered him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of the 1982 human rights report. When one Honduran legislator complained about the US refusal to denounce the repression, Negroponte told him, “You and others, what you are proposing is to let communism take over this country.”
Significantly, several members of Battalion 3-16, long resident in the United States, were suddenly and swiftly deported after Negroponte’s nomination was announced. In February the State Department revoked the visa of General Discua, the founder of Battalion 3-16, who had been deputy ambassador to the UN for Honduras and stayed on in the US after his term expired. Discua responded by publicly confirming the US sponsorship of his death squad operation
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/cont-a01.shtml
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