February 19, 2005

“In Honduras, Mr. Negroponte ‘looked the other way’ when evidence of rights violations came to light, said Reed Brody, counsel to Human Rights Watch,” reports the New York Times. “‘Unfortunately,’ Mr. Brody said, ‘today the United States is involved in serious human rights crimes committed in the process of collecting intelligence. Is he just going to look the other way again?’”

Negroponte hardly “looked the other way,” in fact he was an avid organizer of human rights violations and other crimes in Honduras. Reed Brody need only read the Wikipedia entry on Negroponte—and Wikipedia is hardly a leftist propaganda mill—detailing Negroponte’s hands-on participation:

Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the U.S., and which some critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site…. Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a “death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and the Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including U.S. missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

“With his well-documented record in Central America, Negroponte is certainly the right man to represent the Bush regime in Iraq,” Toni Solo wrote in May, 2004. “He is the very model of a totally Teflon torture manager. The fact that neither Congress nor mainstream media ever grill Negroponte seriously on his record in Honduras does much to explain the catastrophe in Iraq. We can try and hide the truth about ourselves in the attic like the portrait of Dorian Gray. But the ugliness and the horror remain there all the same.”

And Negroponte is now the “right man” to serve as director of national intelligence. His curriculum vitae is chock full of experience as a torture and death squad facilitator and this is not a problem for the Senate, if the remarks of John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia are any indication. “People grow and change over 20 years,” Rockefeller told the New York Times.

Rockefeller did not clarify his remark. Did he mean to say Negroponte is now akin to Mother Teresa or has he simply honed his skill at organizing death and torture squads and covering up his criminal behavior?

http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Millions of White House e-mails may be missing, White

House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.

 

"I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost," Perino told reporters.

 

The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top presidential

advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National Committee e-mail

that the White House said later disappeared.

 

The latest comments were a response to a new report from a liberal watchdog group,

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleging that over a

two-year period official White House e-mail traffic for hundreds of days has vanished

 -- in possible violation of the federal Presidential Records Act.

(Watch CREW's comments on the missing messages )

 

"This story is really now a two-part issue," CREW's Melanie Sloan told CNN. "First

there's the use of the RNC e-mail server that's inappropriate by White House officials

and secondly we've also learned that there were between March of 2003 and October

of 2005 apparently over 5 million e-mail that were not preserved and these are e-mail

on the regular White House server."