U.S. President
George W. Bush has nominated John Negroponte as the first director of U.S. national
intelligence.Negroponte, once he is
confirmed, will be responsible for overseeing all of the
intelligence gathering carried out by different U.S. agencies, including the CIA,
FBI and the armed forces.Until his
nomination, Negroponte was serving as the U.S.
ambassador to Iraq.He was also the U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations from 2001 until 2003, and played a key role in misleading the UN with
presentations of flawed or completely fictitious intelligence reports about
Iraq’s weapons capabilities that the Americans used to justify their illegal
invasion if Iraq.
Negroponte’s
appointment will make him the second person closely associated with torture who
has been promoted in the second term of the Bush administration. The exposure
of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, which the U.S. administration claimed was perpetuated by a
few rogue soldiers occurred while Negroponte was the U.S.
ambassador in Iraq.Last month, Roberto Gonzales, the lawyer who
wrote crucial White House memos authorizing the use of torture, was also
promoted to attorney general.
Negroponte is
perhaps most closely associated with the Iran Contra scandal of the 1980s; as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, he was
responsible for organizing the shipment of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras in
the hopes of toppling the Sandinista government.With the permission of the Honduran regime,
the Americans used Honduras
as a base not only to funnel arms to the Contras but also to train them.Honduran police and military officials, with
support from American military personnel, provided training on everything from
laying land mines and terrorizing civilian populations to torture.
During that era,
Negroponte made headlines for his close personal friendship with General
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the chief of the Honduran national police force and
the head of Battalion 316, a Honduran death squad responsible for the
kidnapping, torture and murder of hundreds of activists and opposition
leaders.The battalion was also
implicated in the murders of Sandanistas and FMLN members in neighbouring Nicaragua and El Salvador.During the Salvadoran truth commission
hearings of the 1990s, Martinez
was named as personally responsible for carrying out several assassinations of
high-profile FMLN leaders.The Honduran
regime, at the recommendation of Alvarez, gave the Americans permission to use Honduras as a
training base for the Contras.