Before you breathe too heavy a sigh of relief that GWB avoided another Bernie Kerik moment by picking a diplomat for NID, take a walk down memory lane regarding John Negroponte's history as former ambassador to Honduras, and his questionable record regarding human rights. From Wikipedia:
From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.
Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US, and which 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 Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.
In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Óscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.
1. No one else would take the job. (MSNBC confirmed that several potential nominees turned Dubya down for the post). That left the administration to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic, moving their key Iraq guy back home. (Now they'll have to find a new sucker to take on the hornet's nest in Baghdad).
2. Iraq is a bigger mess -- or much more stable -- than we thought. Why would the administration yank its ambassador so soon? The Baghdad embassy will be America's largest, and at this point, one of its most important (if not the most important). Could the Bushies be raring for a pullout? And what frightening appointment awaits us as Negroponte's replacement? (Scary thought: Doug Feith is leaving his post at Defense in June, and he's nursed a long-time dream of remaking Iraq ... or worse, could a Wolfowitz ascendance, or even a Rumsfeld insertion be in the offing? That would certainly clear the way for Connecticut Joe to take the helm at the Pentagon...)
3. Porter Goss is in for a fight. Goss just yesterday was forced to admit that North Korea has the capability to become the world's largest nuclear supermarket (while he and Rumsfeld told the Senate that essentially, another al-Qaida attack on the U.S. is all-but inevitable). Now he will have to share the anti-terror spotlight with Negroponte, who has accepted a job that will make him, not Goss, the primary briefer to the president on intel matters, and who the president says will have some sort of budgetary authority (the Pentagon is likely to fight that last one). Still, many have described the NID job as as due for all the blame if something goes wrong, and none of the credit if nothing goes wrong. Question is, would he get more blame than Porter?
Negroponte does have the requisite qualifications for anything related to Bush: he's close to the family. Note this passage from MSNBC:
From 1997 to 2001, Negroponte was executive vice president for global markets at The McGraw-Hill Companies.
And of course, McGraw-Hill has longstanding, close ties to the Bush family that go back three generations.
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
