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“NOMINATION OF JOHN NEGROPONTE TO REPRESENT THE U.S. AT THE UNITED NATIONS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S9461-S9464 on Sept. 14, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
NOMINATION OF JOHN NEGROPONTE TO REPRESENT THE U.S. AT THE UNITED
NATIONS
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon at this late hour on Friday at the close of a terrible week--a week which has seared itself into our very being for the rest of our lives--to object to the approval of John Negroponte to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
I understand an agreement was reached that this nomination be passed on a voice vote today. It has been made, and certainly I will honor and respect the agreement. However, I believe this nomination deserves a full debate on the Senate floor and a full look into the record of this individual who is about to represent all of us in the United Nations.
I understand and I agree that America needs a U.N. ambassador. We do need someone there, especially given the terrorist attacks on our Nation this week, in terms of an international dialog and international response to this terrorist attack. But I believe it is also important that all Senators be given an opportunity to vote on this controversial nomination and to debate it.
Why is Mr. Negroponte's nomination so controversial? Why did the Baltimore Sun, in April of this year, devote a five-part series just on this one nominee? Well, I think there are two considerations that stand out in my mind, and I will explain why I oppose his nomination.
First of all, Mr. Negroponte showed a callous disregard for human rights abuses throughout his tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras between 1981 and 1985, during which time I traveled to Honduras and, in fact, went out to one of the contra camps with the Ambassador at that time. Quite frankly, in my conversations at that time in Honduras, and with the later revelations of what was going on with Battalion 316, which was supervised and basically trained by our CIA and our military personnel--when a lot of these issues came to light, it became clear to me that during my trip there I was misled and, quite frankly, not given the correct information that I sought.
Secondly, I believe Mr. Negroponte knowingly misinformed the U.S. State Department about gross human rights violations in Honduras and throughout Central America during the height of the so-called contra war in Central America in the 1980s.
That action, in turn, resulted in the Congress being misled as to the scope and nature of gross human rights violations that were being committed by the contras and by the Honduran military and, in particular, Battalion 316 in the Honduran military.
In a letter to The Economist in 1982, then-Ambassador Negroponte wrote:
It is simply untrue that death squads have made appearances in Honduras.
Yet from 1981 to 1984 over 150 people disappeared, including one American priest, Father James Carney, whose body has never been recovered.
All indications are it was Battalion 316 that took custody of and had control over Father Carney. There had been reports that they interrogated him, that he was severely tortured and killed--he was an American citizen, an American priest--during the time of Mr. Negroponte's ambassadorship.
I am not saying in any way he was responsible. I do not want anyone to get that wrong. All I am saying is as Ambassador at that time, there is a lot of evidence to show he just turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the human rights abuses at that time in Honduras.
The 1997 CIA Inspector General's report and other official records, as well as extensive research published in numerous books and articles, have implicated Mr. Negroponte personally in condoning and covering up egregious human rights violations during his service in Honduras in the 1980s. Read the five-part series that was in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 and later amplified this year. That lays out the case quite clearly.
Is he really the best nominee President Bush could find to represent our Nation at the United Nations? I think not. I guess what bothers me more than anything else is, as we move ahead seeking to get other nations to support us in our efforts to uphold human rights around the world, he does not bring clean hands to this critically important and senior diplomatic post.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following articles be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks: An April 16, 2001, Los Angeles Times editorial headlined ``Hard Questions for U.N. Nominee''; a Sunday, April 8, 2001, editorial written by Frank Del Olmo, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times; a Thursday, April 19, 2001, editorial written by Father Joseph Mulligan, a Jesuit priest from Detroit who has been working in Central America since 1986; an April 2, 2001, editorial from In These Times of the Institute for Public Affairs, and a list of 150 people who disappeared in Honduras from October 29, 1981, to May 30, 1985.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See Exhibit 1.)
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I understand agreements were made. I wish we had a fuller debate on this nominee. I want the record to show if, in fact, there was a record vote on this nominee, this Senator from Iowa would have voted no.
I thank the President, and I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
Hard Questions for U.N. Nominee
Under normal circumstances, President Bush's nomination of a veteran U.S. diplomat like John D. Negroponte to be ambassador to the United Nations would be a routine matter. Negroponte is well regarded in the State Department and close to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Senate approval would be all but certain.
But while Negroponte's 37-year career in the foreign service has admittedly been an impressive upward arc of increasingly important ambassadorships, it was not routine. It would be a mistake for the Senate, and particularly for the Committee on Foreign Relations, to treat Negroponte with kid gloves.
To be sure, Negroponte's diplomatic career has been marked by noteworthy accomplishments. He handled sensitive embassy posts quite effectively, most notably Mexico City in the years leading up to the North American Free Trade Agreement and Manila following the collapse of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos' regime. But Negroponte's career also includes some troubling activities that took place in Honduras during his tenure as ambassador there, between 1981 and 1985.
Those were the years when President Ronald Reagan ordered the CIA to launch covert activities against the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. The key element of Reagan's anti-Nicaragua strategy was a guerrilla war waged by a puppet army based in Honduras and known as the Contras. It was composed largely of former soldiers of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, whom the Sandinistas had ousted. With such unseemly allies, the Contra war was immediately controversial, and Congress imposed limits on how the CIA could wage it.
Among other things, Congress insisted that before a small nation like Honduras received massive increases in military aid (from $4 million a year to $77 million during Negroponte's tenure alone) that the U.S. Embassy there had to verify that the notoriously corrupt Honduran army would use the money properly. The Honduran security forces were not, for instance, to use the money to pursue political dissidents or otherwise violate the human rights of their fellow citizens. Congress even required annual human rights reports on Honduras to ensure that its mandate was being carried out.
The human rights reports that Negroponte signed off on during his tenure in Honduras need to be carefully reviewed by the Senate. For while he routinely reported few violations by the Honduran government, it has since become public record, through declassified government documents and reputable reports in the U.S. and Honduran press, that the Honduran military was indeed engaged in some very brutal activities in support of the Contras and U.S. policy.
Honduran officials have documented the disappearance of as many as 184 Honduran citizens, not just political dissidents but innocent civilians who may have been mistaken for dissidents, during that period. Most of these kidnappings and murders were carried out by a secret, CIA-trained Honduran army unit known as Battalion 316. The Senate should probe deeply regarding how much of this activity Negroponte was aware of and whether he hid what he knew from Congress.
The Contra war was an ugly and inconclusive affair--but brush-fire wars usually are. And no one is suggesting that Negroponte bears all, or even most, of the blame for whatever excesses may have taken place in Honduras. But he had a legal obligation to truthfully inform Congress of what was happening in Honduras in support of U.S. policy. If Negroponte did not live up to that obligation, it calls into question his suitability for an important post at the United Nations.
The Senate must not approve Negroponte's nomination without asking him some very tough questions and putting his tenure in Honduras under renewed and thorough scrutiny.
____
Is Negroponte Clean Enough for the U.N?
(By Frank Del Olmo)
We're eyeball to eyeball with the Chinese, talking tough to the Russians and not talking to North Korea at all. It's back to the Cold War.
Call me parochial, but what has me shivering after a brief but chilly visit to Washington is how the Bush administration is reviving the old U.S.-Soviet standoff in a part of the world where I spent my crazy youth as a correspondent: Central America. And if you loved how the Bushies tossed those alleged Russian spies out of the country, wait until you see what's for dessert. Warmed over Contras!
Or, to be more precise, a warmed-over Contra paymaster, John D. Negroponte, who has been nominated to be ambassador to the United Nations.
You remember the Contras--the CIA-funded guerrillas who waged a futile war to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua, until the Nicaraguan people simply voted the Sandinistas out of power. Even those poor Central Americans, it turned out, know how democracy works. But more on the Contras later.
It is no longer news that most of the men (doesn't National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice know any women she can suggest for some of these jobs?) President Bush wants to put in key positions on his foreign policy team are Cold Warriors from the days of presidents Reagan and Bush the First. But some of the guys being hauled out of cold storage have worrisome histories that Congress needs to revisit before punching their tickets. We can start with Negroponte.
During his 37-year career with the State Department, Negroponte has held several sensitive embassy jobs in Asia
(Vietnam, during the war, and the Philippines in the 1990s) and Latin America (Mexico, in the years leading up to the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Honduras, during the start of the Contra war against neighboring Nicaragua). It is Negroponte's tenure in Honduras, from 1981 to 1985, that the Senate needs to consider.
I traveled all over Central America in those days, knew Negroponte and members of his staff and have no illusions about anyone who was involved in those brush-fire wars. Some ugly things were done on both sides in the same of national security--from assassinations to wholesale massacres. It was quite literally a bloody mess, and Negroponte was in it up to his elbows.
Just how deep we don't know because Negroponte's involvement in convert U.S. activities in Honduras has never been fully investigated by Congress, even when the Mexican government protested Negroponte's 1989 appointment to run the U.S. Embassy there. Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari wanted NAFTA so badly that he probably would have accepted any U.S. ambassador. Knowing that, Congress stamped Negroponte's passport after some token questions about Honduras.
Since then, however, much more has become public, largely because of an excellent, but insufficiently recognized, series of articles published by the Baltimore Sun in 1995. Through interviews with former Honduran soldiers and some of the people they kidnapped and tortured, the articles laid out in gruesome detail the activities of a CIA-funded death squad run by the Honduran military during the Contra war.
Those articles also made a credible case that Negroponte knew about the Honduran death squad, officially known as Battalion 316, and other covert operations taking place under his nose, and he ignored them. Worse, he may have lied to Congress about what he knew.
The Sun documents the fact that embassy staffers knew about human rights violations and duly reported them to their superiors in the embassy (including Negroponte) and Washington. Yet their annual human-rights reports to Congress did not reflect what they knew was going on all around them. In just one of the less egregious cases (no one was killed), the 1982 year-end report to Congress asserted there had been
``no incident of official interference with the media'' that year. Yet in June 1982, Negroponte had personally intervened with the Hondurans to free a prominent journalist, Oscar Reyes, who had been arrested and tortured by Battalion 316 for a week. The ambassador did so at the behest of his embassy's press spokesman, who warned Negroponte: ``We cannot let this guy get hurt. . . . It would be a disaster for our policy.''
The Sun series should be reread by every member of the Senate before Negroponte comes before them for confirmation later this spring. Better yet, the Foreign Affairs Committee should move beyond what one gutsy newspaper did and thoroughly review any and all still-classified documents that might shed light on just what Negroponte knew about Battalion 316 and the wider Contra war, and when he knew it.
Negroponte is, after all, the guy Bush wants in New York to lecture the Chinese and Cubans about human rights. We ought to be sure they won't have reason to laugh in his face when he does.
____
What Did Negroponte Hide and When Did He Hide It?
(By Joseph E. Mulligan)
Managua, Nicaragua.--As the Senate considers the nomination of John D. Negroponte to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, it is important to look at charges that, as ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte suppressed information about the Honduran military's human rights violations. This is a serious matter. What is the evidence?
According to a 1997 CIA inspector general's report, U.S. officials in Honduras were aware of serious violations of human rights by the Honduran military during the 1980s but did not adequately report this to Congress. A heavily redacted version of the report notes particularly that the U.S. Embassy suppressed sensitive data during Negroponte's time there.
I am especially concerned about the disappearance of two U.S. citizens--Father James ``Guadalupe'' Carney and David Arturo Baez Cruz--during Negroponte's tenure. Carney had come to Honduras in 1983 as a chaplain to a revolutionary group, which include Baez Cruz, a Nicaraguan American who had served in the U.S. special forces. The group was captured by the Honduran army, and Carney ``disappeared'' along with nearly all of the 96 members of the group.
U.S. officials eventually gave Carney's chalice and stole, turned up by the Honduran army, to his relatives. But the army never explained the circumstances of the priest's death, suggesting only that he probably starved in the mountains. Five years later, in 1988, the New York Times reported that a former officer of the Honduran army sad he personally had interrogated Carney. Carney's body has not been found, and the people responsible for his death have not been identified. Whether any U.S. agents or officials were involved in his disappearance remains an open question.
In a section with repeated references to the capture and execution of Jose Maria Reyes Mata, the political leader of the group, the CIA inspector general's report cited a source whose name has been blacked out who ``believes that the embassy country team in Honduras wanted reports on subjects such as this to be benign to avoid Congress looking over its shoulders.''
Reporting murders, executions and corruption, says the source, would ``reflect negatively on Honduras and not be beneficial in carrying out U.S. policy.'' The embassy seemed particularly sensitive to reports about the operation in which the two U.S. citizens disappeared, the report said, quoting another source as recalling ``a discussion . . . circa 1983 wherein the latter indicated that unspecified individuals at the embassy did not want information concerning human rights abuses . . . to be disseminated because it was viewed as an internal Honduran matter,'' This is corroborated by an Aug. 19, 1985, handwritten memo declassified by the State Department ``Fr. Carney case . . . is dead. Front office does not want the case active. . . . We aren't telling that to the family.''
The CIA report cites another person whose name has been deleted as explaining ``the basis for no further reporting on the prisoner executions--the event had been reported previously and there was concern on the part of Negroponte that over-emphasis would create an unwarranted human rights problem for Honduras.'' Among his conclusions, the CIA inspector general states: ``The ambassador was particularly sensitive regarding the issue and was concerned that earlier CIA reporting on the same topic might create a human rights problem for Honduras. Based on the ambassador's reported concerns, [blacked out] actively discouraged [blacked out] from following up the information reported by the [blacked out] source.''
It was up to members of Congress to determine whether Honduras had a human rights problem. But Negroponte denied the facts needed for their judgment.
____
In From the Cold War; Bush's Pick for U.N. Ambassador Has Some Spooky
Stuff on His Resume
(By Terry J. Allen)
Like spooks from an abandoned B-Movie graveyard, officials of the Reagan-Bush era are merging from the dirt and showing up inside the George W. Bush administration. The latest resurrection is John Negroponte, whom Bush recently nominated as ambassador to the United Nations.
As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte abetted and covered up human rights crimes. He was a zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador. The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras. U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million in 1989 to
$77.4 million by 1984. So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground.
The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote in the series, Battalion 316 used ``shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.'' Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras. Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces who personally directed Battalion 316, also trained in the United States at the School of the Americas.
Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of U.S. involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that ``some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic.''
By the time Negroponte was appointed ambassador by President Reagan in 1981, human rights activists in Honduras were vocally denouncing abuses. Former Honduran congressman Efrain Diaz Arrivillage pleaded with Negroponte and other U.S. officials to stop the abuses committed by the U.S.-controlled military. ``Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence,'' Diaz told the Sun. ``They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.''
Negroponte ignored such protests, and annually filed State Department reports from Honduras that gave the impression that the Honduran military respected human rights. But in an interview with In These Times, Negroponte's predecessor as ambassador, Carter appointee Jack Binns, tells a different story: ``Negroponte would have had to be deliberately blind not to know about human rights violations. . . . One of the things a departing ambassador does is prepare a briefing book, and one of those issues we included [in our briefing book] was how to deal with the escalation of human rights issues.''
Binns considered the U.S. support for Alvarez and Battalion 316 ``counterproductive'' to the declared objective of
``establishing a rule of law.'' This lack of enthusiasm, Binns says, led to ``my being cut out of the loop'' by the Reagan administration, which he served for several months before Negroponte took over. In the summer of 1981, Binns recalls, ``I was called unexpectedly to Washington by Tom Enders, the assistant secretary of state. He asked me to stop reporting human rights violations through official State Department channels and to use back channels because they were afraid of leaks.''
As Binns explains, back-channel messages ``don't officially exist. The message is translated over CIA channels, decrypted and hand-carried from Langley, one copy only. No record.''
Binns did not agree to use back channels and when he returned to Honduras, he received no further reports of human rights violations from the CIA. ``I was deliberately lied to,'' says Binns, who later found out that Reagan administration had been working behind his back.
Honduras was only one of many hot spots where Negroponte served. He spent four years as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during the height of the Vietnam War. As an aide to then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Talks, he fell out of favor with his boss, wrote Mark Matthews in a 1997 article in the Sun, ``by arguing that the chief U.S. negotiator was making too many concessions to the North Vietnamese.'' Negroponte also served in the Philippines, Panama and Mexico, where he was a strong booster for NAFTA.
Rumored to have been Colin Powell's pick for the job of U.N. ambassador, Negroponte has a reputation as a loyal bureaucrat and efficient fixer. He also has a Cold War mentality characteristic of many of the old Reagan-Bush people surrounding the new president.
The lessons Negroponte has learned from the past may shed light on what kind of U.N. ambassador he will be if his nomination is approved by the Senate. When he appeared in 1981 before a Senate committee for confirmation as envoy to Honduras, he said, ``I believe we must do our best not to allow the tragic outcome of Indochina to be repeated in Central America.''
The tragedy to which he referred, of course, was the defeat of the United States, not the devastation and death caused by U.S. intervention.
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Disappearances in Honduras During Amb. Negroponte's Tenure, October 29,
1981-May 30, 1985
1981
Eduardo Anibal Blanco Araya, November 14, 1981; Yolanda del Carmen Solis Corrales, December 11, 1981; Francisco Fairen Garbi, December 11, 1981; Alfredo Duarte, December 20, 1981; Jose Frech Guiterrez, December 20, 1981; Jose Francisco Rivera Miranda, December 22, 1981; Victor Hugo Alas Herrera, December 24, 1981.
1982
Maria Ediltrudis Montres Giron, January 24, 1982; Julio Cesar Zavala Mendez, January 24, 1982; Samuel Perez, January 24, 1982; Enrique Lopez Hernandez, January 24, 1982; Nelson Mackay Chavarria, February 21, 1982; Guadalupe Carillo Coleman, June 11, 1982; Eduardo Coleman Martinez, June 11, 1982; Reynaldo Coleman Martinez, June 11, 1982; Amado Espinoza Paz, June 12, 1982.
Adan Villanueva, June 12, 1982; Hans Albert Madisson Lopez, July 8, 1982; Jose Saul Godinez Cruz, July 22, 1982; Jose Eduardo Becerra Lanza, August 1, 1982; German Perez Aleman, August 18, 1982; Teresa de Jesus Sierra Alvarenga, August 31, 1982; Rafael Antonio Pacheco, September 1, 1982; Hector Hernandez, December 24, 1982; Jose Celestino Medina, December 24, 1982.
1983
Casimiro Castellanos, Exact day unknown, 1983; Pedro Jose Amador Meza, January 22, 1983; Maria Martha Ventura Garcia, February 17, 1983; Dolores Geraldina Garcia Zelaya, February 25, 1983; Melba Caceres Mondragon, March 15, 1983; Jose Martinez Vasquez, March 17, 1983; Filiberto Flores Zuniga, April 13, 1983; Victor Manual Torres Lopez, April 13, 1983; Luis Alonso Romero Ortiz, April 24, 1983; Daniel Velasquez Nunez, May 4, 1983.
Jose Eloy Torres Barahona, June 1, 1983; Victor Manuel Ramos, June 10, 1983; Jose Amilcar Mardiaga, July 1, 1983; Marco Antonio Marin Aguilar, August, 1983; Ramon Adonay Bustillo Jimenez, September 9 1983; Pablo Roberto Munguia, September 28, 1983; Mario Mejia Mateo, October 1, 1983; Jose Melanio Valle Alvarado, October 1, 1983; James Francisco Carney (Father Guadalupe), December, 1983; Juan Batista Canales H., December 15, 1983.
1984
Marcelino Moncada Bustamante, February 18, 1984; Gustavo Adolfo Morales Funes, March 18, 1984; Rolando Vindel Gonzalez, March 18, 1984; Francisco Garcia, July 9, 1984; Francisco Osorto, July 9, 1984; Alberto Garcia, July 9, 1984; Elsa Marina Perdomo, August 12, 1984; Juan Alberto Villeda, September 25, 1984; Luis Ramon Blandon Zeas, September 28, 1984.
Elman Luis Cortes Seiza, September 28, 1984; Marcia Mercedes Chamorro Morales, October 5, 1984; Estanislao Vasquez M., October 22, 1984; Joaquin, October 22, 1984; Reynaldo Caceres Lopez, October 28, 1984; Estanislao Martinez Lopez, October 31, 1984; Maritza Cubillo Molina, November 4, 1984; Jose Isabel Salgado, November 20, 1984; Jose Eduardo Lopez, December 24, 1984.
1985
Rose Nelly Matamoros, January, 1985; Jesus Reyes Escobar, March 24, 1985.
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