Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record

Media Advisory (2/22/05)

George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a country that was being used as a training and staging ground for the CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who relied on a terrorist strategy of targeting civilians. Those years saw a massive increase in U.S. military aid to Honduras, and Negroponte was a key player in organizing training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the armies that the United States was building in order to topple the socialist Nicaraguan government (Extra!, 9-10/01).

Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal: the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular reporting of such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports of Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been acknowledged, U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which could have jeopardized the Contra operations. <snip>

The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News (2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against Nicaragua." The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel death squads." <more>

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2452