Negroponte and Reich are two of the three Bush administration appointees with direct operational roles in the Central American counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s. The third is Elliott Abrams, named as director of the office for democracy, human rights and international operations at the National Security Council, a White House position which is not subject to Senate confirmation. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, but was later pardoned by Bush’s father in 1992.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/cont-a01.shtml

Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras during the years when the right-wing Nicaraguan Contra forces were based in southern Honduras, just across the border from Nicaragua, supplied and armed illegally by the Reagan administration.
Abrams was assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs during that period and worked closely with Oliver North in organizing the illegal arms supplies to the Contras. Reich headed the Office of Public Diplomacy, a State Department agency which illegally funded pro-Contra propaganda both in the US and internationally.

The selection of Abrams is the most provocative appointment by Bush since his nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general.

It is a measure of the cynicism of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans that Abrams could be appointed to a high position with his record. They were willing to impeach Clinton as president for lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky, but no such standard applies to lies about an illegal US war which killed thousands of innocent people. Abrams, a collaborator with death squads, is now to be put in a high position with responsibility for addressing human rights issues!

Negroponte and Reich are equally odious figures, although less well known to the public because they did not become Iran-Contra defendants. Otto Reich, who left Cuba in 1960 at the age of 15, is a favorite of the fascistic anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami. His appointment was sponsored by the two Cuban-American congressmen from Miami, and by Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations at the time Reich was nominated.

The joint House-Senate select committee on Iran-Contra found that Reich’s unit of the State Department had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda” on behalf of the Contras and violated restrictions on State Department appropriations, but in keeping with the overall whitewash of the illegal activity, did not charge Reich himself with any specific offense. The agency was abolished and Reich was shipped out of Washington to a three-year stint as US ambassador to Venezuela, to avoid any further involvement in the scandal.

Among Reich’s other lobbying clients are the British-American Tobacco company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, which he assisted in the successful attempt to sell F-16 fighter jets to Chile, breaking a 20-year US policy of not selling high-tech weapons to Latin American countries.



"The most important of the three appointments is that of Negroponte to the UN. Negroponte spent his entire working life in the service of American imperialism, participating in many of the bloodiest crimes of the post-World War II, including nine years as a State Department official during the Vietnam War and five years in Central America."
Much of his career itinerary reads like a dossier for some future war crimes tribunal:


mr ed
heres a cute pre911 article, lest we forget...

"The most important of the three appointments is that of Negroponte to the UN. Negroponte spent his entire working life in the service of American imperialism, participating in many of the bloodiest crimes of the post-World War II, including nine years as a State Department official during the Vietnam War and five years in Central America."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/cont-a01.shtml

"Much of his career itinerary reads like a dossier for some future war crimes tribunal:"

this is the man just appointed to president of iraq. could it possibly end without tears?

the article is actually about the appointment of ottoreich, abrams and negroponte to the 43 admin... i wonder if the authors would have believed at the time that the overwhelmingly elected president of haiti would be kidnapped...

and ftr - honduras made the news today for the first time in i dont know how long - pulling out a significant number of peeps from iraq. (which prolly means nothing)

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but we were *saving* the village
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