When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 2004 by Dennis Hans

Remember Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, the Islamist movement that misgoverned the failed state of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001? He and the Taliban played host to Osama bin Laden, providing him and his al-Qaeda organization a safe haven from where they could plot terror attacks and train recruits who came to Afghanistan from every corner of the globe.

Well, it turns out that Mullah Omar has much in common with John Negroponte, the veteran U.S. diplomat who has become our new ambassador to Iraq, where he'll oversee the largest embassy and CIA station in the world.

Up till now, the most important foreign posting in Negroponte's career was to Honduras. From 1981 to '85 he was the most powerful figure in that nation perhaps as powerful as Mullah Omar would one day be in Afghanistan. Long before Omar welcomed and protected bin Laden and alQaeda, Negroponte arranged for Honduras to provide bases and sanctuary for a terrorist group every bit as deadly: the Nicaraguan contras.

President Ronald Reagan hailed the contras as "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." But contemporaneous reports by reputable human rights groups gave the lie to that line.

Precise body counts are hard to come by, but the contras may well have killed more defenseless souls in the 1980s than al-Qaeda has killed in its decade of terror--albeit one slit throat at a time, sometimes with the victim's wife and kids looking on, rather than 3,000 blown up one day in New York and 2,000 another day in Africa, among other al-Qaeda atrocities.

Negroponte was dispatched to Honduras in 1981 to replace U.S. Ambassador Jack Binns, who had provoked the wrath of the Reagan administration with his concerns over escalating torture and killings by Honduran security forces. Clearly, Binns was not the man to supervise what would soon become the largest U.S. embassy in Central America and the transformation of a large swath of Honduras into a sanctuary and training ground for killers.

Reagan's unstated policy toward Nicaragua in 1981 was "regime change," although he pretended that the actual goal was halting an alleged flow of Weapons of Minimal Destruction. With Congress strongly opposed at that time to regime change, presidential honesty was not an option.

Small arms allegedly flowed from Nicaragua, overland through Honduras and on to El Salvador, where Marxist guerrillas had the audacity to resist a U.S.-backed military dictatorship that, in 1981 alone, killed perhaps 15,000 civilians. But in another parallel to the present, the arms flow was largely illusory, particularly by the time Negroponte arrived in Honduras.

The contras were led by former officers of the Nicaraguan National Guard --itself a terror-prone, U.S.-trained outfit that had killed 30,000 to 40,000 civilians from 1977-79 in a vain attempt to prop up our longtime client dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The guard's roots and cutthroat tactics prevented the contras from functioning as a true guerrilla force, where you live among the people you're ostensibly liberating and rely on them for food, shelter and information. Hence, the need for a sanctuary, without which the contras couldn't have lasted a month.

With it, the contras terrorized for a decade. Reliant on the United States for everything--arms, intelligence, assassination manuals--they would rampage through rural Nicaragua for a spell, then retreat to their safe haven where they would continue to rape, torture and murder, albeit at a more leisurely pace than within their beloved homeland.

Negroponte's pretend job was to implement the pretend U.S. policy of promoting Honduran democracy. (Sound familiar?) His real job was to prevent any meaningful democracy and to ensure that key foreign policy decisions were made not by the democratic facade--the irrelevant Honduran president and legislature--but by Negroponte and the right-wing extremist who headed the armed forces, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez.

Negroponte oversaw a U.S. team that subverted, through bribes and other anti-democratic methods, not just Honduran institutions such as the army and news media, but contra-affiliated groups.

James LeMoyne reported in the June 7, 1987, New York Times on U.S. "support" for the Miskito faction of the contras: "Top Indian leaders and diplomats in Tegucigalpa [the Honduran capital] say that for the last five years, the CIA has relied on bribes, threats and the exile of selected Indian officials to prevent the Indians from choosing their own leaders, because it feared losing control of the Miskitos and also feared they might choose not to fight."

That was the reality behind the rhetoric of "promoting democracy," Reagan-style: thuggish tactics to prevent people from freely choosing their own leaders who would set their own course.

What will Negroponte's real duties be in Iraq? Will he be promoting a transition to genuine democracy or merely to a facade? Will the U.S. team he leads repeat the Honduran strategy of engaging in massive bribery and other dirty tricks to manipulate and subvert Iraqi institutions and individuals?