In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. As Fox News reports:

In a statement provided by the Clinton campaign, Negroponte touted the former secretary of state's "leadership qualities" in his decision. "She will bring to the Presidency the skill, experience and wisdom that is needed in a President and Commander in Chief," he said. "Having myself served in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960, I am convinced that Secretary Clinton has the leadership qualities that far and away qualify her best to be our next President."

Well, that's special, isn't it? And what did Negroponte do while serving "in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960"? I'm glad you asked.

In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country's murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)

Saul Loeb Getty Images

In A Very Thin Line, Theodore Draper's definitive account of the Iran-Contra scandal, Draper goes into great detail about how the Honduran government shook down the Reagan administration in exchange for allowing Honduras to be used as a venue for supplying the Contras in Nicaragua. Draper describes one episode in which Oliver North arranged for the Contras to get a shipment of sophisticated weapons from Red China via Guatemala and Honduras—Don't ask, Jake. It's Chinatown—only to have the Hondurans grab the shipment and essentially hold it for ransom until the U.S. promised Honduras $75 million in aid.

(And, yes, that's the same Oliver North who recently appeared on TV condemning the president for arranging to give the Iranians their own money back.)

In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte's tenure as ambassador in the early '80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that's one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte's work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of "death squad" operations by the Honduran military in the '80s.

In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. "Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on," is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. "These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue." It's unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

Negroponte's role as the Pontius Pilate of Central America didn't get any better, either.

In a Senate floor speech before Negroponte won confirmation, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said, "The picture that emerges in analyzing this new information is a troubling one." Summarizing the new documents from the State Department and CIA, Dodd said the evidence pointed to the fact that from 1980 to 1984, the Honduran military committed most of the country's hundreds of human rights abuses. The documents reported that some Honduran military units, trained by the United States, were implicated in "death squad" operations that employed counterterrorist tactics, including torture, rape, and assassinations against people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas in El Salvador or leftist movements in Honduras. Dodd criticized Negroponte's earlier Senate testimony. In response to questions about one of these units, Battalion 316, Negroponte had said, "I have never seen any convincing substantiation that they were involved in death squad-type activities."

"Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous," said Dodd. "I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte's unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987]," Dodd said.

As it happens, I've just finished reading an early copy of Eileen Markey's upcoming biography of Maura Clarke, one of the four American churchwomen raped and murdered by soldiers in El Salvador in 1980. These were the four women who Alexander Haig, that splendid nutball, said were killed trying to run a roadblock, and whom the late Jeane Kirkpatrick slandered as Communist sympathizers. The book is a vivid (if maddening) reminder of how the United States sold its moral credibility for a bag of magic jelly beans and the smiles of a fading actor. John Negroponte was in the middle of all of that. His endorsement should be as worthless as the promises he made to the Americans who came to him pleading for the lives of the people with whom they worked.

And if anyone thinks I'm going to drop this because Donald Trump is a crazy person, by all means, find another shebeen.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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