George W. Bush’s choice of John Negro­ponte to be the first U.S. intel­li­gence czar sig­nals that Wash­ing­ton is head­ing down the same road that has led to ear­li­er Amer­i­can intel­li­gence fail­ures and con­tro­ver­sies — from politi­ciz­ing analy­sis to wink­ing at human rights abuses.

Although Negroponte’s nom­i­na­tion is expect­ed to sail through the Sen­ate, one ques­tion that might be worth ask­ing about his tenure as U.S. ambas­sador to Hon­duras from 1981 to 1985 is: ​“Were you obliv­i­ous to the Hon­duran military’s human rights vio­la­tions and drug traf­fick­ing, or did you just ignore these prob­lems for geopo­lit­i­cal reasons?”

Negro­ponte either over­saw a stun­ning­ly inept U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tion at the embassy in Tegu­ci­gal­pa — miss­ing major events occur­ring under his nose — or he tol­er­at­ed atroc­i­ties that includ­ed tor­ture, rape and mur­der, while slant­i­ng intel­li­gence reports to please his supe­ri­ors in Washington.

Whichev­er it is — incom­pe­tence or com­plic­i­ty — it is hard to under­stand how Negro­ponte, the cur­rent U.S. ambas­sador to Iraq, can be expect­ed to fix the intel­li­gence flaws revealed by the Bush administration’s fail­ure to con­nect the dots before the 9⁄ 11 ter­ror attacks or to avert the scan­dalous use of tor­ture on Mus­lim sus­pects cap­tured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the bipar­ti­san praise Negroponte’s nom­i­na­tion has elicit­ed, a clear-eyed look at his record sug­gests that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion intends to con­tin­ue mak­ing two demands on the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty: that ana­lysts wear rose-col­ored glass­es when assess­ing U.S. poli­cies and that field oper­a­tives turn a blind eye to atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by U.S. allies or Amer­i­can interrogators.

A his­to­ry of oversight

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 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 ambas­sador­ship also coin­cid­ed with the evo­lu­tion of the Nicaraguan con­tra forces from a small band under the tute­lage of Argen­tine intel­li­gence offi­cers into an irreg­u­lar army sup­port­ed by the CIA, and lat­er by a secret oper­a­tion inside the White House run by Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil aide Oliv­er North.

Recent rev­e­la­tions

Despite sev­er­al inves­ti­ga­tions into what became known as the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal, many doc­u­ments about Negroponte’s involve­ment remained clas­si­fied, out­side pub­lic knowl­edge. Some of that infor­ma­tion bub­bled to the sur­face in Sep­tem­ber 2001 when Negro­ponte was fac­ing con­fir­ma­tion to be Bush’s ambas­sador to the Unit­ed Nations.

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. ​“The Court found that ​‘a prac­tice of dis­ap­pear­ances car­ried out or tol­er­at­ed by Hon­duran offi­cials exist­ed between 1981−84’ … Based upon an exten­sive review of U.S. intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion by the CIA Work­ing Group in 1996, the CIA is pre­pared to stip­u­late that ​‘dur­ing the 1980 – 84 peri­od, the Hon­duran mil­i­tary com­mit­ted most of the hun­dreds of human rights abus­es report­ed in Hon­duras. These abus­es were often polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed and offi­cial­ly sanctioned.’ ”

How­ev­er, when Bush nom­i­nat­ed Negro­ponte to be ambas­sador to Iraq in 2004, Dodd and oth­er Democ­rats large­ly dropped their objec­tions. The Nation­al Catholic Reporter, which had cov­ered the right-wing per­se­cu­tion of Catholic cler­gy in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca dur­ing the ​’80s, was one of the few pub­li­ca­tions still ques­tion­ing Negroponte’s fitness.

In an April 2004 arti­cle, the mag­a­zine recount­ed a state­ment from Soci­ety of Helpers’ Sis­ter Laeti­tia Bor­des, who had gone to Hon­duras and approached Negro­ponte about the ​“dis­ap­pear­ances” of 32 women who had fled to Hon­duras after right­ist death squads in El Sal­vador assas­si­nat­ed Catholic Arch­bish­op Oscar Romero in 1980.

Lat­er, these women, includ­ing one who had been Romero’s sec­re­tary, ​“were forcibly tak­en from their liv­ing quar­ters in Tegu­ci­gal­pa, pushed into a van and dis­ap­peared,” Sis­ter Laeti­tia Bor­des said. ​“John Negro­ponte lis­tened to us as we exposed the facts. … Negro­ponte denied any knowl­edge of the where­abouts of these women. He insist­ed that the U.S. embassy did not inter­fere in the affairs of the Hon­duran government.”

The Nation­al Catholic Reporter not­ed, ​“Years lat­er, the Bal­ti­more Sun would reveal that Negro­ponte appar­ent­ly knew more than he was let­ting on. In fact, charge his many crit­ics, the ambas­sador over­saw an expo­nen­tial increase in mil­i­tary aid to the Hon­duran army, decep­tive­ly down­played human rights vio­la­tions, and played a key role in sup­port­ing the activ­i­ties of Bat­tal­ion 316, a CIA-backed Hon­duran-based region­al coun­terin­sur­gency unit sub­se­quent­ly found to be among the cru­elest of the cruel.”

Many con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats, as well as Repub­li­cans, con­sid­er those two-decade-old con­cerns about Cen­tral Amer­i­ca stale and irrel­e­vant to Negroponte’s nom­i­na­tion as the nation’s first Nation­al Intel­li­gence Direc­tor. But his tenure as ambas­sador to Hon­duras rais­es ques­tions not only about his moral judg­ment and integri­ty, but his capac­i­ty to assess infor­ma­tion and to ensure that polit­i­cal pres­sures don’t influ­ence intel­li­gence reporting.

As the first per­son cho­sen to hold this post — with over­sight respon­si­bil­i­ty for all U.S. intel­li­gence activ­i­ties — Negro­ponte might legit­i­mate­ly be expect­ed to rep­re­sent some­thing oth­er than tol­er­ance of death squads and politi­ciza­tion of intel­li­gence information.