A Consumer Of Intelligence?

I was wondering what possible experience an Ambassador and diplomat could have that would make him qualified to be the newly established Director the National Intelligence Agency. But I see now. He's an experienced consumer of intelligence ... a consumer folks!

Bush picks Iraq envoy to be new spy chief: printer friendly version: "At 65, Negroponte, whose first foreign posting was in Vietnam, has spent 41 of the past 45 years in government service, serving in senior posts at both the State Department - as ambassador to the United Nations, Mexico, the Philippines and Honduras - and at the White House, where he was deputy national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan.

'I trust his judgment and I look forward to working with him,' Bush said of Negroponte, adding that his service since last June had provided the ambassador with 'an incalculable advantage for an intelligence chief: an unvarnished and up-close look at a deadly enemy.'

Bush said Negroponte's most important qualifications included not only his long experience as a consumer of intelligence but his savvy as someone who 'understands the power centers of Washington.' The latter is an attribute that many intelligence officials say may prove particularly important in a job whose most immediate priorities may include arbitrating disputes between the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "

Now, months ago (when I still had that nightmare of a commute to Monterey everyday), when Negroponte was selected to be the Ambassador To Iraq, I listened to an interesting segment on Democracy Now tenture as Ambassador to Honduras.

[...] President Bush announced he was appointing John Negroponte to head up the U.S. embassy in Iraq. Perhaps the two events are just a coincidence, or maybe the Hondurans know something most of the world hasn't been told. And that is the record of John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s.

Negroponte currently serves as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But it is his reputation as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 that earned him a reputation for supporting widespread human rights abuses and campaigns of terror. As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina.

According to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military. In a 1995 series, Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

In the hearings on Negroponte's appointment to his current post as UN ambassador, he was questioned by Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff members on whether he had acquiesced to human rights abuses by death squads funded and partly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. "To this day," he said, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."
[...]

While it went virtually uncontested, it seems that Sister Laetitia Bordes, a Catholic nun with the society of Helpers, a Catholic community of woman, was none too thrilled about his appointment:

SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: I'm filled with sadness. I'm filled with fear. I fear that the people of Iraq, because I feel that John Negroponte certainly is not concerned about the democracy of Iraq. I think that John Negroponte is concerned about his reputation. He is an expert in counter insurgency tactics. We see that in his background. And John Negroponte will stop at nothing. At nothing.

So now, the death squad diplomat, will be a key advisor to the President while the new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, will be his subordinate. Wow! I wonder what he did, in less than a year in Iraq, to merit daily access to the Commander in Chief.?