Craig Murray is now the former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was suspended and then removed after a memorandum he sent to the Foreign Office was leaked. In it he complained that information gathered from tortured prisoners in Uzbekistan was being relayed by the U.S. to Great Britain and that it could be used to jail people in the United Kingdom. By accepting such information, he told his superiors "we are selling our souls for dross."

The British government did not deny that this kind of tainted information could be used, not did it claim that people were not being tortured there. Rather, efforts were made to minimize the problem by attacking the 46 year-old diplomat. Reports surfaced that he was giving out visas in return for sex, that he was drunk on the job, and that he had somehow abused an embassy car while driving it. An affair he was having with a 23 year old Uzbek hairdresser somehow made the news. In the end he received severance pay ( "redundancy payment") as well as a pension.

While the U.S. ambassador there praises the country’s advances toward democracy, Murray claims it remains a totalitarian state ruled by its old Communist boss, Islam Karimov. He notes that opposition parties were prohibited from participating in its previous election. Torture is routinely used there to obtain confessions. Ripping out nails and placing body parts in boiling water are known techniques there. CIA agents witness the torture of Uzbecs it has flown in (extraordinary rendition" via a "Ghost Plane" in from Afghanistan.

Murray claims the UK no longer has its own well-defined foreign policy and is content to be the best friend of the world’s only super power. As a private citizen, he plans to run for Parliament to remedy this situation and hold leaders of his own party responsible for helping to dummy up the case for the invasion of Iraq. Don’t look for anyone in the US foreign policy establishment to follow his example.

        For a time Admiral John Poindexter, of Iran-Contra notoriety, occupied a high profile position in George W. Bush's Pentagon, charged with operating a dubious intelligence gathering operation. Three of his appointments to foreign policy positions raised eyebrows. The Chief Executive obviously sought to reward those who sought to evade the law in the Reagan years. These appointments were made in his first term but appeared all the more ominous in the second, when there was much talk of reemploying the brutal and deadly strategies developed in Central America under Ronald Reagan.

 

     Three of Bush’s foreign policy appointments should have raised more than a few eyebrows in the press. The younger Bush became the first president to appoint a pardoned criminal to a high White House post. President Bush the Elder had pardoned Elliott Abrams, who had been convicted of two counts of lying to Congress. Abrams had been involved in the Iran Contra scandal, channeling illegal funds to the right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. This misguided policy produced 70,000 dead in El Salvador and 100,000 in Guatemala. Abrams denied the validity of reports about the El Mozote massacre, which claimed the lives of 700 unarmed people, including children, and was highly critical of reports of the UN truth commissions and Catholic human rights committees about the bloody results of U.S. policy in El Salvador and Guatemala. Under Bush the Younger, appointed Abrams senior director of the office for democracy, human rights, and international operations at the National Security Council. A half-way vigilant press would have publicized this case, and editors would have insisted that the price of rehabilitation should be providing a full and truthful account of all of his dealings with Lt. Colonel Oliver North in sending Iranian arms money to the Contra rebels in El Salvador. Two other Bush nominations should have raised questions about the administration’s intentions toward Latin America and concern for human rights. Otto Reich, who was head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1980s. Reich engineered the unsuccessful effort to oust President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, neand was subsequently for appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere by Senator Richard Lugar. John Negroponte was nominated to be ambassador to the United Nations. He was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 when Battalion 3-16, a U.S. trained death squad, was on the loose. Negroponte, had at his disposal a briefing book by his predecessor on Honduran military’s human rights violations. There were hundreds of stories about their bloody activities in the Honduran papers. Nevertheless, he quashed reports about their abuses and denied he had any information about these matters. Negroponte also helped arm Nicaraguan Contras who were working out of Honduras. The Los Angeles Times investigated his activities when Bush the Younger nominated him, but few other newspapers pursued the matter. Reich, a former teacher at the School of the Americans and another Cuban-American, took his orders from Lt. Colonel Oliver North in the National Security Council. Reich’s task was to plant materials in the press that would discredit the opponents of Ronald Reagan’s policies in El Salvador. The General Accounting Office reported in 1987 that Reich’s office had "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities…." He was never prosecuted. ¹

Central American human rights advocates protested when John Dimitri Negroponte was appointed the US national intelligence director. They claimed he had been involved in human rights abuses when he was ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. The mainstream press and leading Democrats generally praised the appointment and did not mention the charges against him. These matters were touched upon when he was confirmed first for Ambassador to the United Nations and then ambassador to Iraq. It is also claimed that he helped the Reagan administration circumvent the law banning aid to the Contras, right-wing rebels in Nicaragua.

It cannot be proven that Negroponte was directly involved in human rights abuses in Honduras. Jack Binns, his predecessor, left for him an extensive brief of mounting violence, but Negroponte ignored the warnings. In his time there, death squads killed dissidents, people disappeared, and others were beaten and tortured. Thirty nuns savagely beaten by the Honduran Secret Police ( DNI) sent to their deaths by being pushed out of helicopters. Negroponte helped form Battalion 3-16 ( or 316), which provided most of the death squads. The ambassador repeatedly gave Honduras good marks for its human rights record, praised its military, and denied that anything was amiss. Negroponte worked to thwart the families of three American victimed–one was Fr. James Carney–from learning what had happened to their loved ones.

Perhaps the U .S. administration thought it had no choice but to turn a deaf eye to the violence and repression. This was a time when the United States was using Honduras to train and supply the Contra rebels. Negroponte supervised the building the the El Aguacate base, where Contras were supplied and trained. Prisoners were tortured there and 185 bodies were later excavated..

A cable sent by Negroponte to the State Department in 1985 makes it clear that he knew about the death squads, which he called "secret operating cells." Yet he has continued to deny to Congress any knowledge of what was going on around him. He also denied that Vice President George H.W. Bush ever mentioned resupplying the contras when he visited the country after Congress banned further US involvement. Hondurans called him the "pro-consul" which suggests he was not far removed from what was going on in the country. When he was nominated to the UN post, two Honduran officers who could have testified were deported, and the former Honduran deputy ambassador to the UN was denied a visa that would have enabled him to come to Washington to share what he knew.

As national intelligence director, Negroponte will provide Bush with daily intelligence briefings and he will coordinate the activities of the nation’s fifteen spy agencies. Recently a former high ranking intelligence official reminded Seymour Hhersh that the U.S. had supported military hit squads in Central America in the 1980s and added, "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." In addition U.S. Special Forces "action teams" will operate in many countries on intelligence missions. A former military officer told Hersh, "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Will Negroponte inform Congress about these activities? It has just come to light that the CIA had used a Boeing 737 to transport detainees– chained to the floor– to various outposts for interrogation, often by brutal foreign intelligence services. One wonders if Negroponte will permit this practice to continue. Will he reign in the military intelligence officers and civilian intelligence contractors whose misdeeds at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have been documented? We know that he tolerated human rights abuses in the 1980s and years later continued to tell Congress that he knew nothing about these horrors. Are there circumstances under which he would fail to respect the rights of American citizens? Will he be truthful in the future when testifying before Congress?