During an interview on December 5, 2007 by journalist Jim Lehrer, John Negroponte, deputy secretary of state since January 2007, mentioned his tenure in Iraq as the ambassador. When Negroponte began his stint as ambassador to Iraq in June 2004 he brought with him an extensive knowledge of defeating insurgents through the use of death squads. Having served as the Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte helped strengthen the dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, not to mention helping the Contras during the Nicaraguan civil war.
Negroponte was appointed by President Reagan, and replaced Jack Binn (Carter’s appointee). During his tenure as Ambassador to Honduras, Martínez’s death squads kidnapped and killed political opponents. Argentinian military advisors in Honduras trained the death squads, and helped create Contra forces in Nicaragua. Negroponte supervised the building of the El Aguacate air base where Contras were trained by the U.S. Critics claim it was sued to hold and torture detainees. A 2001 excavation of the base found 185 corpses that are believed to have been killed at the site. Two Americans were among the corpses discovered.
Jack Binn warned that killings were taking place, and America needed to take a stand about it. In a cable Binn reported that Martínez was modeling his death squads after Argentina’s dirty wars in the ‘70s. Binn claimed he thoroughly briefed Negroponte about the dismal human rights situation in Honduras.
The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the American embassy in Honduras compiled and submitted to the Senate under Negroponte contained the report that there were no “political prisoners in Honduras…the Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.” An official who served under Negroponte, Rick Chidester, says he was under orders to take out any mention of torture or killings in his 1982 draft of the human rights situation in Honduras.
In a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1982 the Honduran press printed 318 articles about kidnappings and killings by the Honduran military. A year later in a 1995 series an article detailed the Honduran army unit’s, Battalion 316, use of “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.”
The same article quoted ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, who said of Negroponte’s American embassy, “Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.” The Sun’s investigation uncovered that the CIA and US embassy know about the support given to Battalion 316. A 1997 Sun reporter said, “He was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on.”
Ines Consuelo Murrillo was tortured by Batallion 316 for 78 days. Among other heinous acts against Murrillo, her captors put wires on her body which were used to send electricity through her. She said, “It was so frightening the way my body would shake when they shocked me. They put rags in my throat so I would not scream. But I screamed so loud, sometimes it sounded like an animal. I would even scare myself.” The sad fact is that she is only one of hundreds of people kidnapped and tortured by Battalion 316 in the 1980s. Many of the bodies of those who were murdered have been discovered.
Sister Laetitia Bordes, another victim of the Honduran military, was a nun working in El Salvador who went to Honduras to find out where 30 El Salvadoran nuns and devout lay women were who had emigrated to Honduras after Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in 1981. Negroponte denied knowing anything about their disappearance. Binn said in an interview in 1996 that they were detained on April 22, 1981 and tortured by the Honduran secret police, then thrown alive out of helicopters.
Despite the evidence that death squads were operating in Honduras, Negroponte denied their existence throughout his tenure as ambassador. He wrote in a 1982 letter to The Economist that it was “simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.”
Negroponte was contacted by two American mercenaries in 1984 who wanted to give arms to the Contras after the Congress banned anymore aid to them, and according to documents Negroponte met with them. Nine months after meeting with the mercenaries it was exposed, but the Reagan administration denied there was any American involvement. More documents exposed a plan hatched by Negroponte and George H.W. Bush, then the Vice-President, to give money to the Contras via the Honduran government.
In 1996 Negroponte was sent to Panama as the negotiator for the U.S. regarding military bases. Human Rights Research Center of Panama objected because he “knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives,” according to the BBC.
Years later Negroponte talked about the American fear of communism spreading. He told CNN in 1997, “It was a central American domino theory if you will: so that if it happened at first in Nicaragua then in El Salvador and if they (communists) succeeded in El Salvador, then presumably they would try to finish off the situation in Guatemala, which was rather ripe at the time, you may recall. And then maybe Honduras would have fallen of its own volition, without necessarily even having to make that much effort. That was the theory in any case, and it seemed a plausible hypothesis at the time.”
Negroponte has never been sorry, as he said in another interview with CNN, “Some of these regimes, to the outside observer, may not have been as savory as Americans would have liked; they may have been dictators, or likely to [become] dictators, when you would have been wanting to support democracy in the area. But with the turmoil that [was there], it was perhaps not possible to do that.”
After Negroponte’s nomination as Ambassador to the United Nations was announced in 2005, and some protested it, Negroponte said, “I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy …To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras.”
As Ambassador of Iraq
Negroponte transferred his knowledge of death squads to Iraq during his tenure as ambassador. James Steele, Counselor to the U.S. Ambassador for Iraqi security Forces, was assigned to work with an Iraqi counter-insurgency group called the Special Police Commandos. Steele led the U.S. Military Advisory Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986 where he developed special operating forces made up of soldiers who attacked insurgent leaders, their supporters, their sources of supplies, and camps.
The Police Commandos began operations in October 2004. In mid-November insurgents had driven most of the police from Mosul. U.S. forces and Police Commandos began joint operations. They conducted raids where dozens of suspects were arrested. During raids of a tea shop and mosque suspects were seen being taken away blindfolded and handcuffed by Commandos. During the weeks and months that followed over 150 bodies, body parts in some cases, were discovered. The bodies were usually found in groups, with a clear sign of execution: bullet wounds to the head.
In January 2005, in the middle of his time as ambassador to Iraq, the Pentagon publicized that they were considering the “Salvadoran option.” This was a veiled reference to U.S. assistance given to the Salvadoran military death squads in the 1980s. According to freelance reporter, Dahr Jamail who spent five months in Iraq, the Salvadoran option consisted of Special Forces advising, supporting, and training Iraqi squads. “Members of these squads would be hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga militia and Shia Badr militiamen used to target Sunni resistance fighters and their sympathizers.”
A Washington Post article described present day Iraq as containing, “Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound.” The London newspaper The Independent reported that “hundreds of Iraqis each month are tortured to death or executed by death squads working out of the Shia-run Ministry of Interior.”
The former Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, John Pace, claimed that the U.S. is in violation of the Geneva Conventions by detaining thousand of innocent Iraqis. In an interview for Democracy Now Pace said, “They first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions. And they have - they had a considerable role to play in the [security] vacuum that was created by the invasion…So you have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions.”
When Pace was asked if there were death squads in Iraq he answered, “I would say yes, there are death squads…my observations would confirm that at least at a certain point last year and in 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador.”
On January 8, 2005 MSNBC reported that the Pentagon was “intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the US government funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually, the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success, despite the deaths of innocent civilians.”
Another January 8, 2005 story, this one by Newsweek, reported that Major General Mohammed Abdallah al-Shawani, Iraq’s National Intelligence Service director, saying that insurgents are “mostly in the Sunni area where the population there, almost 200,000 is sympathetic to them.” He added that the majority of Iraqis do not support the insurgents or give them aide, but will not turn them in. A military source was quoted as saying that the “new offensive operations” are needed in order to scare Iraqis from helping the insurgents, and adding that “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
After taking his position as Ambassador to Iraq Negroponte was asked if Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi had killed six men suspected to be insurgents in front of his U.S. military bodyguards, Negroponte did not deny it, although Allawi did. An email he sent to the Sydney Morning Herald in July 2004 said, “If we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed.”
An Iraqi newspaper, Al Ittihad, reported that the militant group named “Saraya Iraqna” began offering wads of American money on January 11, 2004, days after the Pentagon revealed its “new offensive operations.” The group is reported as saying, “Our activity will not be selective.” It is not a stretch of the imagination to label the group as part of the “new offensive operations.”
On May 5, 2006 a mass grave containing 14 bodies was discovered in Baghdad’s Kasra-Wa-Atash industrial area. All 14 bodies were those of young Sunni farmers on their way to the market. They had been blindfolded, handcuffed, and shot in the head. The bodies also showed signs of torture: broken skulls, burnings, beatings, and right eyeballs removed. Phil Shiner from the British group, Public Interest Lawyers, says the men were arrested when a market was raided by Iraqi security forces.
Ten days later 15 other bodies were discovered in two different Baghdad sites. Eight of the bodies were discovered in the Al-Shaab area, and the seven others in the Ore district. The Chicago Tribune reported that “some had been blindfolded, most were found with their hands bound and all had been shot in the head.” In the beginning of May, before the discoveries of the bodies, the Iraqi government announced that it was cracking down on insurgents, which would include commandos in Baghdad.
The Association of Muslim Scholars accused the soldiers and Interior Ministry commandos of having “arrested imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump in the Shaab district.” The Secretary General of the Association, Hareth al-Dhari, said “This is state terrorism by the Ministry of Interior.”
Twenty-six bodies were found at Rumana, close to the Syrian border. The victims, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, were part of a rapid response team, and were discovered in an area where the American army had conducted Operation River Blitz, an assault on insurgents in the Euphrates River valley. They were blindfolded, handcuffed, and shot in the head.
Late February of this year bodies began to be discovered in the Tigris River, particularly around Suwayra, one or two a day. This month has brought the discovery of more bodies, most of them men, but some women and children. The bodies have been discovered handcuffed, and either shot in the head or beheaded. A report on the website Jihad Unspun claims that American soldiers dumped body bags from helicopters into the Diali River in east Iraq.
A report submitted to the Brussels Tribunal called, “Tarmiya: The Silent Agony,” details an account by a farm worker who survived being kidnapped and almost executed by American special forces. Another worker and he were taken to a secluded area and had their throats cut. The account does not have corroboration and the farm worker remains anonymous, but sounds similar to missions that James Steele conducted when he served in Vietnam.
The Bush administration has made references to the El Salvadoran civil war, from which the “Salvadoran Option” gets its name. Cheney claimed during the 2004 Vice Presidential debate, “Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvadorand today, El Salvador is a whale of a lot better.”
Not to be outdone by Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld remarked while in San Salvador in 2004, “The Iraqi people can find much to admire in El Salvador’s recent history.” He went on to say, “For millions of Salvadorans back then, peace and prosperity was little more than a distant hope. In that struggle for freedom many lives were lost. I think they would be proud to know thatsoldiers from a peaceful and democratic El Salvador are today fighting alongside U.S. and coalition forces to help to secure freedom and prosperity for the people of Iraq.”
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Gina-Marie Cheeseman
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