Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
When that country did its best to keep Saddam in power while he was killing hundreds of thousands, and secretly profit from the situation, yeah.
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And that has what to do with Al Qaeda and the war on terror? Just about nothing.
If your point is that the French were supporting bad people, what do you make of the fact that John Negroponte, with
his record of support for -- or, at the very least, willfully turning a blind eye to -- Honduran death squads, is
the leading contender to be the ambassador to Iraq?
eta: More on Negroponte:
- ...Negroponte -- ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 -- was doing his best to make sure that news of torture, disappearances and killings by the U.S.-trained Honduran military didn't make it back to Congress or the American people, where it might discourage funding for the covert wars.
More than $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer money flowed to the Honduran military during the 1980s. The country served as the primary U.S. base for waging its clandestine wars against communism -- specifically in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The CIA trained and financed a Honduran army unit known as Battalion 316, which kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people. Negroponte denied knowing of the human rights violations though the abuses were widely publicized in the Honduran press. A CIA document declassified in 1998 and made available by the nonprofit National Security Archive, acknowledged that the Honduran military had committed abuses which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned.
"The focus of my efforts were in shoring up Honduras's own defenses," Negroponte said in a 1999 CNN interview. "So we worked on building up their military, and building their self-confidence. ... We served as a sort of rear area, if you will, on a modest scale for the efforts in El Salvador." Some 75,000 Salvadorans died in the civil war in that country.
more
Is he going to do for Iraqi democracy what he did for Honduran democracy?
