As watered-down as the 9/11 Commission reports had to be in order to make bi-partisan “consensus”, one especially important recommendation still shone through as being imperative to reign in the demonstrably inept nature of American governmental intelligence bureaucracy, this being the creation of the new Cabinet-level “Intelligence Director” post.  This person will oversee the FBI, Pentagon, and CIA, coordinating intelligence between all three and (crucially) with budget-making abilities, making the post obviously a very powerful one and a very important one in terms of the decisions being made.  The Bush Administration, led (as it so commonly is) by the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon, opposed the creation of this post for weeks, and then “flip-flopped” under election pressures.  You might say he “voted for it before he voted against it.”  That said, I’m glad he changed his position to what I believe to be the “better” decision for the security of our country, and for reducing the power of the competing agencies, none of whom have leaders I can say I have much faith in to make pragmatic and non-ideological decisions based on the facts at available (i.e. such as those which led to 9/11.  Nice one, Condi).

However, a week or so ago, President Bush announced his selection for this important and extremely powerful position: John Negroponte.  There is much that is truly and horrifyingly absurd about a society such as ours, a society in which there is widespread “outrage” and literally hour upon hour of media coverage (including an actual apology from the “perpetrator”) devoted to cosmically irrelevant incidents such as the brief exposure of an aging/has-been celebrity’s breast during a highly popular football game (“Oh my God! You can’t show the human body when we’re all, as an assuredly-otherwise-perfect family, trying to enjoy apes bashing one another apart, albeit interspersed by extremely well-produced and entertaining lies about products and services!”), but little more than formal acceptance from the politically-“engaged” and almost total ignorance from the general public on the appointment of a true war criminal to high-position with-in the government of our own country, the United States (aka the “Almighty God’s gift” to people all over at least one known planet).  Its no secret why the media provides sketchy-at-best coverage of this man’s history, as it is the predictable consequence of the way in which our media functions, with-in the free market model, to limit the scope of debate in our country in the educated/political classes to with-in a preconceived institutional framework.  As for “the proles,” there’s simply just not much very entertaining about this man, who has never even made an embarrassing “scream” to a crowd of supporters, let alone been caught in a sex scandal, or using illegal “drugs” etc.

Instead this man was our ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration’s illegal aggression against the popularly supported Sandinista government of Nicaragua.  He was known in Honduras as “the proconsul’, a title given to powerful administrators in colonial times.  In Honduras, proconsul Negroponte’s task was to supervise the bases where a terrorist mercenary army – the Contras – was trained, armed and sent to overthrow the Sandinistas.  Negroponte assisted in the increase of United-States military funding to Honduras at a time Honduran military units and death squads, some trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, carried out kidnappings, torture and killings, all of which Negroponte has denied knowledge of despite what would have had to amount to total incompetence and/or utter stupidity on his part in that case, given the role he played during his time as our envoy.  Our actions in Nicaragua, coordinated from Honduras, included the mining of harbors, and other acts of guerilla warfare, often against “soft” (ie civilian) targets via our support of the brutal Contras (“freedom fighters” in many of the same ways that Reagan called the militant Islamic “Mujahadeen” in Afghanistan) destroyed a country that finally was providing for its own citizens, leaving it now a dependent democracy, the second poorest country in the hemisphere (behind Haiti, another major target of US intervention).

In 1984 Nicaragua took its case against the U.S. to the World Court in the Hague, where we were convicted of “unlawful use of force,” which we were ordered to terminate and pay substantial reparations for.   Washington ignored the court, then vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions affirming the judgment and calling on all states to observe international law.  When a country has veto power against any resolution opposing its will (such as those which provided the supposed “legal grounds” for our invasion and hegemonic quasi-usurpation of Iraq), how can we be said to be held to any course of action at all, save for that which we use our own might to impose?  It is a fact that in the Nuremberg trials, what was a punishable crime was decided to be any atrocity that the Axis powers committed but the Allies did not.  Regardless, taking the standards set at the most famous and important of all war-crimes tribunals, every US president since Truman would have been hanged.

As direct result a result of the actions taken by Negropente and his superiors (many of whom either serve, or are the immediate mentors of those who currently serve in the Bush administration) about 60 per cent of Nicaraguan children under age two are afflicted with anemia from severe malnutrition – only one grim indication of what is hailed as a victory for democracy.  Civilian deaths have been estimated at tens of thousands – proportionately, a death toll “significantly higher than the number of US persons killed in the US Civil War and all the wars of the 20th century combined,” writes Thomas Carothers, a leading historian of the “democratization” of Latin America, who incidentally also served in Reagan’s State Department.  These actions (along with a generally unspoken-of litany of others), of course, by definition, are merely the result of, at most, “misguided benevolence” or “blundering attempts to do good” on our part.  No matter how many thousands die, our leaders are never to be held accountable – this question is out of the realm of debate.  The world suffered few tragedies “worth” acting upon in recent years, because, unless it somehow serves our overall interests (something that can’t be said for the unfortunate 1,000,000 Rwandans macheted to death while we did little more than “ensure the safety of our own citizens”) to use the citizens of other countries as symbols of our exalted benevolence in the midst of our strategic plotting, American life is inherently worth infinitely more than the lives of any being ever to inhabit Planet Earth (save of course for those being(s) who are “fully man” but also “fully God” and fully “Holy Spirit.”)  To act as if this were not the case would take little more than for people to be educated, stop holding up false dogmas, break the unwritten rules of what simply “is and is not” talked about (or when/how things are talked about) and to not “do as the hypocrites do” but instead to apply the same standards for behavior that we impose on our official enemies upon ourselves and our allies.

The irony is Negropente’s other major recent post (the one usually mentioned in the media) was as envoy to the U.N. during the run-up to the war in Iraq, where-in he presented the trumped up and/or false “evidence” (aka “intelligence”) of the weapons of mass destruction that were our original supposed reason for invading that country (incidentally causing the deaths of roughly 100,000 people, primarily with our bombs).  This man is now our Intelligence Director.  “Feast on that.”

G’Night Folks.

By : Joe Zamarelli