Monday, February 28, 2005

The new DNI position is nothing but window dressing

The new DNI position is nothing but window dressing

From the commentry by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The liberties that Gonzales, Chertoff and John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) have taken with human rights are warning signs enough. The increased power that will be Negroponte’s under the recent intelligence reform legislation makes the situation still more worrisome.
The fact that the CIA and the FBI have been kept separate and distinct entities for very good reason—first and foremost, to protect civil liberties. But now, under the intelligence reform legislation, the DNI will have under his aegis not only the entire CIA—whose operatives are skilled at breaking (foreign) law—but also a major part of the FBI, whose agents are carefully trained not to violate constitutional protections or otherwise go beyond the law. (That is why the FBI agents at Guantanamo judged it necessary to report the abuses they saw.)
Both the 9/11 Commission and Congress proposed creation of an oversight board to safeguard civil liberties. Nice idea. But by the time the legislation passed last December, the powers and independence of the “Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board” had been so watered down as to be a laughingstock. For example, the Board’s access to information from government agencies requires the approval of the DNI and the attorney general, who can withhold information from the Board for a variety of reasons—among them the familiar “national security interests.” In addition, the Board lacks subpoena power over third parties. Clearly, if the Board does not have unfettered access to information on sensitive law enforcement or intelligence gathering initiatives, the role of the Board (primarily oversight and guidance) becomes window dressing. In short, the Board has been made lame before it could take its first step.
Source: from
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/hail_hail_the_gangs_all_here.php

Negroponte's A Carefully Crafted Deception
18 June 1995 -- The Reagan administration made the decision to reduce the emphasis that the Carter administration had put on (human) rights issues. The new policy was made clear to Ambassador Binns, a Carter appointee, after he repeatedly warned of human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In a June 1981 cable, Binns reported:
"I am deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations of political and criminal targets, which clearly indicate [Government of Honduras] repression has built up a head of steam much faster than we had anticipated."
The reaction was swift and unexpected. Binns was summoned to Washington by Thomas O. Enders, the new assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Thomas Enders, the assistant secretary of state who told Binns to stop reporting rights violations through normal channels and said it was crucial to keep U.S. aid flowing to Honduras.
"What we were attempting to do was, on the one hand, to maintain our ability to act in Central America. That is, our congressional authority to send economic and military aid, so we avoided direct public confrontations against the military in El Salvador and Honduras," he said.
Instead of telling Congress what was going on in Central America, the Reagan administration employed the State Department human rights reports as instruments to advance policy objectives.
"I was told to stop human rights reporting except in back channel. The fear was that if it came into the State Department, it will leak," Binns recalled. "They wanted to keep assistance flowing. Increased violations by the Honduran military would prejudice that."
"Back channel" messages are very secret communications, often in code, sent outside the usual distribution system and with very restrict circulation of who sees the information.

A dangerous truth confronted John Dimitri Negroponte as he prepared to take over as U.S. ambassador to Honduras late in 1981.

"GOH [Government of Honduras] security forces have begun to resort to extralegal tactics - disappearances and, apparently, physical eliminations ` to control a perceived subversive threat," Negroponte was told in a secret briefing book prepared by the embassy staff.

Time and again during his tour of duty in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives.
A 14-month investigation by The Sun, which included interviews with U.S. and Honduran officials shows that Negroponte learned from numerous sources about the crimes of the unit called Battalion 316.
Evidence that Negroponte lied to Congress and the American people:
The Honduran press was full of reports about military abuses, including hundreds of newspaper stories in 1982 alone. There were also direct pleas from Honduran officials to U.S. officials, including Negroponte.
A disgruntled former Honduran intelligence chief publicly denounced Battalion 316. Relatives of the battalion's victims demonstrated in the streets and appealed to U.S. officials for intervention.
---
Rick Chidester, then a junior political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, told The Sun that he compiled substantial evidence of abuses by the Honduran military in 1982, but was ordered to delete most of it from the annual human rights report prepared for the State Department to deliver to Congress.
Rick Chidester, was a junior political officer and was assigned in 1982 to gather information for the embassy's annual report on human rights, a task that usually fell to a junior officer.
Chidester, now 43 and a private businessman, said that while in Honduras, he interviewed human rights advocates and journalists who provided him with information that the Honduran military was illegally detaining, torturing and executing people.
"I had allegations about vans coming up to police cells and taking out people they [the Honduran military] didn't want ... and shooting them," Chidester said. "I had allegations that, as part of the interrogation techniques, torture was being used."
He said he included the allegations in his draft of the 1982 report.
A supervisor, who Chidester will not name, demanded proof - sworn testimony or photographs of torture victims. Chidester said he was admonished for basing his report on rumors when he was unable to produce such evidence.
Chidester said he argued that while he had not interviewed torture victims, the allegations came from too many credible sources to be ignored, and that the reports were not supposed to be limited to provable facts.
"While the State Department is not an investigative body, we're supposed to analyze political events and identify trends," Chidester said. "Our analysis is valuable, even if based on opinion and not admissible as proof in a court of law."
His arguments failed.
By the time the report reached the U.S. Congress, the serious accusations against the Honduran military had been removed. Allegations that remained were described as unsubstantiated or isolated abuses that had been dealt with swiftly by the Honduran government.
Those human rights reports consistently misled Congress and the public. For example, the State Department asserted falsely in its 1983 human rights report, "There are no political prisoners in Honduras. The reports to Congress were carefully crafted to convey the impression that the Honduran government and military were committed to democratic ideals. It was important not to confront Congress with evidence that the military was trampling on civil liberties and murdering dissidents. The truth could have triggered congressional action under the Foreign Assistance Act, which generally prohibits military aid to any government that "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021905C.shtml

Negroponte looked the other way to drug trafficking

Negroponte served as Reagan's Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. He was personally responsible for carrying out the Reagan administration's illegal policy of training and arming Contra rebels inside Honduras for the purpose of overthrowing Nicaragua's Sandinista government. He also oversaw the build-up of the Honduran military, while turning a blind eye to their campaigns of death, (drug trafficking), and torture.
This was a period when the Honduran military's notorious Battalion 316, trained by the CIA, killed or “disappeared" at least 184 political opponents. Hundreds of articles in Honduran newspapers reported on the brutality of the government's death squads. http://www.politicalstrategy.org/archives/001163.php

Casey appointed the high-ranking CIA official Duane Clarridge to be the de facto commander-in-chief of the contra war.

In August 1981 before the contra war even started, Clarridge flew down to Honduras, the country just north of Nicaragua, which had been selected as the base area for the CIA's contra war. Clarridge met with Honduran President Policarpo Paz García, military intelligence boss Col. Leonides Torres, and national police chief, Col. Gustavo Alvarez Martínez. These three men were already deeply involved in cocaine traffic. And they were connected to Honduras' main cocaine trafficker, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros.[1] "We don't know the extent of the Honduran military's involvement in drugs," a State Department official would later say. "But our educated guess is that all of the senior officials have knowledge, many are involved...and they are all reaping the profits."[2] http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/885/cia3.htm

The CIA offered large-scale (Contra) drug smugglers a simple deal: It would prevent U.S. drug and customs agencies from disrupting their cocaine traffic, if these traffickers would airlift and finance the flow of arms to the contras.In 1983, Vice President George Bush put the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operations under the control of the "national security" apparatus. In June 1983, the DEA office in Honduras was shut down, one month after thelocal DEA agent started investigating SETCO.Also in 1983, planes of Southern Air Transport (SAT--the CIA's newly "privatized" airline) were seen being loaded with cocaine in Barranquilla, Colombia (Washington Post, Jan. 20, 1987). SETCO and SAT were part of a larger air support network directed by "retired Air Force General" Richard Secord. After 1984, the contra operation was overseen by Donald Gregg, who for 30 years was a CIA official. In August 1982, he resigned from the CIA and accepted the position of national security adviser to Vice President George Bush, holding that position until the end of the Reagan Administration. The Enterprise continued to grow. By 1986, the CIA had at least 300 agents operating in Honduras.[3] In 1984, SETCO started receiving funds directly from the U.S. State Department. State Department testimony before congresssaid that the CIA approved giving funds to Matta's organization. Honduras' main cocaine trafficker, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros. In addition, it was reported that North gave SETCO other money from secret accounts.[1] According to Newsweek, by 1985, Matta's organization was supplying "perhaps one third of all the cocaine consumed in the United States." Honduras' main cocaine trafficker was Juan Ramón MattaBallesteros.[1] "http://www.dcia.com/doping.html

During the 1980s the Contras were putting as much cocaine onto the streets in the US as the Medellin Cartel. Yet, not a single case of any significance was allowed to go for prosecution against the Contras, as well as the heroin trafficker connected to the CIA supported Mujihideen in Afghanistan. After a DEA Agent in Tegucigalpa, Honduras documented that 50 tones of cocaine has been sent into the US by Honduran military people who has supporting the Contras, within months the DEA closed down the DEA office in Tergucigalpa.
Pres. Reagan in 1981 installed a highly compartmentalized organization separate from his National Security Council. He signed a top secret National Security Decision Directive #3 which established a new intelligence organization headed by VP Bush resulting in a separate spy agency within the White House. Oliver North's boss in the Iran-Contra debacle was VP Bush, the head of this White House covert action group. (Source: Loftus, John The Secret War Against the Jews, New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 49).

In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed William Casey to be the head of the CIA. Over the next years, the Agency greatly expanded its covert activities. One of them was a whole secret war. Former officers of the hated National Guard of Nicaragua's deposed dictator Somoza were hired by the CIA to attack Nicaragua. These were the so-called contras (short for counter-revolutionaries).

In 1982, Casey authorized "Black Eagle"--a secret operation to fund and supply the contras. Casey's plan was to develop a "private" network large enough to secretly arm, finance, and command a whole war--without openly involving official U.S. military forces or intelligence agencies. They called it "The Enterprise"--and it was riddled with "former" CIA officers and agents.

To fund the Enterprise, Casey and his representatives contacted governments, including the Israelis, Argentinians, the Sultan of Brunei, the Saudi monarchy, and the various CIA-dominated militaries of Central America. In exchange for all kinds of favors, these governments contributed arms, money, and trainers to the Enterprise. This whole operation was exposed during the Iran-contra scandal. But what was covered up during the Iran-contra hearings was that the Enterprise also relied heavily on drug-smuggling operations. The CIA offered large-scale drug smugglers a simple deal: It would prevent U.S. drug and customs agencies from disrupting their cocaine traffic, if these traffickers would airlift and finance the flow of arms to the contras. The CIA calls such deals "ticket punching. http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/885/cia3.htm

"The Independent Counsel concluded that: the Iran(/Contra) operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, and national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter."

"President [George H. W.] Bush, [on] December 24, [1992] granted pardons to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other individuals for their conduct related to the Iran-Contra affair. By pardoning these criminals, Bush was pardoning his own actions.
The kicker is that although a president has unlimited pardon powers, it is highly unusual to pardon someone before trial and conviction. (The best-known precedent was the Nixon pardon) Indeed, if Weinberger was allowed to stand trail, there is little doubt that Bush and Reagan themselves would have been indicted and perhaps impeached for their brazen usurpation of American and international law. http://www.politicalstrategy.org/archives/001163.php

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose

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