NO ONE WEPT FOR THE CONG:

Negroponte and the escalation of death (Dahr Jamail , 1/11/07, Asia Times)

[T]he transfer of Negroponte into the State Department comes conveniently just as the announcement of the escalation of troops in Iraq is planned. Bush needs someone with experience in managing escalations and he needs look no further than this man. It is Negroponte who oversaw the implementation of the "Salvador Option" in Iraq, as it was referred to in Newsweek in January 2005.

Under the "Salvador Option", Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980s, retired Colonel James Steele. Steel, whose title in Baghdad was counselor for Iraqi security forces, supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi'ite militias in Iraq, to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance.

Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq. Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies that turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was Negroponte. And it is this US-backed sectarian violence that largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today.

Under president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, where he played a major role in US efforts to topple the Nicaraguan government. The political history of Negroponte shows a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human-rights abuses, and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence.

In Honduras he earned the distinction of being accused of widespread human-rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights while he worked as "a tough Cold Warrior who enthusiastically carried out president Ronald Reagan's strategy", according to cables sent between Negroponte and Washington during his tenure there. The human-rights violations carried out by Negroponte were described as "systematic".

The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Records document his "special intelligence units", better known as "death squads", composed of CIA-trained Honduran armed units who kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Negroponte had full knowledge of these activities while making sure US military aid to Honduras increased from US$4 million to $77.4 million a year during his tenure. Under his watch, civilian deaths skyrocketed into the tens of thousands.

Negroponte has been described as an "old-fashioned imperialist" and got his start during the Vietnam War in the CIA's Phoenix Program, which was responsible for the assassination of some 40,000 Vietnamese.

At roughly that time, Steele was commander of the US Military Adviser Group in El Salvador. He also smuggled weapons to the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua and lied about it to the Senate Intelligence Committee, as documented in the final report of the Iran-Contra special prosecutor.