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Promoting the 'Ambassador of Torture': Bush Nominates Negroponte
for Intel Czar
The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Ward Churchill Speaks
Promoting the 'Ambassador of Torture': Bush Nominates
Negroponte for Intel Czar
As President Bush nominates Ambassador John Negroponte,
current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the first Director of
National Intelligence, we look back at Negroponte's bloody
history in Central America in the 1980s. [includes rush
transcript]
President Bush has nominated John Negroponte - the current
U.S. ambassador to Iraq - as the country’s first director
of national intelligence. Bush made the surprise announcement
at a news conference yesterday in Washington.
- President Bush, news conference, February, 18, 2005.
John Negroponte will have daily access to Bush as his primary
intelligence briefer and would have authority over the budgets
of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. He also will have the
authority to order the collection of new intelligence and
information sharing between agencies.
Creating the new top intelligence position was a central
recommendation of the 9/11 commission. It was included in
an intelligence overhaul bill that Bush signed into law in
December.
Negroponte has been ambassador to Baghdad for less than a
year. Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said he was
concerned "about the message we are sending to Iraq and
the rest of the world" by removing Negroponte from Baghdad
so soon after he took office in June.
Negroponte served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
from 2001 to 2004. But it is his time as ambassador to Honduras
from 1981 to 1985 that earned him a reputation for supporting
widespread human rights abuses and campaigns of terror.
He played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the
Contras who targeted civilians in Nicaragua and shoring up
a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During Negroponte’s
tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from 3.9 million
dollars to over 77 million. Much of this went to ensure the
Honduran army’s loyalty in the battle against popular
movements throughout Central America.
The Senate must confirm Negroponte to the new post of national
intelligence director. In his confirmation hearings as UN
ambassador in (2001) two-thousand-one, he was asked whether
he had supported human rights abuses by death squads, which
were funded and partly trained by the Central Intelligence
Agency. Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses
were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. He said,
"To this day I do not believe that death squads were
operating in Honduras."
- Peter Kornbluh, author of “The Pinochet File: A
Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.”
He is a senior analyst at the National
Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center
in Washington.
- Sister Laetitia Bordes, Catholic nun with the Society
of Helpers, a Catholic community of women. She is talking
to us from San Bruno California.
- Andrés Thomas Conteris, program director for Latin
America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-Violence
International. He is Co-Producer of “Hidden in
Plain Sight” He has promoted human rights throughout
Latin America for 25 years.
The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Ward Churchill
Speaks
The Governor of Colorado has called for his "termination."
Fox's Bill O'Reilly has attacked him consistently for weeks.
He says he won't apologize and he won't back down. We speak
with Ward Churchill, the professor at the center of the controversy
over free speech and academic freedom on college campuses.
[includes rush transcript]
We take a look at a controversy at the University of Colorado
that has captured national headlines and has sparked a debate
about academic freedom and free speech on college campuses
nationwide. At the center of the controversy is Ward Churchill,
a professor in the Ethnic Studies department at the University
of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is a well-known activist with
the American Indian Movement and author of a number of books
on genocide against Native Americans and the US government’s
COINTELPRO program.
The current controversy began in February with an article
published on the front page of the Hamilton College newspaper,
The Spectator. The College, which is located in upstate New
York, had invited Professor Churchill to speak at the school
in the beginning of February. The article highlighted statements
Churchill made in an essay about the September 11th attacks.
The essay was called “Some People Push Back; on the
Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Among other things, the
article said that many of the people killed in the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 were not innocent
civilians.
The passage that received the most attention was Churchill’s
labeling of the people described as a “technocratic
corps at the very heart of America’s global financial
empire” as “little Eichmanns.”
After the article in the school newspaper was published,
some Hamilton professors began to call for the college to
rescind professor Churchill’s invitation. Others defended
his right to free speech. The controversy quickly spread outside
of Hamilton, with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News repeatedly
attacking Churchill on his television program. On Feb. 1st,
Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university
calling for Churchill’s resignation. Owens also made
the same call on The O’Reilly Factor.
* Excerpt from The O’Reilly Factor with Gov. Bill
Owens, February 7, 2005.
That same week, The University of Colorado Board of Regents
voted to review all of Churchill’s speeches and writings
in order to determine whether there is cause for his dismissal.
And two days before Churchill was scheduled to speak, Hamilton
College withdrew the invitation citing security concerns.
Interestingly, the panel that Hamilton had originally asked
Professor Churchill to be on, was titled The Limits of Dissent.
On February 8, Churchill spoke about the controversy to a
packed crowd at the University of Colorado. Ward Churchill
joins us on the phone from Colorado.
* Ward Churchill, on the line from Boulder.
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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