Yes. I'll list a few articles on the subject. Comment however you want and feel free to add other articles.
Lets see here. One of the main figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, ordered the torture of catholic nuns, and helped kill hundreds of people merely because they wanted not to be ruled by a fascist regime? Attempting to rig human rights reports and intimidating human rights agencies?
Quite a character.
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/...ief/index.html
Bush names Negroponte intelligence chief
Thursday, February 17, 2005 Posted: 11:32 PM EST (0432 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Thursday nominated John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the first director of national intelligence.
Bush said that Negroponte would be his principal adviser on intelligence issues and would have authority over the budgets of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Negroponte also will have the authority to order the collection of new intelligence, information sharing between agencies and the establishment of common standards, Bush said.
"Vesting these in a single official who reports directly to me will make our intelligence efforts better coordinated, more efficient and more effective," Bush said.
"The director's responsibility is straightforward and demanding," he said. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike, we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise."
Negroponte, 65, has been the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq since June.
He was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004. (Profile)
Bush also announced that he's chosen Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, as Negroponte's deputy.
The intelligence overhaul bill that Bush signed into law in December created the intelligence czar position. The legislation sought to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission that investigated the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 panel, respectively, praised Negroponte as a "highly respected diplomat with a deep understanding of the world."
"His extraordinary knowledge of foreign policy and intelligence issues will serve him well in his new capacity," the two said in a written statement.
The job will be one of the the most powerful in the U.S. government. The Senate must confirm Negroponte, who called the post "the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service."
Bush said that Negroponte's skill as a diplomat would help him negotiate the jockeying between the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies.
He said that those agencies' existing chains of command would remain in place.
CIA chief to report to Negroponte
Bush said the relationship between the White House and CIA would be vital.
"The CIA will retain its core of responsibilities for collecting human intelligence, analyzing intelligence from all sources and supporting American interests abroad at the direction of the president," Bush said.
CIA Director Porter Goss, who would report to Negroponte, called the men "excellent choices."
"The nominations of Ambassador Negroponte and Gen. Hayden are welcome news and a critical step in continuing to strengthen our intelligence community and to create even better coordinated working relationships and communications between the agencies," Goss said in a press release.
Some critics have said that the intelligence director's duties and authority have not been spelled out clearly.
Shortly before the announcement, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Congress does not want to handcuff the director.
"I think the fact that all of the lines aren't crossed and every decision isn't made about what powers the [director of national intelligence] has is an advantage for the [director] because a vacuum invites power. I think it is much more important that the [director] be able to come in, he or she, in order to fill that out according to their own instincts," Rockefeller said.
"If we had prescribed in Congress each of the relationships between the agencies, I think that would have been an enormous mistake and would have rendered this person more useless. This person can exercise power, and I think that's good."
Not first choice?
The uncertainties about the parameters of the position and its enormous responsibility apparently made the search for a candidate difficult.
Ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, who is now president of Texas A&M University, declined an offer to take the job.
"There seems to be a growing number of rumors in the media and around campus that I am leaving Texas A&M to become the new director of national intelligence ("Intelligence Czar") in Washington, D.C.," Gates wrote in a message posted on the school's Web site February 1.
"To put the rumors to rest, I was indeed asked to take the position, wrestled with perhaps the most difficult -- and close -- decision of my life, and last week declined the position."
Negroponte was a member of the U.S. foreign service from 1960 to 1997, serving in eight countries on three continents.
As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, he was linked to controversies surrounding human rights violations there and in connection with the funding of contras in Nicaragua.
The Senate confirmed Negroponte as U.N. ambassador in September 2001 after a six-month delay, caused mostly by criticism of his record in Honduras, according to The Associated Press.
After facing questions on whether he consented to human rights abuses by a Honduran death squad, Negroponte testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he didn't believe abuses were part of a deliberate policy by that country's government, the AP reported.
"To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras," he said, according to the AP.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...lligence_chief
Negroponte Selected As Intelligence Chief
Thu Feb 17, 6:47 PM ET
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) named John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq (news - web sites), as the government's first national intelligence director Thursday, turning to a veteran diplomat to revive a spy community besieged by criticism after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ending a nine-week search, Bush chose Negroponte, who has been in Iraq for less than a year, for the difficult job of implementing the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years.
Negroponte, 65, is tasked with bringing together 15 highly competitive spy agencies and learning to work with the combative Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the brand new CIA (news - web sites) Director Porter Goss and other intelligence leaders. He'll oversee a covert intelligence budget estimated at $40 billion.
Negroponte, a former ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) and to a number of countries, called the job his "most challenging assignment" in more than 40 years of government work.
His U.N. nomination was held up for half a year in 2001 over criticism regarding his record as ambassador in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, the time of the Iran-Contra scandal.
He was widely believed not to have been Bush's first choice for the new job, but officials denied the president had had trouble filling the position.
If confirmed by the Senate, as expected, Negroponte said he planned "reform of the intelligence community in ways designed to best meet the intelligence needs of the 21st century."
Bush signaled that he sees Negroponte as the man to steer his intelligence clearinghouse. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike, we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise," Bush said.
Negroponte will have coveted time with the president during daily intelligence briefings and will have authority over the spy community's intelligence collection priorities. Perhaps most importantly, Bush made clear that Negroponte will set budgets for the national intelligence agencies.
"People who control the money, people who have access to the president generally have a lot of influence," Bush said. "And that's why John Negroponte is going to have a lot of influence."
Bush also announced he had chosen an intelligence insider to serve as Negroponte's deputy, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the National Security Agency's director since 1999. As the longest-serving head of the secretive codebreaking and eavesdropping agency, Hayden pushed for change by asking some longtime personnel to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors.
For years, blue-ribbon commissions have proposed creating a single, powerful director to oversee the entire intelligence community, but the concept didn't gain momentum until recommended by the independent Sept. 11 Commission.
Bush and other senior administration officials initially resisted, but reversed course after an exceptional lobbying effort by the families of 9/11 attack victims. Congress approved the new post in December as part of the most significant intelligence overhaul since 1947.
Yet intelligence veterans remain concerned about whether the job will wield enough power to lead government elements that handle everything from recruiting spies to eavesdropping to steering satellites.
Some say the authorities of the intelligence chief are too ambiguous as established in the legislation. The position was also excluded from the Cabinet to shield it from politics, requiring Negroponte to work directly with more senior personalities such as Rumsfeld.
According to one informed administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, former CIA Director Robert Gates was the White House's first choice, but he and other candidates declined the post over concerns about the job's authority.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card rejected reports that Bush had a difficult time filling the job. "It's just not true," he said.
Bush has trusted Negroponte with trying assignments. He was ambassador to the U.N. when U.S. relations with the world organization were declining over the approaching Iraq invasion. Last year, Bush sent him to Iraq as ambassador during the middle of a bloody insurgency.
Negroponte has held official posts in eight countries, including ambassadorships in Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines. He also understands the intelligence demands of policy-makers, serving in President Reagan's National Security Council from 1987 to 1989.
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill expressed concern that Negroponte's departure from Iraq would create a crucial vacancy less than a month after the country's first democratic elections.
During consideration of his U.N. nomination, critics suggested he had played a key role in carrying out the Reagan administration's covert strategy to crush the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua — an element of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Human rights groups also alleged that Negroponte acquiesced in rights abuses by Honduran death squads funded and partly trained by the CIA. Negroponte said during his U.N. confirmation hearings that he did not believe death squads were operating there.
In a statement Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., praised Negroponte's selection and said the panel would hold a confirmation hearing as soon as his duties in Iraq are complete. A Roberts aide said that could still be weeks away.
The committee's top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, called Negroponte "a sound choice." Others reacted more coolly.
Said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California: "As one who has disagreed with Ambassador Negroponte for over 20 years ... I am pleased that he is now in a position that doesn't have anything to do with policy."
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgame...bid=3&pid=2203
Negroponte's Dark Past
02/17/2005 @ 1:43pm
How many times can I write the same piece about John Negroponte?
Today George W. Bush named him to the new post of Director of National Intelligence. Previously, Bush had hired Negroponte to be UN ambassador and then US ambassador to the new Iraq. On each of those earlier occasions, I noted that Negroponte's past deserved scrutiny. After all, during the Reagan years, when he was ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte was involved in what was arguably an illegal covert quid pro quo connected to the Iran/contra scandal, and he refused to acknowledge significant human rights abuses committed by the pro-US military in Honduras. But each time Negroponte's appointment came before the Senate, he won easy confirmation. Now that he's been tapped to lead the effort to reorganize and reform an intelligence community that screwed up 9/11 and the WMD-in-Iraq assignment, Negroponte will likely sail through the confirmation process once again.
His previous exploits, though, warrant more attention than ever. He has been credibly accused of rigging a human rights report that was politically inconvenient. This is a bad omen. The fundamental mission of the intelligence community is to provide policymakers with unvarnished and valuable information-even if it causes the policymakers headaches. But there's reason to believe that Negroponte did the opposite in tough circumstances. If that is the case, he would not be the right man to oversee an intelligence community that needs solid leaders who are committed to truth-finding. Rather than rewrite my previous work on Negroponte, I am posting below the article I did after Bush named him the viceroy of Baghdad. It's more relevant today than when it first appeared. But I doubt Negroponte's dark history will finally trigger a confirmation debate within the Senate. He has skated in the past; he'll likely do so again.
Bush's New Iraq Viceroy
by DAVID CORN
May 10, 2004 issue
Like dirty money, tainted reputations can be laundered, as the Administration fervently hopes in the case of John Negroponte. Now UN ambassador, Negroponte has been chosen by George W. Bush to be the first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces. This past threatened his confirmation as UN ambassador. But 9/11 rescued Negroponte. At the time of the attack, his nomination was pending, and the Senate moved quickly to approve him.
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Don't forget about DAVID CORN's BLOG at www.davidcorn.com. Read recent postings on why Republicans fancy G. Bush more than G. Washington, the growing connection between K Street and Wall Street, and David Horowitz's bad history.
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These days Negroponte's tenure in Honduras is old news. The Washington Post's front-page story on his nomination did not mention his stint there. Senate staffers say that his record in Honduras won't be a focus of the confirmation hearings. But his tour of duty there is worth scrutiny, for it raises questions about his credibility and his ability to handle tough situations and inconvenient truths. While he was in Honduras and for years afterward, Negroponte refused to acknowledge the human rights abuses. In a 1982 letter to The Economist he said it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The next year he maintained, "There is no indication that the infrequent human rights violations that do occur are part of deliberate government policy." And during his 2001 confirmation he stated, "I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras." How then does he account for a 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation that concluded, "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and linked to "death squad activities"?
Not only has Negroponte declined to acknowledge the obvious; when he was ambassador, the State Department rigged its Honduras human rights reports to Congress. As a 1995 Baltimore Sun series noted, "A comparison of the annual human rights reports prepared while Negroponte was ambassador with the facts as they were then known shows that Congress was deliberately misled." The Sun reported, "Time and again...Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives." But this didn't make it into State Department reports. Had Honduras been found to be engaging in systematic abuses, it could have lost its US aid--thwarting the Reagan Administration's use of Honduras to support the contras.
Negroponte has claimed "there was no effort to soft pedal" abuses in Honduras. Yet in public statements he repeatedly conveyed a misleading appearance, and in the years since he has held tight--in the face of compelling evidence--to the view that the abuses that did occur were merely unfortunate exceptions. Negroponte's confirmation hearing will provide senators a chance to probe Bush's plans (or lack thereof) in Iraq. But if Negroponte's record as an abuse denier is not questioned, as seems likely, he will once again be able to escape his haunted past.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...tral%20America
Negroponte draws criticism south of border
By LISA J. ADAMS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MEXICO CITY -- Central American politicians and human rights activists issued stinging criticism Thursday of John Negroponte, nominated to become America's first intelligence director, citing the career diplomat's active backing for the Contra rebels and support for a government involved in human rights abuses.
John Negroponte, now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, a time of intense conflict in Central America in which the United States played a central role. The Reagan administration feared that leftist rebels were leading Central American countries toward totalitarian regimes.
Negroponte assisted the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in their attempt to overthrow Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. In the process, activists claim, he ignored human rights abuses by the rebels and their Honduran hosts.
The effort to oust Daniel Ortega's Moscow-leaning Sandinista regime produced a huge scandal in the United States when it was learned the United States secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund the Contra operation.
"What an outrage!" said Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee for Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras, an independent group representing civilians believed to have vanished while in government custody. "The United States has invented a position to reward someone who was a dangerous person."
In Nicaragua, Tomas Borge, former interior minister for the Sandinista regime and a current leader of the Sandinista opposition party, said Negroponte "is the most efficient and ideal representative for the Bush administration's primitive international security policy."
"He is faithful to Bush's excessive and ultra-right policy in Iraq and other parts of the world," he said.
Borge is the only surviving founder of the Sandinista movement, and was in charge of domestic political control as the Sandinistas battled U.S.-backed opponents.
The new U.S. intelligence chief has denied accusations that his reports to Washington dramatically underplayed human rights problems in Honduras.
During 2001 confirmation hearings for his U.N. ambassadorship - an appointment that was delayed for six months because of the controversy over his tenure in Honduras - Negroponte testified that he did not believe death squads were operating in Honduras.
However, a 1993 Honduran government human rights report said 184 suspected leftists had disappeared in government custody, many of them at the hands of a U.S. trained Honduran army battalion.
"It was obvious that he knew what was happening," said Leo Valladeres, a law professor in Honduras who wrote the report. "They used outlaw methods to kill ... and it is absolutely impossible to believe that a diplomatic mission such as that of the United States was unaware of the situation faced by Honduras and Central America."
In neighboring Guatemala, a U.S.-supported government that was engaged in battle with left-wing rebels trained paramilitary squads that were found later to have committed large-scale civilian massacres.
In El Salvador, U.S.-trained army squads hunted down leftist rebels in offensives fraught with human rights abuses.
Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archives in Washington, said declassified documents on the Iran-Contra scandal also showed that Negroponte was involved in seeking more guns for the Contras - "the role that normally would be reserved for the (CIA) station chief."
Kornbluh also said the documents he cited showed that Negroponte helped clear the way for a secret agreement under which the United States would provide more CIA money to Honduran army generals and additional military and economic aid to the country. In exchange, he said, Honduras agreed to allow the Contras to continue operating on Honduran soil.
Ironically, Kornbluh said, the controversy surrounding Negroponte's past helps qualify him for the job.
"Someone who is a career diplomat ... on paper doesn't seem to have the intelligence background needed," he said. "The fact that he certainly departed from his diplomatic role and was involved in paramilitary operations against Nicaragua ... means he has had a relationship with covert operations in the past."
http://www.speaktruth.org/defend/pro...profile_09.asp
Dianna Ortiz is an Ursuline nun from New Mexico who journeyed to Guatemala in the early 1980s as a missionary, teaching Mayan children in the highlands. After months of receiving threats, Ortiz was abducted and brutally raped by armed men in November 1989. One of the men overseeing the torture appeared to be American. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that: "Sister Ortiz was placed under surveillance and threatened, then kidnapped and tortured, and that agents of the government of Guatemala were responsible for these crimes. . . including violating Dianna Ortiz’s rights to ‘humane treatment, personal liberty, a fair trial, privacy, freedom of conscience and of religion, freedom of association and judicial protection.’" Ortiz’s ordeal did not end with her escape. Her torment continued as she sought answers from the U.S. government about the identity of her torturers in her unrelenting quest for justice. Ortiz’s raw honesty and capacity to articulate the agony she suffered compelled the United States to declassify long-secret files on Guatemala, and shed light on some of the darkest moments of Guatemalan history and American foreign policy.
Kerry Kennedy
I want to be free of these memories. I want to be as trusting, confident, adventurous, and carefree as I was in 1987 when I went to the western highlands of Guatemala to teach young indigenous children to read and write in Spanish and in their native language and to understand the Bible in their culture. But on November 2, 1989, the Dianna I just described ceased to exist. I tell you this story only because it reflects the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Guatemala, a country ravaged by a civil war that began in 1960 and lasted thirty-six years. Most of the victims, like me, were civilians targeted by government security forces.
As I sat reading in the garden of a convent, where I had retreated to think about my options after receiving increasingly violent death threats, I heard a man’s deep voice behind me: "Hello, my love," he said in Spanish. "We have some things to discuss." I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me. We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.
Then they transferred me to another room and left me alone with another woman prisoner. We exchanged names, cried, and held onto each other. "Dianna," she said in Spanish, "they will try to break you. Be strong." When the men returned, they had a video camera and a still camera. The policeman put a machete into my hands. Thinking it would be used against me, and at that point in my torture wanting to die, I did not resist. But the policeman put his hands onto the handle, on top of mine, and forced me to stab the woman again and again. What I remember is blood gushing—spurting like a water fountain—droplets of blood splattering everywhere—and my cries lost in the cries of the woman.
The policeman asked me if I was now ready to talk, and one of the other torturers, the man who had threatened me on the street, mentioned that they had just filmed and photographed me stabbing the woman. If I refused to cooperate, their boss, Alejandro, would have no choice but to turn the videotapes and the photographs over to the press, and everyone would know about the crime I’d committed. This was the first I had heard of Alejandro, the torturers’ boss. But soon I would meet him.
I was taken into a courtyard and interrogated again. The policeman wanted me to admit that I was Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. Earlier he had shown me a photograph of a long-haired, indigenous woman. "That’s you," he’d said. "You are Veronica Ortiz Hernandez." She looked nothing like me. He was still insisting on this, and asking me the name of a man in another photograph he had shown me.
The policeman raped me again. Then I was lowered into a pit full of bodies— bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning. Someone was weeping. I didn’t know if it was me or somebody else. A stench of decay rose from the pit. Rats swarmed over the bodies and were dropped onto me as I hung suspended over the pit by the wrists. I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.
The nightmare I lived was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1989, under Guatemala’s first civilian president in years, nearly two hundred people were abducted. Unlike me, they were "disappeared, gone forever." The only uncommon element of my ordeal was that I survived, probably because I was a U.S. citizen, and phone calls poured into Congress when I was reported missing. As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers.
I remember the moment he removed my blindfold. I asked him, "Are you an American?" In poor Spanish and with a heavy American accent, he answered me with a question: "Why do you want to know?" Moments before, after the torturers had blindfolded me again and were getting ready to rape me again, they had called out in Spanish: "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!"
And a voice had responded "****!" in perfect American English with no trace of an accent. It was the voice of the tall, fair-skinned man beside me. After swearing, he’d switched to a halting Spanish. "Idiots!" he said. "She’s a North American nun." He added that my disappearance had been made public, and he ran them out of the room.
Now he was helping me on with my clothes. "Vamos," he said, and he led me out of the building. He kept telling me he was sorry. The torturers had made a mistake. We came to a parking garage, where he put me into a gray Suzuki jeep and told me he was taking me to a friend of his at the U.S. embassy who would help me leave the country.
For the duration of the trip, I spoke to him in English, which he understood perfectly. He said he was concerned about the people of Guatemala and consequently was working to liberate them from Communism. Alejandro told me to forgive my torturers because they had confused me with Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. It was an honest mistake.
I asked him how they could have mistaken me for a woman who did not resemble me in any way. And why were the threatening letters I had received addressed to Madre Dianna and not to Veronica Ortiz Hernandez? He avoided my questions and insinuated that I was to blame for my torture because I had not heeded the threats that were sent to me. I asked him what would happen to the other people I had heard screaming and saw tortured before my eyes. He told me not to concern myself with them and to forget what had happened.
In English again, he made it clear that if I didn’t "forgive" my torturers, I would face consequences. "We have the videotapes and the photographs," he said. Soon the jeep stopped in traffic. We were near an intersection and up ahead was a red light. I took advantage of the opportunity, jumped out of the jeep, and ran.
I thought that was the end of my torture. It was only the beginning. Because I didn’t "forget" about the other people being tortured, because I filed suit against the Guatemalan security forces instead of forgiving my torturers, and because I revealed that they were supervised by an American, I faced consequences. The Guatemalan president claimed that the abduction had never occurred, simultaneously claiming that it had been carried out by nongovernmental elements and therefore was not a human rights abuse. Only one week after my abduction, before any true investigation had been conducted, the U.S. ambassador suggested that I was a political strategist and had staged my own kidnapping to secure a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Guatemala.
Two months later, after a U.S. doctor had counted 111 cigarette burns on my back alone, the story changed. In January 1990, the Guatemalan defense minister publicly announced that I was a lesbian and had staged my abduction to cover up a tryst. The minister of the interior echoed this statement and then said he had heard it first from the U.S. embassy. According to a congressional aide, the political affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Lew Anselem, was indeed spreading the same rumor.
In the presence of Ambassador Thomas Stroock, this same human rights officer told a delegation of religious men and women concerned about my case that he was "tired of these lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala." The story would undergo other permutations. According to the Guatemalan press, the ambassador came up with another version: he told the Guatemalan defense minister that I was not abducted and tortured but simply "had problems with [my] nerves."
During this time, the United States was working arm in arm with the Guatemalan army to achieve a secret foreign policy objective–defeating the Guatemalan guerrillas. And my case was bad publicity for the army. Because I had mentioned the American boss, it was also bad publicity for the U.S. government, whose overt foreign policy objectives in Guatemala were promoting democracy, stability, and respect for human rights. In the ambassador’s words, my case could "damage U.S. interests." In a letter urging State Department officials not to meet with me to take my testimony, the ambassador put it this way: "If the Department meets with her...pressure from all sorts of people and groups will build on the Department to act on the information she provides...I’m afraid we’re going to get cooked on this one...."
The Organization of American States, after completing a four-year investigation of my case, found in 1997 that I indeed was abducted and tortured by agents of the Guatemalan government, that the details of my testimony were credible, and that the Guatemalan government had "engaged in repeated unwarranted attacks on [my] honor and reputation."
The Guatemalan justice system was not so forthcoming. I made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government, something no torture survivor had ever been able to do. Again, my passport opened up possibilities for me that Guatemalans would never have. Pressing charges would mean certain death for a Guatemalan who managed to survive torture. I identified the place where I was detained and tortured, and participated in a reenactment of my abduction.
On my return to the United States, I received intimidating phone calls and anonymous packages. One contained a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. I suspect that Guatemalan military intelligence agents or members of a U.S. intelligence agency were behind these attempts to intimidate me.
The intimidation did not end with anonymous threats, but carried over into the courtroom. As I sought justice, I was cast as the criminal, much as women who file charges of rape are presumed guilty until proven innocent. The lawyers’ accusations against me and their aggressive interrogations triggered flashbacks. The case languished in the Guatemalan court system. No suspects were ever identified.
In 1996, I held a five-week vigil before the White House, asking for the declassification of all U.S. government documents related to human rights abuses in Guatemala since 1954, including documents on my own case. A few days into my vigil, I was granted a meeting with First Lady Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton admitted what no other U.S. government official had dared to concede during my seven-year search for the truth behind my abduction and torture in Guatemala: she said it was possible that the American in charge of my Guatemalan torturers was a "past or present employee of a U.S. agency."
I ended my vigil and fast when the State Department declassified thousands of documents. But the documents contain no information about the American boss, and they do not identify my Guatemalan torturers. They do contain several interesting points of information. For example, Americans employed by various government agencies were in fact working within the Guatemalan security forces at the time of my abduction; and the U.S. ambassador at the time of my abduction admitted that the embassy had contact with members of a death squad.
Documents also show that the Guatemalan defense minister in office at the time of my torture studied counterinsurgency tactics at an army school in Georgia. Course manuals advocated the torture and execution of civilians ("terrorists operating within the democratic system") whose "political, social, and economic activities" could cause "discontent." The manuals urged internal intelligence agencies to "obtain information on the substance of [these] nonviolent attacks." It is no surprise that the Guatemalan army targeted me, as all civilians trying to help the poor were considered potential subversives.
After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico, so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents. I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being. I still have little memory of my life before my abduction at thirty-one. Instead I have memories of the torture. You may think this strange, but even at this moment, I can sense the presence of my torturers. I can smell them. I can feel their monstrous hands on my body, I can hear them hissing in my ear that I am the one who killed the woman. I want to be free of these memories. I want freedom for myself and all the people of Guatemala. The key is the truth. I want to know who Alejandro was. Was he a CIA agent? Why is the U.S. government protecting him? How many other Alejandros are there out there, supervising torture?
Efforts to obtain information through U.S. government investigations also led nowhere. The Department of Justice interviewed me for more than forty hours, during which time their attorneys accused me of lying. They interrogated my friends and family members and generally made it clear that I was the culprit, I was the one being investigated, not the government officials who acted wrongly in my case. During the interview, I reentered that clandestine military prison and relived my torture it in all its horror. After I had given the majority of my testimony, I felt compelled to withdraw from direct participation in the Justice Department investigation. The investigators had the sketches I had made with the help of a professional forensic artist, delineating the characteristics of each torturer, including Alejandro, and the investigators had my testimony, in detail. The responsibility for finding answers lay with them. The Department of Justice came up with a two-hundred-page report to protect sources and methods and, ostensibly, to protect my own privacy.
In an attempt to get the report declassified, I then had to violate my own privacy. Afraid that the Department of Justice investigators might leak information I had given them if I pressured for the release of the report, I went public with that secret information myself: I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes. Unable to carry within me what the torturers had engendered, what I could only view as a monster, the product of the men who had raped me, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life.
Am I proud of that decision? No. But if I had to make the decision again, I believe I would decide as I did then. I felt I had no choice. If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died. In 1998, after going public with this information, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the Department of Justice report. My request was denied in full.
But to this day, I cannot forget those who suffered with me and died in that clandestine prison. In spite of the humiliation that demanding answers has entailed, I stand with the Guatemalan people. I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice. My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible. I know what few U.S. citizens know: what it is to be an innocent civilian, and to be accused, interrogated, and tortured, to have my own government eschew my claims for justice and actively destroy my character because my case causes political problems for them. I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting.
Lets see here. One of the main figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, ordered the torture of catholic nuns, and helped kill hundreds of people merely because they wanted not to be ruled by a fascist regime? Attempting to rig human rights reports and intimidating human rights agencies?
Quite a character.
=====================
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/...ief/index.html
Bush names Negroponte intelligence chief
Thursday, February 17, 2005 Posted: 11:32 PM EST (0432 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Thursday nominated John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the first director of national intelligence.
Bush said that Negroponte would be his principal adviser on intelligence issues and would have authority over the budgets of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Negroponte also will have the authority to order the collection of new intelligence, information sharing between agencies and the establishment of common standards, Bush said.
"Vesting these in a single official who reports directly to me will make our intelligence efforts better coordinated, more efficient and more effective," Bush said.
"The director's responsibility is straightforward and demanding," he said. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike, we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise."
Negroponte, 65, has been the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq since June.
He was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004. (Profile)
Bush also announced that he's chosen Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, as Negroponte's deputy.
The intelligence overhaul bill that Bush signed into law in December created the intelligence czar position. The legislation sought to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission that investigated the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 panel, respectively, praised Negroponte as a "highly respected diplomat with a deep understanding of the world."
"His extraordinary knowledge of foreign policy and intelligence issues will serve him well in his new capacity," the two said in a written statement.
The job will be one of the the most powerful in the U.S. government. The Senate must confirm Negroponte, who called the post "the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service."
Bush said that Negroponte's skill as a diplomat would help him negotiate the jockeying between the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies.
He said that those agencies' existing chains of command would remain in place.
CIA chief to report to Negroponte
Bush said the relationship between the White House and CIA would be vital.
"The CIA will retain its core of responsibilities for collecting human intelligence, analyzing intelligence from all sources and supporting American interests abroad at the direction of the president," Bush said.
CIA Director Porter Goss, who would report to Negroponte, called the men "excellent choices."
"The nominations of Ambassador Negroponte and Gen. Hayden are welcome news and a critical step in continuing to strengthen our intelligence community and to create even better coordinated working relationships and communications between the agencies," Goss said in a press release.
Some critics have said that the intelligence director's duties and authority have not been spelled out clearly.
Shortly before the announcement, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Congress does not want to handcuff the director.
"I think the fact that all of the lines aren't crossed and every decision isn't made about what powers the [director of national intelligence] has is an advantage for the [director] because a vacuum invites power. I think it is much more important that the [director] be able to come in, he or she, in order to fill that out according to their own instincts," Rockefeller said.
"If we had prescribed in Congress each of the relationships between the agencies, I think that would have been an enormous mistake and would have rendered this person more useless. This person can exercise power, and I think that's good."
Not first choice?
The uncertainties about the parameters of the position and its enormous responsibility apparently made the search for a candidate difficult.
Ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, who is now president of Texas A&M University, declined an offer to take the job.
"There seems to be a growing number of rumors in the media and around campus that I am leaving Texas A&M to become the new director of national intelligence ("Intelligence Czar") in Washington, D.C.," Gates wrote in a message posted on the school's Web site February 1.
"To put the rumors to rest, I was indeed asked to take the position, wrestled with perhaps the most difficult -- and close -- decision of my life, and last week declined the position."
Negroponte was a member of the U.S. foreign service from 1960 to 1997, serving in eight countries on three continents.
As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, he was linked to controversies surrounding human rights violations there and in connection with the funding of contras in Nicaragua.
The Senate confirmed Negroponte as U.N. ambassador in September 2001 after a six-month delay, caused mostly by criticism of his record in Honduras, according to The Associated Press.
After facing questions on whether he consented to human rights abuses by a Honduran death squad, Negroponte testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he didn't believe abuses were part of a deliberate policy by that country's government, the AP reported.
"To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras," he said, according to the AP.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...lligence_chief
Negroponte Selected As Intelligence Chief
Thu Feb 17, 6:47 PM ET
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) named John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq (news - web sites), as the government's first national intelligence director Thursday, turning to a veteran diplomat to revive a spy community besieged by criticism after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ending a nine-week search, Bush chose Negroponte, who has been in Iraq for less than a year, for the difficult job of implementing the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years.
Negroponte, 65, is tasked with bringing together 15 highly competitive spy agencies and learning to work with the combative Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the brand new CIA (news - web sites) Director Porter Goss and other intelligence leaders. He'll oversee a covert intelligence budget estimated at $40 billion.
Negroponte, a former ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) and to a number of countries, called the job his "most challenging assignment" in more than 40 years of government work.
His U.N. nomination was held up for half a year in 2001 over criticism regarding his record as ambassador in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, the time of the Iran-Contra scandal.
He was widely believed not to have been Bush's first choice for the new job, but officials denied the president had had trouble filling the position.
If confirmed by the Senate, as expected, Negroponte said he planned "reform of the intelligence community in ways designed to best meet the intelligence needs of the 21st century."
Bush signaled that he sees Negroponte as the man to steer his intelligence clearinghouse. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike, we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise," Bush said.
Negroponte will have coveted time with the president during daily intelligence briefings and will have authority over the spy community's intelligence collection priorities. Perhaps most importantly, Bush made clear that Negroponte will set budgets for the national intelligence agencies.
"People who control the money, people who have access to the president generally have a lot of influence," Bush said. "And that's why John Negroponte is going to have a lot of influence."
Bush also announced he had chosen an intelligence insider to serve as Negroponte's deputy, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the National Security Agency's director since 1999. As the longest-serving head of the secretive codebreaking and eavesdropping agency, Hayden pushed for change by asking some longtime personnel to retire and increasing reliance on technology contractors.
For years, blue-ribbon commissions have proposed creating a single, powerful director to oversee the entire intelligence community, but the concept didn't gain momentum until recommended by the independent Sept. 11 Commission.
Bush and other senior administration officials initially resisted, but reversed course after an exceptional lobbying effort by the families of 9/11 attack victims. Congress approved the new post in December as part of the most significant intelligence overhaul since 1947.
Yet intelligence veterans remain concerned about whether the job will wield enough power to lead government elements that handle everything from recruiting spies to eavesdropping to steering satellites.
Some say the authorities of the intelligence chief are too ambiguous as established in the legislation. The position was also excluded from the Cabinet to shield it from politics, requiring Negroponte to work directly with more senior personalities such as Rumsfeld.
According to one informed administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, former CIA Director Robert Gates was the White House's first choice, but he and other candidates declined the post over concerns about the job's authority.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card rejected reports that Bush had a difficult time filling the job. "It's just not true," he said.
Bush has trusted Negroponte with trying assignments. He was ambassador to the U.N. when U.S. relations with the world organization were declining over the approaching Iraq invasion. Last year, Bush sent him to Iraq as ambassador during the middle of a bloody insurgency.
Negroponte has held official posts in eight countries, including ambassadorships in Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines. He also understands the intelligence demands of policy-makers, serving in President Reagan's National Security Council from 1987 to 1989.
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill expressed concern that Negroponte's departure from Iraq would create a crucial vacancy less than a month after the country's first democratic elections.
During consideration of his U.N. nomination, critics suggested he had played a key role in carrying out the Reagan administration's covert strategy to crush the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua — an element of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Human rights groups also alleged that Negroponte acquiesced in rights abuses by Honduran death squads funded and partly trained by the CIA. Negroponte said during his U.N. confirmation hearings that he did not believe death squads were operating there.
In a statement Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., praised Negroponte's selection and said the panel would hold a confirmation hearing as soon as his duties in Iraq are complete. A Roberts aide said that could still be weeks away.
The committee's top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, called Negroponte "a sound choice." Others reacted more coolly.
Said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California: "As one who has disagreed with Ambassador Negroponte for over 20 years ... I am pleased that he is now in a position that doesn't have anything to do with policy."
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgame...bid=3&pid=2203
Negroponte's Dark Past
02/17/2005 @ 1:43pm
How many times can I write the same piece about John Negroponte?
Today George W. Bush named him to the new post of Director of National Intelligence. Previously, Bush had hired Negroponte to be UN ambassador and then US ambassador to the new Iraq. On each of those earlier occasions, I noted that Negroponte's past deserved scrutiny. After all, during the Reagan years, when he was ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte was involved in what was arguably an illegal covert quid pro quo connected to the Iran/contra scandal, and he refused to acknowledge significant human rights abuses committed by the pro-US military in Honduras. But each time Negroponte's appointment came before the Senate, he won easy confirmation. Now that he's been tapped to lead the effort to reorganize and reform an intelligence community that screwed up 9/11 and the WMD-in-Iraq assignment, Negroponte will likely sail through the confirmation process once again.
His previous exploits, though, warrant more attention than ever. He has been credibly accused of rigging a human rights report that was politically inconvenient. This is a bad omen. The fundamental mission of the intelligence community is to provide policymakers with unvarnished and valuable information-even if it causes the policymakers headaches. But there's reason to believe that Negroponte did the opposite in tough circumstances. If that is the case, he would not be the right man to oversee an intelligence community that needs solid leaders who are committed to truth-finding. Rather than rewrite my previous work on Negroponte, I am posting below the article I did after Bush named him the viceroy of Baghdad. It's more relevant today than when it first appeared. But I doubt Negroponte's dark history will finally trigger a confirmation debate within the Senate. He has skated in the past; he'll likely do so again.
Bush's New Iraq Viceroy
by DAVID CORN
May 10, 2004 issue
Like dirty money, tainted reputations can be laundered, as the Administration fervently hopes in the case of John Negroponte. Now UN ambassador, Negroponte has been chosen by George W. Bush to be the first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces. This past threatened his confirmation as UN ambassador. But 9/11 rescued Negroponte. At the time of the attack, his nomination was pending, and the Senate moved quickly to approve him.
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Don't forget about DAVID CORN's BLOG at www.davidcorn.com. Read recent postings on why Republicans fancy G. Bush more than G. Washington, the growing connection between K Street and Wall Street, and David Horowitz's bad history.
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These days Negroponte's tenure in Honduras is old news. The Washington Post's front-page story on his nomination did not mention his stint there. Senate staffers say that his record in Honduras won't be a focus of the confirmation hearings. But his tour of duty there is worth scrutiny, for it raises questions about his credibility and his ability to handle tough situations and inconvenient truths. While he was in Honduras and for years afterward, Negroponte refused to acknowledge the human rights abuses. In a 1982 letter to The Economist he said it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The next year he maintained, "There is no indication that the infrequent human rights violations that do occur are part of deliberate government policy." And during his 2001 confirmation he stated, "I do not believe then, nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras." How then does he account for a 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation that concluded, "The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned" and linked to "death squad activities"?
Not only has Negroponte declined to acknowledge the obvious; when he was ambassador, the State Department rigged its Honduras human rights reports to Congress. As a 1995 Baltimore Sun series noted, "A comparison of the annual human rights reports prepared while Negroponte was ambassador with the facts as they were then known shows that Congress was deliberately misled." The Sun reported, "Time and again...Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives." But this didn't make it into State Department reports. Had Honduras been found to be engaging in systematic abuses, it could have lost its US aid--thwarting the Reagan Administration's use of Honduras to support the contras.
Negroponte has claimed "there was no effort to soft pedal" abuses in Honduras. Yet in public statements he repeatedly conveyed a misleading appearance, and in the years since he has held tight--in the face of compelling evidence--to the view that the abuses that did occur were merely unfortunate exceptions. Negroponte's confirmation hearing will provide senators a chance to probe Bush's plans (or lack thereof) in Iraq. But if Negroponte's record as an abuse denier is not questioned, as seems likely, he will once again be able to escape his haunted past.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...tral%20America
Negroponte draws criticism south of border
By LISA J. ADAMS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
MEXICO CITY -- Central American politicians and human rights activists issued stinging criticism Thursday of John Negroponte, nominated to become America's first intelligence director, citing the career diplomat's active backing for the Contra rebels and support for a government involved in human rights abuses.
John Negroponte, now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, a time of intense conflict in Central America in which the United States played a central role. The Reagan administration feared that leftist rebels were leading Central American countries toward totalitarian regimes.
Negroponte assisted the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in their attempt to overthrow Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. In the process, activists claim, he ignored human rights abuses by the rebels and their Honduran hosts.
The effort to oust Daniel Ortega's Moscow-leaning Sandinista regime produced a huge scandal in the United States when it was learned the United States secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund the Contra operation.
"What an outrage!" said Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee for Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras, an independent group representing civilians believed to have vanished while in government custody. "The United States has invented a position to reward someone who was a dangerous person."
In Nicaragua, Tomas Borge, former interior minister for the Sandinista regime and a current leader of the Sandinista opposition party, said Negroponte "is the most efficient and ideal representative for the Bush administration's primitive international security policy."
"He is faithful to Bush's excessive and ultra-right policy in Iraq and other parts of the world," he said.
Borge is the only surviving founder of the Sandinista movement, and was in charge of domestic political control as the Sandinistas battled U.S.-backed opponents.
The new U.S. intelligence chief has denied accusations that his reports to Washington dramatically underplayed human rights problems in Honduras.
During 2001 confirmation hearings for his U.N. ambassadorship - an appointment that was delayed for six months because of the controversy over his tenure in Honduras - Negroponte testified that he did not believe death squads were operating in Honduras.
However, a 1993 Honduran government human rights report said 184 suspected leftists had disappeared in government custody, many of them at the hands of a U.S. trained Honduran army battalion.
"It was obvious that he knew what was happening," said Leo Valladeres, a law professor in Honduras who wrote the report. "They used outlaw methods to kill ... and it is absolutely impossible to believe that a diplomatic mission such as that of the United States was unaware of the situation faced by Honduras and Central America."
In neighboring Guatemala, a U.S.-supported government that was engaged in battle with left-wing rebels trained paramilitary squads that were found later to have committed large-scale civilian massacres.
In El Salvador, U.S.-trained army squads hunted down leftist rebels in offensives fraught with human rights abuses.
Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archives in Washington, said declassified documents on the Iran-Contra scandal also showed that Negroponte was involved in seeking more guns for the Contras - "the role that normally would be reserved for the (CIA) station chief."
Kornbluh also said the documents he cited showed that Negroponte helped clear the way for a secret agreement under which the United States would provide more CIA money to Honduran army generals and additional military and economic aid to the country. In exchange, he said, Honduras agreed to allow the Contras to continue operating on Honduran soil.
Ironically, Kornbluh said, the controversy surrounding Negroponte's past helps qualify him for the job.
"Someone who is a career diplomat ... on paper doesn't seem to have the intelligence background needed," he said. "The fact that he certainly departed from his diplomatic role and was involved in paramilitary operations against Nicaragua ... means he has had a relationship with covert operations in the past."
http://www.speaktruth.org/defend/pro...profile_09.asp
Dianna Ortiz is an Ursuline nun from New Mexico who journeyed to Guatemala in the early 1980s as a missionary, teaching Mayan children in the highlands. After months of receiving threats, Ortiz was abducted and brutally raped by armed men in November 1989. One of the men overseeing the torture appeared to be American. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that: "Sister Ortiz was placed under surveillance and threatened, then kidnapped and tortured, and that agents of the government of Guatemala were responsible for these crimes. . . including violating Dianna Ortiz’s rights to ‘humane treatment, personal liberty, a fair trial, privacy, freedom of conscience and of religion, freedom of association and judicial protection.’" Ortiz’s ordeal did not end with her escape. Her torment continued as she sought answers from the U.S. government about the identity of her torturers in her unrelenting quest for justice. Ortiz’s raw honesty and capacity to articulate the agony she suffered compelled the United States to declassify long-secret files on Guatemala, and shed light on some of the darkest moments of Guatemalan history and American foreign policy.
Kerry Kennedy
I want to be free of these memories. I want to be as trusting, confident, adventurous, and carefree as I was in 1987 when I went to the western highlands of Guatemala to teach young indigenous children to read and write in Spanish and in their native language and to understand the Bible in their culture. But on November 2, 1989, the Dianna I just described ceased to exist. I tell you this story only because it reflects the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Guatemala, a country ravaged by a civil war that began in 1960 and lasted thirty-six years. Most of the victims, like me, were civilians targeted by government security forces.
As I sat reading in the garden of a convent, where I had retreated to think about my options after receiving increasingly violent death threats, I heard a man’s deep voice behind me: "Hello, my love," he said in Spanish. "We have some things to discuss." I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me. We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.
Then they transferred me to another room and left me alone with another woman prisoner. We exchanged names, cried, and held onto each other. "Dianna," she said in Spanish, "they will try to break you. Be strong." When the men returned, they had a video camera and a still camera. The policeman put a machete into my hands. Thinking it would be used against me, and at that point in my torture wanting to die, I did not resist. But the policeman put his hands onto the handle, on top of mine, and forced me to stab the woman again and again. What I remember is blood gushing—spurting like a water fountain—droplets of blood splattering everywhere—and my cries lost in the cries of the woman.
The policeman asked me if I was now ready to talk, and one of the other torturers, the man who had threatened me on the street, mentioned that they had just filmed and photographed me stabbing the woman. If I refused to cooperate, their boss, Alejandro, would have no choice but to turn the videotapes and the photographs over to the press, and everyone would know about the crime I’d committed. This was the first I had heard of Alejandro, the torturers’ boss. But soon I would meet him.
I was taken into a courtyard and interrogated again. The policeman wanted me to admit that I was Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. Earlier he had shown me a photograph of a long-haired, indigenous woman. "That’s you," he’d said. "You are Veronica Ortiz Hernandez." She looked nothing like me. He was still insisting on this, and asking me the name of a man in another photograph he had shown me.
The policeman raped me again. Then I was lowered into a pit full of bodies— bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning. Someone was weeping. I didn’t know if it was me or somebody else. A stench of decay rose from the pit. Rats swarmed over the bodies and were dropped onto me as I hung suspended over the pit by the wrists. I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.
The nightmare I lived was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1989, under Guatemala’s first civilian president in years, nearly two hundred people were abducted. Unlike me, they were "disappeared, gone forever." The only uncommon element of my ordeal was that I survived, probably because I was a U.S. citizen, and phone calls poured into Congress when I was reported missing. As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers.
I remember the moment he removed my blindfold. I asked him, "Are you an American?" In poor Spanish and with a heavy American accent, he answered me with a question: "Why do you want to know?" Moments before, after the torturers had blindfolded me again and were getting ready to rape me again, they had called out in Spanish: "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!"
And a voice had responded "****!" in perfect American English with no trace of an accent. It was the voice of the tall, fair-skinned man beside me. After swearing, he’d switched to a halting Spanish. "Idiots!" he said. "She’s a North American nun." He added that my disappearance had been made public, and he ran them out of the room.
Now he was helping me on with my clothes. "Vamos," he said, and he led me out of the building. He kept telling me he was sorry. The torturers had made a mistake. We came to a parking garage, where he put me into a gray Suzuki jeep and told me he was taking me to a friend of his at the U.S. embassy who would help me leave the country.
For the duration of the trip, I spoke to him in English, which he understood perfectly. He said he was concerned about the people of Guatemala and consequently was working to liberate them from Communism. Alejandro told me to forgive my torturers because they had confused me with Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. It was an honest mistake.
I asked him how they could have mistaken me for a woman who did not resemble me in any way. And why were the threatening letters I had received addressed to Madre Dianna and not to Veronica Ortiz Hernandez? He avoided my questions and insinuated that I was to blame for my torture because I had not heeded the threats that were sent to me. I asked him what would happen to the other people I had heard screaming and saw tortured before my eyes. He told me not to concern myself with them and to forget what had happened.
In English again, he made it clear that if I didn’t "forgive" my torturers, I would face consequences. "We have the videotapes and the photographs," he said. Soon the jeep stopped in traffic. We were near an intersection and up ahead was a red light. I took advantage of the opportunity, jumped out of the jeep, and ran.
I thought that was the end of my torture. It was only the beginning. Because I didn’t "forget" about the other people being tortured, because I filed suit against the Guatemalan security forces instead of forgiving my torturers, and because I revealed that they were supervised by an American, I faced consequences. The Guatemalan president claimed that the abduction had never occurred, simultaneously claiming that it had been carried out by nongovernmental elements and therefore was not a human rights abuse. Only one week after my abduction, before any true investigation had been conducted, the U.S. ambassador suggested that I was a political strategist and had staged my own kidnapping to secure a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Guatemala.
Two months later, after a U.S. doctor had counted 111 cigarette burns on my back alone, the story changed. In January 1990, the Guatemalan defense minister publicly announced that I was a lesbian and had staged my abduction to cover up a tryst. The minister of the interior echoed this statement and then said he had heard it first from the U.S. embassy. According to a congressional aide, the political affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Lew Anselem, was indeed spreading the same rumor.
In the presence of Ambassador Thomas Stroock, this same human rights officer told a delegation of religious men and women concerned about my case that he was "tired of these lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala." The story would undergo other permutations. According to the Guatemalan press, the ambassador came up with another version: he told the Guatemalan defense minister that I was not abducted and tortured but simply "had problems with [my] nerves."
During this time, the United States was working arm in arm with the Guatemalan army to achieve a secret foreign policy objective–defeating the Guatemalan guerrillas. And my case was bad publicity for the army. Because I had mentioned the American boss, it was also bad publicity for the U.S. government, whose overt foreign policy objectives in Guatemala were promoting democracy, stability, and respect for human rights. In the ambassador’s words, my case could "damage U.S. interests." In a letter urging State Department officials not to meet with me to take my testimony, the ambassador put it this way: "If the Department meets with her...pressure from all sorts of people and groups will build on the Department to act on the information she provides...I’m afraid we’re going to get cooked on this one...."
The Organization of American States, after completing a four-year investigation of my case, found in 1997 that I indeed was abducted and tortured by agents of the Guatemalan government, that the details of my testimony were credible, and that the Guatemalan government had "engaged in repeated unwarranted attacks on [my] honor and reputation."
The Guatemalan justice system was not so forthcoming. I made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government, something no torture survivor had ever been able to do. Again, my passport opened up possibilities for me that Guatemalans would never have. Pressing charges would mean certain death for a Guatemalan who managed to survive torture. I identified the place where I was detained and tortured, and participated in a reenactment of my abduction.
On my return to the United States, I received intimidating phone calls and anonymous packages. One contained a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. I suspect that Guatemalan military intelligence agents or members of a U.S. intelligence agency were behind these attempts to intimidate me.
The intimidation did not end with anonymous threats, but carried over into the courtroom. As I sought justice, I was cast as the criminal, much as women who file charges of rape are presumed guilty until proven innocent. The lawyers’ accusations against me and their aggressive interrogations triggered flashbacks. The case languished in the Guatemalan court system. No suspects were ever identified.
In 1996, I held a five-week vigil before the White House, asking for the declassification of all U.S. government documents related to human rights abuses in Guatemala since 1954, including documents on my own case. A few days into my vigil, I was granted a meeting with First Lady Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton admitted what no other U.S. government official had dared to concede during my seven-year search for the truth behind my abduction and torture in Guatemala: she said it was possible that the American in charge of my Guatemalan torturers was a "past or present employee of a U.S. agency."
I ended my vigil and fast when the State Department declassified thousands of documents. But the documents contain no information about the American boss, and they do not identify my Guatemalan torturers. They do contain several interesting points of information. For example, Americans employed by various government agencies were in fact working within the Guatemalan security forces at the time of my abduction; and the U.S. ambassador at the time of my abduction admitted that the embassy had contact with members of a death squad.
Documents also show that the Guatemalan defense minister in office at the time of my torture studied counterinsurgency tactics at an army school in Georgia. Course manuals advocated the torture and execution of civilians ("terrorists operating within the democratic system") whose "political, social, and economic activities" could cause "discontent." The manuals urged internal intelligence agencies to "obtain information on the substance of [these] nonviolent attacks." It is no surprise that the Guatemalan army targeted me, as all civilians trying to help the poor were considered potential subversives.
After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico, so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents. I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being. I still have little memory of my life before my abduction at thirty-one. Instead I have memories of the torture. You may think this strange, but even at this moment, I can sense the presence of my torturers. I can smell them. I can feel their monstrous hands on my body, I can hear them hissing in my ear that I am the one who killed the woman. I want to be free of these memories. I want freedom for myself and all the people of Guatemala. The key is the truth. I want to know who Alejandro was. Was he a CIA agent? Why is the U.S. government protecting him? How many other Alejandros are there out there, supervising torture?
Efforts to obtain information through U.S. government investigations also led nowhere. The Department of Justice interviewed me for more than forty hours, during which time their attorneys accused me of lying. They interrogated my friends and family members and generally made it clear that I was the culprit, I was the one being investigated, not the government officials who acted wrongly in my case. During the interview, I reentered that clandestine military prison and relived my torture it in all its horror. After I had given the majority of my testimony, I felt compelled to withdraw from direct participation in the Justice Department investigation. The investigators had the sketches I had made with the help of a professional forensic artist, delineating the characteristics of each torturer, including Alejandro, and the investigators had my testimony, in detail. The responsibility for finding answers lay with them. The Department of Justice came up with a two-hundred-page report to protect sources and methods and, ostensibly, to protect my own privacy.
In an attempt to get the report declassified, I then had to violate my own privacy. Afraid that the Department of Justice investigators might leak information I had given them if I pressured for the release of the report, I went public with that secret information myself: I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes. Unable to carry within me what the torturers had engendered, what I could only view as a monster, the product of the men who had raped me, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life.
Am I proud of that decision? No. But if I had to make the decision again, I believe I would decide as I did then. I felt I had no choice. If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died. In 1998, after going public with this information, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the Department of Justice report. My request was denied in full.
But to this day, I cannot forget those who suffered with me and died in that clandestine prison. In spite of the humiliation that demanding answers has entailed, I stand with the Guatemalan people. I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice. My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible. I know what few U.S. citizens know: what it is to be an innocent civilian, and to be accused, interrogated, and tortured, to have my own government eschew my claims for justice and actively destroy my character because my case causes political problems for them. I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting.
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