In 2004 George Walker Bush named John Negroponte as Ambassador to the newly conquered nation of Iraq. Mr. Negroponte has an interesting history during the Reagan administration in Honduras (1981-1985):
At the time Mr. Negroponte was in Honduras, Honduras was a military dictatorship. Kidnapping, rape, torture and executions of dissidents was rampant. The military top and middle ranks were U.S-trained at the School of the Americas (SOA), the Harvard version of the CIA, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. According to Human Rights Watch, graduates of the SOA are responsible for the worst human rights abuses and torture of dissidents in Latin America. Some of its 60,000 graduates are notorious Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia and Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, Honduras security police chief and later Honduran top military commander.
Additional documentation below:
Through his support of Battalion 316, Negroponte is directly complicit in the murder of at least 184 Honduran civilians officially found to have been killed by the death squad by a 1994 Honduran truth commission. The unit used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept prisoners naked--and, when no longer useful, killed them brutally, and buried them in unmarked clandestine graves. Women were raped, often in front of their families.
Negroponte was likely involved in a number of other like paramilitary formations throughout Central America, as compliant and "stable" Honduras served as a base for U.S. operations throughout the region. Recently, the New York Times (March 8, 2005) reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) has reopened an investigation, "based on new forensic evidence," into the massacre of "hundreds of peasants" at El Mozote, El Salvador in 1981--when 800 unarmed men, women and children were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers "from a battalion trained and equipped by the United States." Reports of the massacre were published at the time in the New York Times and the Washington Post--reports that were "dismissed" by Negroponte and other "officials of the Reagan administration."
The following tends a bit towards hysteria -- extensive use of capitalization, their editorial choice, not mine:
BUT THE VERY CHOICE OF NEGROPONTE and his two assistants - James Jeffrey, who will become the deputy chief of mission, and Ron Newman, who will become senior defense attaché (both with intelligence and special forces backgrounds) - together with the very size of the new embassy the Americans are building in Baghdad (a massive, fortress-like structure encompassing one of Saddam Hussein's gargantuan Baghdad palaces) arguers something else altogether. It's an ominous and very foreboding sign that the Americans are planning AN EXTREMELY BRUTAL AND MURDEROUS, "ANTI-INSURGENCY CAMPAIGN" (I.E., A PHOENIX-STYLE OPERATION) AGAINST THE IRAQI PEOPLE BASED ON THE SWEEPING AND VERY SAVAGE USE OF DEATH SQUADS - the kind of campaign pursued by the very person they have now put in charge in Iraq (i.e., Negroponte) when he was ambassador to Honduras during the bloody Contra Wars of the early to mid-1980s.
Well!
Things got really bad and violent afterwards in Iraq -- and, come to think of it, in lots of parts of the Middle East.
I'm just sayin'. I've even heard it said that suicide bombings did not exist before Negroponte but I've been unable to turn up documentation. Negroponte's people have been working diligently to clean up his record.