Torture: Hold Them Accountable; or repeat, repeat.

(from the above article- it's fun to google names, by the way-jr)

....Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, declined to comment on the manuals. However, asked about agency policy on the use of force and torture, he referred to Stolz's (Richard Stolz, then-deputy director for operations) 1988 testimony before the Senate intelligence committee.

In testimony declassified at The Sun's request, Stolz confirmed that the CIA trained Hondurans.

"The course consisted of three weeks of classroom instruction followed by two weeks of practical exercises, which included the questioning of actual prisoners by the students.

"Physical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected, not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective," he said. 1988 ....

In Texas, said Mr. Caballero, the Americans ''taught me interrogation, in order to end physical torture in Honduras. They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/05/magazine/testifying-to-torture.html?pagewanted=1

''The C.I.A. knew what was going on, and the Ambassador (John Negroponte) complained sometimes. But most of the time they'd look the other way,'' said one American official who, like almost all officials quoted in this article, spoke on the condition that he not be named. The C.I.A. refused to comment on the events described here, saying through a spokesman that the agency would not comment ''on intelligence matters.''...

...By the beginning of 1981, according to American and Honduran officials, the C.I.A. had helped bring Argentine Army officers to Honduras to train the contras and Honduran intelligence units. The Argentines were led by Col. Osvaldo Ribeiro, who, a Honduran officer said, had learned and practiced secret murder during the ''dirty war'' in the mid-1970's, in which an estimated 12,000 or more Argentines ''disappeared'' in a state-directed campaign of elimination known in Central America as ''the Argentine method.'' At the same time, according to American and Honduran officials, the C.I.A. pushed for the rapid rise of a Honduran Army colonel, Gustavo Alvarez Martinez....

 

"The Americans knew everything we were doing," Caballero said. "They saw what condition the victims were in -- their marks and bruises. They did not do anything."

http://www.soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id=807

Torturers' confessions

Tuesday, June 13th 1995

Ginger Thompson and Gary Cohn, Baltimore Sun TORONTO - Jose Barrera gulped down a double shot of Sambuca before he began to talk about his past as a torturer and murderer. He recalled how he nearly suffocated people with rubber masks, how he attached wires to their genitals and shocked them with electricity, how he tore off a man's testicles with a rope. "We let them stay in their own excrement," he said, his gold front tooth reflecting the dim lamplight. "When they were very weak, we would take them to disappear." Images such as these cast a shadow over the lives of Barrera and other men who served in Battalion 316, a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s. At a time when Honduras was crucial to the U.S. government's war on communism in Central America, the battalion was created and trained to collect intelligence. But it also stalked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of Honduran men and women suspected of subversion. ...  ...

Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive notes that Negroponte's own cables and memos do not reflect any concern about these human rights abuses.

"Conspicuously absent from the cable traffic," writes Kornbluh, "is reporting on human rights atrocities that were committed by the Honduran military and its secret police unit known as Battalion 316. . . . Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies, and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place."

There's a reason for that, as the Baltimore Sun noted. Had Negroponte reported on these abuses, aid to Honduras could have been cut off. So Negroponte insisted that the embassy reports to Congress not include any mention of the human rights abuses.

According to a raft of recently declassified documents that can be found at the National Security Archive website, Negroponte frequently met with the head of the Honduran military, General Gustavo Alvarez. It was General Alvarez who oversaw the work of  the notorious Battalion 316, which kidnapped and tortured hundreds of Hondurans and murdered at least 184, according to a prizewinning series by the Baltimore Sun in 1995.

In an October 13, 1983, cable, Negroponte wrote about an airplane trip he had just taken with General Alvarez, whose "commitment to constitutional government" Negroponte saluted. "Alvarez's dedication to democracy is frequently questioned by critics of our policies here," Negroponte wrote. "The critics are motivated either by a stereotype of political life in Honduras as unduly influenced by the military, in disregard of the facts, or out of sheer ignorance of the fact that Alvarez on repeated pubic occasions has pledged his complete loyalty to constitutional rule."

To put Alvarez's "dedication to democracy" in perspective, let's return to the Baltimore Sun's piece on Battalion 316.

"The battalion was organized by Colonel Gustav Alvarez Martinez, commander of the Honduran military, and remained under his authority after he became head of the Honduran armed forces in 1982 with the rank of general," the Sun reported. "Execution orders came down to the battalion from Alvarez" and a subordinate.

One member of Battalion 316, Florencio Caballero, told the Sun about the killing of a 35-year-old teacher and political activist. "By order of Alvarez, to be sure that no one would ever find his body, they took him from Tegucigalpa and stabbed him to death," Caballero said. "Then they cut his body to pieces with a machete and buried the pieces in different places along the road." ...

the reason that this stuff happens over and over, we don't hold people accountable- Roger Noriega, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, Oliver North. . . on and on... - excused, promoted and rewarded. 

Negroponte's nomination is also part of a concerted effort to rehabilitate those who planned and organized the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s. When last heard from, these men were objects of public opprobrium and, in some cases, criminal indictments. Bush administration officials believe that they were shamefully mistreated and that they ought to be honored for their much-maligned service. No one is more worthy in their eyes than Negroponte, whose work made it possible for the United States to turn Honduras into a staging area for the contra war.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14485

...After Congress cut off aid to the contras in late 1984, the Honduran government also began to distance itself from the contra project, even intercepting a shipment of arms intended for contra fighters. This alarmed the White House. President Reagan telephoned his Honduran counterpart, Roberto Suazo Córdova, and sent then Vice President George Bush to meet with him. Honduras soon resumed its old policy of helping the contras. ...

...In October 1982 he wrote a letter to The Economist protesting a dispatch it had published about the emergence of death squads in Honduras. He called the dispatch "simply untrue," and asserted that Honduras was blessed with "increasingly professional armed forces" and "liberal democratic institutions including full freedom of expression."

That same year, the State Department's annual human rights report on Honduras, prepared under Negroponte's direction, found "no evidence of systematic violation of judicial procedures" and even praised Gen-eral Álvarez, who "recently issued a public statement denying that the government used torture and specifically stated that torture was not to be used on prisoners." Negroponte's 1983 report was equally positive. It found that "the Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature," that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras," that "sanctity of the home is guaranteed by the Constitution and generally observed," and that "freedom of speech and the press are respected."...