squidpants

so my roommate D'Angelo just sent me this article about Bush appointing a bunch of guys tied up with the Iran-Contra scandal. According to the article, John Negroponte, Bush's selection for Director of National Intelligence, set up an army unit and covered up abuses and massacres by the Honduran army when he served as ambassador to Honduras. Then right before he was nominated to be intelligence czar, a bunch of Hondurans alleged to be war criminals were deported out of the U.S., apparently to avoid having to testify at his hearings. The other two men mentioned in the article, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams, now have foreign affairs jobs in government and did similar things about Nicaragua, with Abrams getting indicted for covering up a massacre and Reich harassing reporters who wrote critical articles and planting ghost-written news articles in major U.S. newspapers. It's pretty scary stuff.

I found a similar editorial in the Asia Times as well. Yikes.

And I found some brief biographies of all three guys:

Otto Reich
Elliott Abrams
John Negroponte