On Oct. 26, John D. Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, released a detailed National Intelligence Strategy for coordinating the nation’s 15 spy agencies. It calls for building up the ranks of intelligence operatives and analysts and delineates new global missions. One of the top three key missions cited is to “bolster the growth of democracy and sustain democratic states.” Reads the 20-page document: “We have learned to our peril that the lack of freedom in one state endangers the peace and freedom of others and that failed states are a refuge and breeding ground of extremism. Self-sustaining democratic states are essential to world peace and development.” The other missions outlined in the document are “defeating terrorists at home and abroad” and “preventing and countering the spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
“This strategy is a statement of our fundamental values, highest priorities, and orientation toward the future, but it is an action document as well,” Negroponte said. “For US national intelligence, the time for change is now.” (Boston Globe, Oct. 27)
Negroponte earlier this month created the National Clandestine Service within the CIA to coordinate US global espionage efforts. Under the plan, CIA Director Porter Goss will also become national human intelligence manager while the day-to-day operations of the clandestine service will be handled by an undercover officer—to be referred to publicly simply as “José.” (KRT, Oct. 13) The move came as a relief (or disappointment) to those who feared (hoped) that creation of the office of National Intelligence Director would supplant the traditional role of the CIA as leader of the various federal intelligence agencies.
Of course all this prattle about “fundamental values” and “spreading democracy” and the danger of “terrorist states” is hilariously ironic for those familiar with Negroponte’s deep complicity with countless human rights atrocities in Central America when he was ambassador to the US-backed terrorist state of Honduras in the 1980s. Unfortunately, this inconvenient little fact is now lost to the mainstream media’s memory. A current Google News search cross-referencing “Negroponte” and “Honduras” brings to light little more than the paranoid, xenophobic spewings of one Terry Thurber on the wacky AlJazeerah.com (not to be confused with the Arabic news network AlJazeera.net). And the esteemed Mr. Thurber is less aghast at all the human rights nastiness than Negroponte’s apparently suspect ethnic background. Thurber, evidently an American, writes with horror that he “learned that John Negroponte, our previous ambassador to the UN when Iraq was invaded, is Jewish.” The title of his charming little piece is “Dear Abby: Do Israelis have Christians in their Government?” The obvious implication is that the US is a Christian nation and Jews have no place in its government.
Unfortunately, this sinister crap is not confined to marginal sites like AlJazeerah.com. Counterpunch, which all us lefties are supposed to love and which modestly bills itself as “America’s Best Political Newsletter,” ran a story in June 2004, when Negroponte was serving as ambassador to occupied Iraq, by Ghali Hassan, which—before mentioning a word about the death sqauds, the torture, the “disappearances,” the massacres—zeroes in like a laser beam on the cardinal sin of Jewish origins. In his lead paragraph, Hassan quotes a “friend” (without any distancing or criticism) saying “to appoint a Jew as ambassador to the Arab country that has been devastated because of the will of a cabal of Jewish neocons headed by Wolfowitz Bush is just an accessory -, is like trying to put off a fire using buckets of gasoline.” (Sic)
Keep digging on Google and you will find plenty more such gems. Sorcha Faal, writing on the poorly-named Educate Yourself, actually goes one better, stating that Negroponte is an “Israeli national.”
And of course this stuff is eagerly lapped up by Israel’s apologists who wish to potray all opposition to the “war on terrorism” as Jew-hatred. Edward Olshaker, writing on the conservative Crisis: Israel, makes note of Ghali Hassan’s Counterpunch screed in a piece entitled “Radical Left’s Anti-Semites No Longer Pretend It’s ‘Zionism’ They Hate.” You know, it would be a hell of a lot easier to counter this propaganda if it weren’t true!
The entry on Negroponte on the supposedly authoritative and comprehensive Wikipedia says nothing about him being Jewish, noting only that “His father was a Greek shipping magnate.”
See WW4 REPORT’s in-depth report, “John Negroponte and the Death Squad Connection”
Jews are as much a race as Catholics
Xenophobic – me think thou protests too much. Perhaps if Jews were Ethiopian, as Hebrews were, and the writer feared them – then you could claim xenophobia. But instead you sound much like a grocery clerk too close to a store manager caught in an act of embezzelment. Jews are not a race – they are a religious affiliation. If we need to argue the ethnicity of the “Jewish” race, then who represents that race, “white” congressman Tom Lantos or “black” actor Whoopie Goldberg or “arab” Jews in Syria and Iraq.
Let it go Weinberg – most eastern European memebers of the Jewish Church that work in DC are Zionists. Clean your church. You’re not solving anything with”jew-baiting” shrills.
“Jewish Church”?
We never said Jews were a “race.” That is soley a product of your imagination. But we certainly stand by “xenophobic.” The commentator was obviously treating Jews as the Other. We just love it when non-Jews (and ignorant, bigoted, semi-literate ones at that) think they know more about what Jews are than Jews do.