A Negroponte Postscript
Laverty, Paul
By Paul Laverty Illustration by Peter Kuper A Negroponte Postscript The trouble about writing fiction is that I spend too much time in a room by myself. On occasions I wonder if I'm going nuts,...
...ambassador to the U.N., Iraq, and now head of National Intelligence, whose only weapon is a pen and a microphone...
...Along with the new director's cut is a glossy booklet with photographs and excerpts from the introduction to my screenplay written in 1996...
...I don't blame the team at Universal, as counsel's opinion in the corporate world is as important as the Oracle at Delphi for ancient Greeks, and all tremble at the signs...
...He won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 for "Sweet Sixteen...
...Despite the best efforts of the young man at Universal to get my postscript added, he was informed by lawyers, that even with the usual disclaimer, they couldn't risk it...
...The other is a highly trained Yale graduate, a polyglot promoted by Kissinger after learning Vietnamese, who then went on to be U.S...
...Negroponte in his new office at National Intelligence in charge of fifteen different agencies with his multi-billion-dollar budget...
...I asked who counsel was, and on what basis he or she reached that opinion...
...He turns at the CIAs kidnapping of terror suspects in Europe and the dumping of them in client states for vicarious torture...
...Deadline passed...
...He turns when he finds out that U.S...
...So, too, does the image of Mr...
...Kofi Annan, in the U.N...
...I asked for a copy of the opinion but was told that it was "verbal...
...experiment to tear Nicaragua apart in the '80s was Mr...
...A prizewinning series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 demonstrated that Negroponte knew about the torture and murders that Honduras's Battalion 316, trained by the CIA, was carrying out...
...And then there are the wordsmiths, who "soften up" public opinion with "sleep manipulation" and yoga-like "stress positions...
...Negroponte a human rights denier and a champion of teenage mutilators...
...He then covered them up by whitewashing reports back to Congress about Honduras's human rights record...
...He told me he had been involved in dozens of ambushes...
...I faxed a one-paragraph postscript, and that is when the trouble started...
...He rolls over yet again after discovering the outsourcing of interrogation to private U.S...
...Paul Laverty once worked as a human rights lawyer in Central America...
...Negroponte, as ambassador, was the local cheerleader taking his instructions from Washington...
...Negroponte told his critics last year that allegations against him were "old hat...
...Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was advising Bush that some elements of the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete...
...Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's memo authorizing new interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva Conventions...
...Here is the offending paragraph: "The man who was at the center of the U.S...
...He turns again when reading U.S...
...In February of 2005 he was appointed head of National Intelligence by George Bush Junior...
...others have expensive educations to chip away at legal convention...
...Some have muscle and plastic gloves...
...Not a squeak...
...On another day, I interviewed a young Contra, barely twenty, who had been captured by the Sandinistas...
...Perhaps, in these times, it should be updated by adding "and who obtains high office...
...I remember...
...ambassador to Honduras...
...And he spins a final time upon hearing that Craig Murray, U.K...
...Incidents like this peppered the entire war...
...Her parents somehow got away to the safety of a trench, only to hear the Contras in the near distance torturing their daughter, whose screams they recognized...
...The film is set against the backdrop of the U.S.-financed war in Nicaragua during the '80s, where I once worked for a human rights organization...
...One has no name, long forgotten, one of many thousands of illiterate campesino teenagers who did the dirty work on flesh with knives...
...So who am I in my tiny room to call Mr...
...headquarters, called him "a great diplomat and a wonderful ambassador...
...While staring out the window, he drifted off into a terrifying reverie and with an imaginary knife in hand, he swished it back and forth, describing in detail how he finished off those lying wounded from an ambushed vehicle...
...The United States bribed and bullied Honduras to host the Contras, who were fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua...
...Almost twenty years on, his face keeps coming back to mind, though my hunch is he has long since taken his own life...
...He claims to be unaware of any U.S...
...The team at Universal was genuinely enthusiastic and worked their pants off to pull it all together...
...ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired for taking up the case of a mother whose son was boiled alive and for daring to acknowledge that the MI6 had used information the CIA had extracted by torture...
...He said, "I want to say to those people: Haven't you moved on...
...National Intelligence Director...
...He calls on us to set up a sister organization to Amnesty, perhaps, Memory International, one that uses the power of public opinion and ordinary decency, not just to follow the fate of the prisoner, but to monitor and challenge the other side of the equation, not the abused, but the abuser-whether that be the head of the detention center, the manufacturer who sells the electric batons, or, most important of all, their political champions in high office who make their dirty work possible but never mess their own suit...
...Two memories still haunt me...
...They found her dead in the ditch the next day with her breasts cut off...
...In my continuing little dream, Peter Benenson comes back from the grave carrying a little symbol of the scales of justice wrapped up in barbed wire, with Milan Kundera's quote underneath: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting...
...In the chaos, a young woman was shot and couldn't run...
...My agent received a phone call from a lawyer saying counsel's opinion had been sought and what I had written was deemed to be "contentious and inflammatory...
...Inflammatory...
...John Negroponte, once U.S...
...His seventh feature film, to be directed by Ken Loach, is now in preproduction...
...On occasions I wonder if I'm going nuts, or just maybe, despite the doubts, my quiet fury is a normal reaction from an average human being...
...Torturers are on the march...
...I'm sure they never met, and suspect the former's butchery would be roundly condemned in diplo-speak by the latter...
...I was on a film set when I got word that the text was going to print and I only had ten minutes to glance over the summary...
...In April, much to my delight, Universal brought out a new DVD of Carla's Song, starring Bobby Carlyle and Scott Glenn, written by me and directed by Ken Loach...
...We got a report one night of a Contra attack on a cooperative...
...Not an inch, Mr...
...Can I ask the outrageous question, "What is the difference between those two men...
...Postscript gone...
...Each morning he should have no difficulty spotting a terrorist...
...contractors in Iraq...
...I am reminded of that wonderful perception by the American philosopher John Dewey, who once said, "If you want to establish some conception of a society, go find out who is in jail...
...human rights abuse in Nicaragua or El Salvador during this time...
...In my fantasy, I imagine Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, turning in his grave...
...Every serious human rights organization carried detailed investigations within Nicaragua at this time, and while the Sandinistas came in for some heavy criticism too, all revealed widespread and systematic abuse by the Contras, much of it directed at the civilian population...
Vol. 69 • July 2005 • No. 7
