A servant of the empire.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editorial

If you wink at torture, if you don't mind mass slaughter, if lying is of no concern to you, you can go far in this world.

Just ask John Negroponte.

He served as a State Department political officer in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, and then he headed up the Vietnam desk at the National Security Council from 1971 to 1973. During that decade, the Johnson-Nixon war was killing three million people in Indochina, along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers.

But Negroponte did not want the war to end. In fact, as an aide to Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks, he urged Kissinger not to come to terms.

A decade later in Central America, Negroponte essentially ran the illegal Contra War against Nicaragua from his post as U.S. ambassador to Honduras.

This war cost the lives of some 30,000 people.

An inescapable feature of U.S.-Central America policy in the 1980s was support for torturers. Here, Negroponte did his part.

In particular, he knew about and supported Battalion 316, the Honduran intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, that killed at least 184 people. One of those was the former secretary to Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, himself the victim of a CIA-funded death squad in 1980. The secretary fled to Honduras after Romero's assassination. Battalion 316 then abducted her and threw her from a helicopter to her death.

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun ran a prizewinning series on Battalion 316. It concluded that Negroponte knew about the tortures and murders and covered them up. Under his direct supervision, the embassy prepared reports to Congress that never mentioned the brutality of the Honduran military, the Sun reported. This omission allowed Honduras to keep getting U.S. funding.

"I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras," Negroponte testified before Congress in 2001.

But here's what the Sun said. "The intelligence unit, known as Battalion...