March 12 — George W. Bush seems intent on rewriting the history of the Reagan and Bush administrations, white-washing the scandal that almost toppled the Reagan Administration and may have cost his father his re-election. How else to explain his appointment of two of the central villains of Iran-Contra in his own administration as if their participation were badges of honor rather than shame?

BUSH’S CHOICE for United Nations ambassador, John Negroponte, was the Reagan administration point man for the contra wars in Honduras during the early 1980s. Otto Reich, his nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, headed up the Reagan Administration’s so-called Office of Public Information during those same years. Both men have a great deal still to answer for, as Papa Bush short-circuited Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation with a timely pardon for former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger before the canaries could finish singing.

OUT OF THE LOOP?
What was Bush the elder so concerned about? Perhaps it was the fact that Weinberger’s diaries implicated him in the Iran-contra cover-up and demonstrated that without a doubt, he had lied about his level of knowledge of the entire operation.

(These pardons were politically far more significant than any of the foolish pardons issued by Bill Clinton in the final moments of his term, despite hysterical press coverage indicating otherwise.) No doubt the younger Bush wants to behave as if his father did nothing wrong in participating in Iran-Contra and then lying about his having been “out of the loop” afterwards.

Another influential member of the Bush foreign policy team has reason to act accordingly. Secretary of State Colin Powell was, like George Bush, fully aware of the secret 1986 sale of TOW missiles to Iran, according to the report of the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission, which investigated the scandal. Lawrence Walsh’s report found that Powell, too, had offered “misleading” testimony that could have been used “to impeach his credibility,” but decided against prosecution.

BAD OLD DAYS RETURN
Now the bad old days appear to be coming back again in the persons of Negroponte and Reich. The job of the former will be to represent the nation before the entire world at the United States. The entire world might be forgiven if comes away with a decidedly unfavorable impression. As Sarah Wildman demonstrates in the current issue of The New Republic, Negroponte appears to have turned a deliberate blind eye to a murderous pattern of political killings during his years in Honduras, in order to allow the illegal prosecution of America’s war against the Sandinistas to proceed without additional complication.

Honduras served as the main base for military operations in neighboring Nicaragua for the US-backed contras during the 1980s. Accordingly, the military aid it received shot up from $4 million to $77.4 million during his ambassadorship. This aid helped the Honduran military carry out a campaign of terror and intimidation against its democratic opponents and indeed, anyone who opposed it. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, found the Honduran government guilty of “engaging in a practice and policy of systematic and gross human rights violations including disappearances, extra judicial execution, and torture,” says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, who is quoted by Wildman. In the Reagan Administration, John D. Negroponte, George W. Bush's pick for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, burnished the image of the Contra rebels and worked to discredit their foes.

Negroponte’s predecessor, Jack Binns, repeatedly reported these abuses and urged his superiors to take action to stop them. But Negroponte preferred to act as a PR man for the killers. Under his explicit direction, the embassy regularly issued reports that insisted, against all evidence, ”“Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature” and that there were “no political prisoners in Honduras.”

In fact, an investigation by The Baltimore Sun discovered that in 1982 alone the Honduran press published at least 318 stories of extrajudicial actions — meaning murders and kidnappings — by the military. In 1994, when the National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras published released a preliminary report on the subject in which it officially admitted 179 of these as still missing. Former U.S. embassy aide Rick Chidester told the Sun that he had been ordered to censor any allegations of torture and executions from his draft of the 1982 human rights report. Negroponte denies this, but the shoe certainly seems to fit.

BLACK HATS, WHITE HATS
Otto Reich, meanwhile, aside from being a favorite of the right-wing Miami Cubans and a paid lobbyist for the arms industry, has a great deal to answer for during these years as well. Together with Elliott Abrams, Oliver North and others, he ran an office in the State Department whose expressed purpose, according to its own internal memorandum, was to “concentrate on gluing black hats on the Sandinistas and white hats on the UNO [the contras].” To do this, it offered privileges to favored journalists; placed ghost-written articles over the signatures of contra leaders in the nation’s’ leading opinion magazines and op-ed pages, and generally publicize nasty stories about the Sandinistas, true or not. (At one point, under Oliver North’s direction, a hapless Central American actor was sent up to Capitol Hill to impersonate a Nicaraguan priest, and claim that he had been mistreated by the Sandinistas.)

In the first year of its operation alone, Reich’s office sent attacks on the Sandinistas to 1,600 college libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, 107 religious organizations and countless reporters, right-wing lobbyists and members of Congress. It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk show engagements. In just one week, of March 1985, its officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of The Wall Street Journal into publishing an op-ed allegedly penned by an unknown professor, guided an NBC news story on the contras, and written and edited op-ed articles to be signed by contra spokesmen, as well as planting lies in the home media about the experiences of a visiting congressman to Nicaragua.

Among the lies peddled by OPD agents and employees were stories that portrayed the Sandinistas as virulent anti-Semites; that reported a Soviet shipment of MIG jets to Managua, and revealed U. S. reporters in Nicaragua to be receiving sexual favors-both heterosexual and homosexual-from both Sandinistas agents in exchange for pro-Communist reporting.

FORGETFUL SUPERPOWER
These charges were outright lies but that did not stop Reich from peddling them and the news media from printing them. Now George Bush wants to put this man in charge of all U.S. Latin American policy as his ideological brethren, Negroponte represents the country to the entire world. Together, these two appointments provide an amazing, though depressingly consistent picture of a superpower that is either too forgetful or insouciant to care about the damage it has rendered, both to other nations and to its own credibility in the extremely recent past. And judging by the non-reaction in both the Democratic Party and the mass media, it’s hard to believe they won’t get away with it. Let’s hope that history somehow ignores Santayana’s famous dictum and does not repeat itself this time as farce. Latin American nations have already paid a high enough price for this, our country’s folly.