Talk:John Negroponte/Archive 1

message: Ferkelparade, Wizzy et al. -- following your complaints, I've moved my earlier contribution to this page. Those who wish to use it as a reference for expanding the section on Negroponte in Iraq are welcome to do so. I do believe that the wiki is an excellent place to consolidate information on Negroponte in Iraq -- a difficult task that the media is probably unwilling to do. But I don't want to violate NPOV.
:On July 14th, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald reported claims by two witnesses that Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, had pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station . The Herald established that at least thirty other people were witnesses to the extra-judicial killings, including US soldiers who were providing Allawi with security at the time. Negroponte, in his new role as US Ambassador to Iraq, refused to comment on the allegations while at the same time asking that the case be closed in a direct echo of his work to minimize and deny US-sanctioned human-rights abuses in Honduras. Negroponte's office replied to the Herald in an e-mail: 
::If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed.
----
How about this ? However, Negroponte was not there himself - just (as I read it) four of his bodyguards. How may does he have ? So, while I initially just wanted the Honduras comment removed, I am not sure it belongs here at all. I first read it that Negroponte was there.
:On July 14th, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald reported claims by two witnesses that Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, had pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station . Negroponte's office replied to The Herald that they would not be persuing the matter.
Now it looks like News, not Encyclopedia ? Wizzy 12:20, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think the paragraph in question is too POV (that's not why I deleted it), and I don't want to question its factual accuracy - it merely seemed to me to be a bit too detailed for a biography article, and the paragraph doesn't really make clear why the event is important for a Negroponte biography. Major news events deserve their own article anyway, which could then be linked from here...maybe the paragraph could be shortened to something like "Negroponte recently came under attack for tacitly accepting Ahmed Allawi's alleged extrajudicial killing of insurgents". Anyway, that's my opinion...I'm willing to discuss. -- Ferkelparade 00:31, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: Hmm, but that's exactly the point: so far, nobody has attacked Negroponte over this issue, and the killings by Allawi themselves are still disputed - this information should definitely be in the Allawi article, but at this point, it seems a bit premature to have it here... -- Ferkelparade 12:32, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Iraq Extrajudicial killings?

message: Dear Wikipedia,
Thank you for your excellent work. Here is a question regarding Mr. Negroponte that I haven't found addressed anywhere, I hope you can help:
When John Negroponte was named U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, I felt it was an announcement to world of international diplomacy that the George W. Bush administration was asserting its intention to use the dirtiest methods of "counter-insurgency" at all levels of international policy implementation.
 
There was extensive reporting in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 on Negroponte?s role in covering up human-rights abuses in Honduras during the Contra war against Nicaragua. However, I remembered hearing Mr. Negroponte's name connected with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. The most I have been able to ascertain was that he served as chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the war. At the time, it seemed to be common knowledge that he supervised the program, which has been characterized as one of torture and summary execution of possibly thousands of Vietnamese believed to be supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
 
If you could verify or refute these charges it would be of undoubted service to the world's right to know the truth about those who speak in our name - especially now with Mr. Negroponte being appointed ambassador to a nominally sovereign Iraq.
 
Thank you very much,
 
Carl Glenn
:Hi, welcome to wikipedia. If you are certain about a fact, you yourself can edit the article and put it in - read Wikipedia:Welcome,_newcomers about this. I too have seen some sources on the web stating that he was a "political officer" at the Saigon embassy, albeit a junior one. It would be nice to at least know the time span which he spent there.
:As to the charges in connection with the Phoenix Project, you could try and post your question at wikipedia's Reference desk. Please be aware that some topics such as U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam war can be highly controversial, so if you make edits try to follow wikipedia's Neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. High on a tree 00:42, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Pheonix Program in Vietnam?

message: This article is a pretty-straightforward example of POV writing.  Virtually all the cites are to left-wing or far-left (the Guardian or Common Dreams) articles....
*Is it really so POV though? I guess it would be good to also have more comprehensive sections about his later career as a diplomat, but the sections that exist now are all of well documented events, which Negroponte is accused of knowing about and ignoring --Jacobolus 11:44, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: POV

message: :"..in a direct echo of his work to minimize and deny US-sanctioned human-rights abuses in Honduras."
Should go. Wizzy 16:52, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Negroponte in Iraq

message: Why is... "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." ...in quotes?
: I believe it's a direct quotation from the NYT, but it should be found and attributed --Jacobolus 10:56, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  question 

message: : "In 1982, with strong American encouragement, Honduras's newly-elected civilian President, Roberto Suazo Cordova, promoted Alvarez to general and named him commander of the army. Even before his promotion, Alvarez was organizing a new army intelligence unit with C.I.A. support, which would be known as Battalion 316. Sgt. Florencio Caballero, who had already received American training, says he was among the first of those recruited to serve in the new unit."
: ...
: "In Texas, said Mr. Caballero, the Americans 'taught me interrogation, in order to end physical torture in Honduras. They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.
:"'When I returned to Honduras, I was trained in assaults, bombs and explosives by Americans, Chileans and Argentines,' Mr. Caballero recalled. 'Then I joined an intelligence unit as an interrogator. We seized and investigated subversives.'"
Jacobolus 11:21, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: From [[New York Times|NYT]], [[5 June]] [[1988]]:

message: :"The nightmare began for Honduras in August 1980. Twenty-five Honduran army officers were flown from Central America to a desert air strip in the southwestern United States, according to the sworn testimony in international court of one Honduran intelligence officer who participated. They spent six months learning interrogation techniques from a team of CIA and FBI trainers. Florencio Caballero, the Honduran officer, says that the U.S. instructors taught different methods of eliciting information from uncooperative prisoners without resorting to violence.
:"When the officers returned to Honduras, the courses continued. The American trainers were joined by instructors fresh from the 'dirty wars' in Argentina and Chile in which thousands of suspected leftists were abducted and executed by security forces. These sessions, according to Caballero, focused on surveillance and techniques for following suspects and rescuing kidnap victims. This group of officers went on to become a secret division of Honduran military intelligence known as Battalion 3-16.
:"That Battalion 3-16 engaged in a systematic program of disappearances and political murder from 1981 to 1984 is beyond question. In 1981, the U.S. State Department, in its annual report on human rights practices, noted some 60 'mysterious' disappearances in Honduras, whereas none was reported in previous years. By March 1984, 100-150 students, teachers, unionists and travelers had been picked up and secretly executed by plainclothes squads. These squads, according to a judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued in July 1988, belonged to Battalion 3-16."
--Jacobolus 11:36, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Washington Post]], [[28 November]], [[1993]]

message: removed hardcore POV sites (the World Socialist Website, Noam Chomsky and The Guardian are not news sources).
: Wikipedia's job is to direct readers to relevant commentary, and sometimes that commentary is located at sites which are clearly POV, but still add value.  For the same reason I could remove links to the white house from George Bush's page, claiming that it is POV. OF COURSE it is POV, but Wikipedia aims only to maintain POV on its own site, not necessarily on all links.  Furthermore, the Guardian is a respected British newspaper, certainly credible as a source. --Jacobolus 12:37, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I second the above and would like add that while the World Socialist Website has an obvious ideological agenda, it publishes excellent reporting. The same goes for, of course, the Economist or the Wall Street Journal. -- Viajero 13:27, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: if you put WSW in the same category as mainstream publications as the Economist and the WSJ I am going to have a hard time taking you seriously. J. Parker Stone 09:24, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: POV sites?

message: OK, i think it's pretty well-established that there are serious questions about what Negroponte knew and whether he intentionally shut himself up about it because the Honduran government was an ally. that's all well and good. but i have not seen evidence that he intentionally tried to cover up evidence of military misconduct. there is a difference. J. Parker Stone 05:57, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Turned a blind eye to vs. Cover up

message: I am neither a Wiki admin, nor a particular fan of Negroponte's. I don't know the man, and have not spent years researching his activities in Honduras or elsewhere. That said, however, I consider myself to be both rational and neutral, and I find this article to be highly POV, verging on character assassination. Indeed, the fact that a small but determined group of anti-Negroponte activists continues its campaign of layering on one-sided attacks, means that in the absence of Negroponte partisans (is there some rule that says every article needs champions as well as detractors?) this article represents a low point of Wikipedia, and a great example of the kind of stuff that Wiki-detractors point to with glee. "Good Article"? You've got to be kidding! [sigh] Yorker 23:23, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have not spent years researching Negroponte either but I don't think the article is a hatchet job.  It appears to report accurate and sourced information that is consistent with my memory of this material.  There may be exculpatory material in the public record that you should include if you know of it, but I certainly never saw it in the 1980s when I read about him in mainstream newspapers.  There are definitely places in the article where citations would be helpful, but I don't think this is made up or just a bunch of baseless attacks.  If you think something is incorrect, by all means look it up and correct it!--csloat 05:19, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Will an admin PLEASE either tag this article for POV, or else edit it to neutrality? 

message: Some anon IP just added the following info to the :
:At Yale, he was, like many members of the Bush family, a member of Skull & Bones.
Now, given the subject, this affiliation is certainly possible, but the Skull and Bones article has no mention of him. Does anyone have a reference to his membership? Also, the phrase "like many memebers of the Bush family" seems unneccessary. Thoughts? Kiaparowits 16:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Skull and Bones 

message: I added the  tag because this article is too criticism-heavy. The Skull and Bones bit is completely irrelevant, and at least a couple of paragraphs do not have anything to do with Negroponte, but rather with the Honduras incidents. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 20:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Whether something is relevant or not is a POV, isn't it? I agree that criticism shouldn't be in articles unless it relates opinions/critisms of credible sources. --Rebroad 16:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV tag 

message: I just heard that he was in Skull & Bones on the radio and came here looking for the years to find fellow members. It is a left wing show, The Randi Rhodes Show, which I know has used Wikipedia to research in the past; so it could have used as its source the disputed line.
I don't think that the original author of the sentence:
"At Yale, he was, like many members of the Bush family, a member of Skull & Bones."
meant to show bias. It can be useful in drawing conclusions about how he was linked to people like the Bushs and Reagan. The wording comes across as expressing a POV, so that problem must be fixed before even thinking about putting it back into the text. Denis Diderot II 04:18, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Skull & Bones Links 

message: Any of y'all know wtf the newly added 'death squad' section is about? I have no idea or context, and am mulling its deletion, unless it gets cleaned up. --moof 07:27, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed it.  Wikipedia is not a place for such apologetics.  If Negroponte made such a statement somewhere, it is likely quotable here, but it is neither necessary nor desirable for wikipedia editors to make up arguments that we think Negroponte should have said.--csloat 07:48, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  'death squads'? 

message: Unfortunately, my commit comment got accidentally truncated. If documents that previously weren't released have actually been released, please cite such, rather than just removing a big hunk of text. --moof 09:43, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "irrelevant miscellany" 

message: The article has no references and is not set out in wiki style which I personally feel makes it hard to follow.--Childzy 12:39, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Failed GA 

message: Wait, what? Do we really need this? I could understand a criticism section but not a whole area devoted for links. Can somebody just add a section with the links as citations? - JWhitt (talk) 00:16, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticism external links? 

message: An anon IP user deleted the wikilink to Battalion 316 in the see also section. I just restored it. Negroponte's links to the US support of Battalion 316 has come up repeatedly at his various Senate confirmation hearings and is frequently cited in media coverage. A simple google search of Negroponte Battalion 316 shows many solid sources discussing Negroponte's relationship with the Battalion.Notmyrealname (talk) 20:33, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Battalion 316 

message: While trying to clean up some of the citations of sources which seem to be so confusing in this article, I discovered that a big chunk of text from "Ambassador to Honduras (1981–1985)" down through "Ambassador to the UN (2001–2004)", seems to have been borrowed from a salon.com article. I question the correctness of this wholesale "borrowing" and hope somebody who is more knowledgeable than I will take a look at the situation.
DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 23:00, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism? 

message: I'm contributing to an article. Anybody can help finding this out? Thy.--SvenAERTS (talk) 23:17, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Family? [[Nicholas NEGROPONTE]] from the [[OLPC]] [[One Laptop Per Child]] initiative? 

message: The POV tag has been on this page for several months, but the explanation given for why it is here offers no specific suggestion for improving the page.  "Too much criticism" is not a good reason for the tag -- couldn't we say the same of this page or this one?  NPOV should not mean that we balance every "bad" comment with a "good" one.  I think we should remove the tag unless someone can articulate a clear suggestion about what can be done to improve the POV issue.--csloat 07:53, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV tag? 

message: Was Negroponte one important member of the US diplomatic delegation against Vietnam during the Vietnam war ( 1965-1975) ?
Thanks,
--Redflowers 19:03, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  One important member of the US diplomatic delegation against Vietnam? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified