ANDRES THOMAS CONTERIS
http://www.hiddeninplainsight.org
Conteris is a Latin America human rights activist. He spoke out during John Negroponte’s Senate confirmation hearing today (and was handcuffed and detained.) Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the Nicaragua Contra war in the early 1980s. Conteris said today: “I spoke up at the hearing just as they were talking about rendition. Rendition is equal to U.S. support for torture. It’s our government sending people to other countries where they can be tortured.”
Conteris added: “John Negroponte is an expert at covering up for torture. He did it while he was ambassador to Honduras, he did it as torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere continued while he was ambassador to Iraq. Now, if he is confirmed he will be in charge of the most massive intelligence apparatus in the world. It’s an apparatus that produces torture manuals and engages in torture — that trains people from other countries on how to torture, as we have seen from the School of the Americas.
“Negroponte is a death squad diplomat. He is associated, rightly, around the world with human rights violations. He supported death squads in Honduras, like Battalion 316. I lived in Honduras for five years, I know the impact Negroponte’s policies had there in the early 1980s.”
Conteris worked as a producer for “Hidden in Plain Sight,” a feature-length documentary that looks at the nature of U.S. policy in Latin America through the prism of the School of the Americas (renamed, in January of 2001, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), the controversial military school that trains Latin American soldiers in the USA.
via IPA