[cross posted at NPR Check]

On Saturday's ATC Guy Raz held a friendly with John Negroponte to see what he thought about the US joining the UN Human Rights Council. Negroponte told Raz

• "No matter how repugnant some of these organizations or behaviors might be, we're probably better served in an international organization by participating..."
• "I think the leadership...are from countries that have good human rights records..."

Raz added his own skepticism noting that it barely approved monitors for Darfur and "it's already withdrawn human rights monitors from places like Cuba and Belarus. Can the council really be taken seriously if, as some have argued, many of it's decisions are simply political?"

Has Raz ever heard of irony, or for that matter Google? All one has to do it Google "Negroponte human rights" and voila! you get a whole assortment of interesting information about Negroponte's lifelong journey through the dark side. During the report Raz tells us that John Negroponte was "former US Ambassador to Iraq and UN, former director of National Intelligence, and most recently Deputy Secretary of State under the Bush Administration" but - dang! - he somehow failed to mention Negroponte's gig in Honduras from 1981 to 1985. That's odd because there's a lot of information out there about it. Let's see he's got his own special file at the National Security Archive, a nice long newspaper article in the Baltimore Sun, a virtual dossier of articles at In These Times, attention from The Nation and The Progressive, and even a film about his time there.

But really, who needs to know that Negroponte was running cover for an infamous Honduran death squad (Battalion 316) and paling around with death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez when all he's on to talk about is the effectiveness of a UN human rights council? Besides that was so long ago, and after his tenure in Iraq there's no indication that the US had created death squads like the ones Negroponte helped operate in Honduras...or is there?