A Negroponte postcript.

The trouble about writing fiction is that I spend too much time in a room by myself. On occasions I wonder if I'm going nuts, or just maybe, despite the doubts, my quiet fury is a normal reaction from an average human being. In April, much to my delight, Universal brought out a new DVD of Carla's Song, starring Bobby Carlyle and Scott Glenn, written by me and directed by Ken Loach. The film is set against the backdrop of the U.S.-financed war in Nicaragua during the '80s, where I once worked for a human rights organization. The team at Universal was genuinely enthusiastic and worked their pants off to pull it all together. Along with the new director's cut is a glossy booklet with photographs and excerpts from the introduction to my screenplay written in 1996. I was on a film set when I got word that the text was going to print and I only had ten minutes to glance over the summary. I faxed a one-paragraph postscript, and that is when the trouble started.

Despite the best efforts of the young man at Universal to get my postscript added, he was informed by lawyers, that even with the usual disclaimer, they couldn't risk it. My agent received a phone call from a lawyer saying counsel's opinion had been sought and what I had written was deemed to be "contentious and inflammatory." I asked for a copy of the opinion but was told that it was "verbal." I asked who counsel was, and on what basis he or she reached that opinion. Not a squeak. Deadline passed. Postscript gone. I don't blame the team at Universal, as counsel's opinion in the corporate world is as important as the Oracle at Delphi for ancient Greeks, and all tremble at the signs.

Here is the offending paragraph:

"The man who was at the center of the U.S. experiment to tear Nicaragua apart in the '80s Was Mr. John Negroponte, once U.S. ambassador to Honduras. He claims to be unaware of any U.S. human rights abuse in Nicaragua or H Salvador during this time. In February of 2005 he was appointed head of National Intelligence by George Bush Junior. Each morning he should have no difficulty spotting a terrorist."

A prizewinning series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 demonstrated that Negroponte knew about the torture and murders that Honduras's Battalion 316, trained by the CIA, was carrying out. He then covered them up by whitewashing reports back to Congress about Honduras's human rights record.

The United States bribed and bullied Honduras to host the Contras, who were fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Negroponte, as ambassador, was the local cheerleader taking his instructions from Washington. Every serious human rights organization carried detailed investigations within Nicaragua at this time, and while the Sandinistas came in for some heavy criticism too, all revealed widespread and systematic abuse by the Contras, much of it directed at the civilian population.

Two memories still haunt me. We got a report one night of a Contra attack on a cooperative. In the chaos, a young woman was shot and couldn't run. Her parents somehow got away to the safety of a trench, only to hear the Contras in the near distance torturing their daughter, whose screams they recognized. They found her dead in the ditch the next day with her breasts cut off. Incidents like this peppered the entire war.

On another day, I interviewed a young Contra, barely twenty, who had been captured by the Sandinistas. He told me he had been involved in dozens of ambushes. While staring out the window, he drifted off into a terrifying reverie and with an imaginary knife in hand, he swished it back and forth, describing in detail how he finished off those lying wounded from an ambushed vehicle.

Almost twenty years on, his face keeps coming back to mind, though my hunch is he has long since taken his own life. So, too, does the image of Mr. Negroponte in his new office at National Intelligence in charge of fifteen different agencies with his multibillion-dollar budget. I'm sure they never met, and suspect the former's butchery would be roundly condemned in diplo-speak by the latter.

Can I ask the outrageous question, "What is the difference between those two men?" One has no name, long forgotten, one of many thousands of illiterate campesino teenagers who did the dirty work on flesh with knives. The other is a highly trained Yale graduate, a polyglot promoted by Kissinger after learning Vietnamese, who then went on to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Iraq, and now head of National Intelligence, whose only weapon is a pen and a microphone. Kofi Annan, in the U.N. headquarters, called him "a great diplomat and a wonderful ambassador." So who am I in my tiny room to call Mr. Negroponte a human rights denier and a champion of teenage mutilators. Inflammatory?

I am reminded of that wonderful perception by the American philosopher John Dewey, who once said, "If you want to establish some conception of a society, go find out who is in jail." Perhaps, in these times, it should be updated by adding "and who obtains high office."

Torturers are on the march. Some have muscle and plastic gloves; others have expensive educations to chip away at legal convention. And then there are the wordsmiths, who "soften up" public opinion with "sleep manipulation" and yoga-like "stress positions."

In my fantasy, I imagine Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, turning in his grave. He turns at the CIA's kidnapping of terror suspects in Europe and the dumping of them in client states for vicarious torture. He turns when he finds out that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was advising Bush that some elements of the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete." He turns again when reading U.S. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's memo authorizing new interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva Conventions. He rolls over yet again after discovering the outsourcing of interrogation to private U.S. contractors in Iraq. And he spins a final time upon hearing that Craig Murray, U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired for taking up the case of a mother whose son was boiled alive and for daring to acknowledge that the MI6 had used information the CIA had extracted by torture.

In my continuing little dream, Peter Benenson comes back from the grave carrying a little symbol of the scales of justice wrapped up in barbed wire, with Milan Kundera's quote underneath: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." He calls on us to set up a sister organization to Amnesty, perhaps, Memory International, one that uses the power of public opinion and ordinary decency, not just to follow the fate of the prisoner, but to monitor and challenge the other side of the equation, not the abused, but the abuser--whether that be the head of the detention center, the manufacturer who sells the electric batons, or, most important of all, their political champions in high office who make their dirty work possible but never mess their own suit.

Mr. Negroponte told his critics last year that allegations against him were "old hat." He said, "I want to say to those people: Haven't you moved on?"

Not an inch, Mr. National Intelligence Director. I remember.

Paul Laverty once worked as a human rights lawyer in Central America. His seventh feature film, to be directed by Ken Loach, is now in preproduction. He won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 for "Sweet Sixteen."