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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/carl-m15.shtml
"Carlucci" bleeped from HBO version of Lumumba
Ex-CIA official threatened lawsuit
By Joanne Laurier
15 March 2002
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Home Box Office (HBO), the US cable television network, is currently
broadcasting a censored version of Lumumba, the award-winning film about
Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo, assassinated
by imperialist agents in January 1961.
Haitian-born director Raoul Peck’s work fictionally reconstructs Lumumba’s
coming to power in 1960 and the intrigues which led to his brutal murder.
The film shown on HBO is a version of the French-language original dubbed
into English, which bleeps out the name of Frank Carlucci, a future deputy
director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and secretary of defense,
in the dialogue and masks his name in the credits. At the time of Lumumba’s
death, Carlucci was the second secretary at the US embassy in the Congo and,
covertly, a CIA agent.
This attempt to keep Carlucci’s role in the Congo from television audiences
follows the release of US government documents revealing that President
Dwight Eisenhower ordered the CIA to murder Lumumba. Minutes of an August
1960 National Security Council meeting confirm that Eisenhower told CIA
chief Allen Dulles to “eliminate” the Congolese leader. The official note
taker, Robert H. Johnson, testified to this before the Senate Intelligence
Committee in 1975, but no documentary evidence had been previously available
to back up his claim.
Carlucci’s lawyers threatened Peck and distribution company Zeitgeist Films
with legal action if the name of the former US official was not bleeped out
of a scene that shows American Ambassador Clare Timberlake and Carlucci,
along with Belgian and Congolese officials, plotting Lumumba’s
assassination. Carlucci insisted that only the altered version of the film,
with his name missing, could be used for mass market venues, such as
television, video and DVD, allowing the original track to remain intact for
theater showings. Zeitgeist officials said they were too small and weak
financially to fight a case in court.
Carlucci is an immensely wealthy individual, with connections at the highest
levels of the US government. Deputy chief of the CIA under Jimmy Carter and
secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, Carlucci is now chairman of the
Carlyle Group, a private equity investment group with billions of dollars of
assets in the defense industry. The company employs prominent
ex-officeholders, such as former president George Bush, former British prime
minister John Majors and former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos.
Carlucci has the closest financial, political and personal ties to the Bush
family. Other figures involved in Carlyle Group operations include former
secretary of state James Baker, who headed up George W. Bush’s effort to
block vote recounts in Florida in 2000 and hijack the presidential election.
Carlucci has a long-term political relationship with his former classmate
and wrestling buddy from Princeton, the present secretary of defense, Donald
Rumsfeld.
At a January 24 screening of the film in New York held at the Council on
Foreign Relations (CRF), publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine, Peck
confirmed that the film had been changed in response to Carlucci’s legal
threats. Despite considerable media presence at the event, during which
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for one, raised a question about
Carlucci’s name being removed, virtually nothing has appeared in the
mainstream media about the issue.
The WSWS spoke with freelance journalist Lucy Komisar, who attended the
screening and wrote an article about Carlucci’s action for the Pacific News
Service. She commented: “This is censorship. This is a story that he
[Carlucci] does not want to talk about. Although he was not in charge [of
the CIA’s Congo activities in 1960], he was involved in what was going on.
It is a part of his history. The honorable thing to do would have been to
acknowledge that the Americans helped in doing away with a man who could
have helped that region—that they supported Mobutu, who for decades led a
brutal dictatorship which caused enormous suffering. I think the incident
shows the extremes to which people like Carlucci will go to cover up actions
they know were wrong—even to censoring a movie.”
The panel at the CFR screening included Brian Urquhart, chief assistant to
Ralph Bunche, who headed up the United Nations (UN) mission in Congo during
the Lumumba crisis. According to Urquhart’s own account of the affair
recently published in the New York Review of Books, he was in touch with
Lumumba on nearly a daily basis until the latter broke off relations with
Bunche. Urquhart’s article, as his statements at the film screening,
depicted the UN as an independent, neutral force that was, albeit
reluctantly, helping Lumumba.
Contrary to Urquhart’s version of events, Peck’s film depicts the UN as an
instrument of the US and Belgium and an accessory to the campaign of
subversion mounted by the imperialist powers against Lumumba and the newly
indepdendent Congolese government. Lumumba invited in the UN “peacekeepers,”
but broke contact with them when their role became clear. UN officials and
troops, in turn, refused to take any action to prevent his murder.
Carlucci’s attack on the film dates back at least to last summer. At a July
25 screening of Lumumba in Washington, DC, he was a panelist along with
Howard Wolpe, the former congressman and chairman of the House subcommittee
on Africa. Carlucci called the subsequently censored scene in the movie “a
cheap shot.” He did make a mild—and thoroughly cynical—criticism of the US
role. “Did [the United States] handle him [Lumumba] right?” Carlucci asked.
“It’s clear we were too strident,” he replied.
In an interview with Komisar, Carlucci claimed that the US had “no role
whatsoever” in plotting Lumumba’s death. He referred to Madeleine Kalb’s
book, The Congo Cables, and asserted, “You’ll find no references to me.” As
Komisar notes, “Carlucci has a bad memory.” Not only does Kalb’s book refer
to Carlucci, it describes “the efforts by the US Embassy and the CIA to
topple Lumumba.” The book, she writes, “contains documents by [US
ambassador] Timberlake and CIA chief Lawrence Devlin talking about their
desire and efforts to stop Lumumba, and even Devlin’s unhappiness [about]
one leader’s refusal to commit murder. The State Department’s official
‘Analytical Chronology of the Congo Crisis’ talks about a plan ‘to bring
about the overthrow of Lumumba and install a pro-western
government...Operations under this plan were gradually put into effect by
the CIA.’”
In a letter to Peck, Belgian Ludo De Witte—author of the recent book, The
Assassination of Lumumba —also made clear that Timbelake, Devlin and
Carlucci worked together “on Congolese efforts to get rid of Lumumba.” De
Witte further commented: “We know that Devlin and other US personnel in the
capital were informed about the transfer of Lumumba to the Kasai or
Katanga... Everybody knew that there were waiting some subcontractors to do
the dirty job, and, given the rank and involvement of Carlucci in
Lumumba-related activities from the US embassy, we may assume (although it’s
not proven) that Carlucci knew of what equaled a death sentence for
Lumumba.”
After leaving the Congo, Carlucci was in Brazil at the time of CIA and US
State Department efforts to overthrow the Goulart government, which lead to
a military coup in March/April 1964. He was the US ambassador to Portugal
during the years of intense revolutionary crisis in 1974-77, before
returning to Washington and assuming top posts in the military and
intelligence apparatus.
Carlucci’s efforts to suppress his role demonstrates that US complicity in
Lumumba’s death remains a sensitive issue. The American establishment does
not care for anyone to know that its interventions—past, present and
future—are guided by the economic and political interests of US capitalism
and often carried out by criminal and bloody means.
The bleeping of Carlucci’s name from Lumumba is not simply a matter of
covering up the past. Carlucci remains a major figure in both the US state
and the American corporate world, as well as within the Republican Party.
The US, moreover, is intensifying its intrigues in Africa, and a reminder of
its dirty past complicates its present-day activities on the continent.
The crude censorship of the film underscores as well the increasingly open
assault on democratic rights and freedom of expression in the US.
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