The West and Others~~Western Civilization, Global Continuity & The 'Third' World~~
Photo; the Turf... a little bit of Heaven, Abraka, Delta State, Nigeria
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Thought for Today
"(A)s long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy," Richard Falk, U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, in an online commentary (The Marathon Murders~~Foreign Policy Journal) blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on Tel Aviv.
I’ve studied and graduated EMT-B certification with the state of Oregon. I’ve been on calls with heavy arterial bleeds, internal bleeding, fatalities, DOA’s. I am speaking from direct personal experience with severe trauma.
Here is a telling photograph of the amputee actor. I encourage readers to view the photo side by side with my analysis.
If you loose both your legs from explosive trauma half your blood is gone in one minute via the femoral arteries, youre dead after two. Bleeding out is worse with blunt force trauma (like shrapnel) because flesh is torn rather than cut, exposing more arterial and vascular tissue. The human body holds 5 to 6 LITERS of blood. If that really happened you would see blood EVERYWHERE, the guy would be drenched in it. You would also see what’s called arterial spurting from the injury. Most likely he would vomit after turning ghost white from shock, then turning delirious or passing out.
As for the “tourniquet”, its not even tied off, its suspended via gravity, which would literally do nothing to an arterial sever. There’s no pressure applied. There’s no knot with a turn stick for leverage. You can clearly see a gap in the nonexistent wrap job on his left inner thigh (left anterior proximal for you experts) His hands have no blood on them. There’s no blood on the ground. The color in his hands and lips shows good circulation.
This is an actor. This is staged. How did they pull it off though? I can show you.
Here in frame six on the left we see the the man with a hood setting up the fake leg wound prosthetic. His attention and hands are right there. The woman is acting as a shield covering what’s happening.
Here in frame eight the prosthetic are in place. Amidst all this chaos seconds after the explosion the hooded man takes the time to put on his sunglasses which is a signal.
Here in frame nine with sunglasses now on the hooded man and the woman make eye contact, signal received.
In frame eleven after recieving the go signal the woman makes an open hand gesture the direction both of them are looking, signaling the staged injuries are in place for cameras. The prone amputee raises his left prosthetic injury into the air over the woman’s shoulder. No blood is present. The bone is dry, no blood on his leg above the knee, no blood on the woman, no arterial spurt, nothing.
Here in frame fourteen the woman turns her head right but is still holding up that open palm signal with her left hand. The hooded man again busies himself pouring fake blood on the pavement behind the woman. The amputee has both fake injuries in the air now. There is still no blood on his legs, his skin above the injury is clean and dry.
Frame twenty, the fake blood and prosthetic are in place. The amputee gives an open hand gesture along with the woman to bring the cameras in. We’re now twenty frames in and still not a drop of fresh blood from a double leg amputation. His legs are dry, the woman is dry and unscathed. Both are making the same hand gesture.
These are actors. This is staged. It was flash powder. There was no crock pot nail bomb. There are no bombers, only patsy. If your looking for a gunman look at the Army in the streets of Boston.
This image was taken by a third party photographer seconds after the first explosion. There is clear evidence of false flag staging here. The man in the red coat and baseball hat on the right is kneeling down giving directions to the guy in the white T-shirt. Also looking to this pair for direction are the woman sitting to the right and the man in a hood and sunglasses who set up the double amputee prosthetic.
Notice the relaxed posture and face of the hooded man. Notice also the calm prepared posture of the woman sitting down on the bottom right. See how her shirt sleeve is severely torn, yet her skin underneath is clean and clear of injury and blood. From where she’s sitting look right to the bottom right corner and you can see an unmarked bottle of fake blood.
Look to the left and see the cowboy hat man standing there doing nothing. This is the same man who will pretend to hold the tourniquet of the fake amputee actor later on. Look to center of the photo and you will see the African woman moving herself away from the amputee actor since her shielding him from camera’s job is over. Next to her is a woman with red hair leaning on her elbow.
Compare this now with another photo taken seconds later. Putting them side by side is very helpful.
The man with the hood and sunglasses, who was just sitting up looking fine and healthy after fixing up the amputee actor’s prosthetics, is now on his back being evaluated by two people. Notice the rips in his jeans have no sign of blood or injury on the skin. The woman with red hair however is in the exact same pose as a minute ago. Meanwhile the double amputee actor is completely ignored by everyone when he is clearly in the most dire need of attention. There is a small amount of fake blood around him where the african lady shielding him used to be, she has dissappeared. What happened to her? Compare this photo with the first in my post.
The African woman who was sitting up, shielding the hooded man and amputee actor’s prosthetic rigging, giving hand signals, looking left and right, having no visible blood or injuries, is now covered in blood and strapped into a spine board stretcher.
In a real medical scenario the amputee would receive immediate treatment or die from bleed out. The fact this actor woman is removed from the scene via stretcher while the double amputee is left on the ground is ludicrous. He would be dead from blood loss before they could even begin spinal assessment procedures involved in moving a patient to a stretched. Not to mention his blood loss would be over five liters, enough to cover the entire scene around these people in a thick puddle.
From firsthand experience with trauma in the field of EMS work, this is not real. These are actors. This is all staged.
Now, compare this picture of the Bauman guy in hospital with the man in the wheelchair (Vogt???), same guy or different guys? You be the judge.
Finally, check out this guy!!! Torn cloths, but no sign of any cuts or wounds. Not a single drop of blood! Is this really possible? It would have been hilarious had events not been so tragic.
All posts are opinions meant to foster comment, reporting, teaching & study under the “fair use doctrine” in Sec. 107 of U.S. Code Title 17. No statement of fact is made or should be implied.
Bisquik (Betty Crocker/General Mills)
-Original
-Reduced Fat
-Shake ‘n Pour Pancake Mix
-Shake ‘n Pour Buttermilk Pancake Mix
-Shake ‘n Pour Blueberry Pancake Mix
Near East (Quaker)
-Spicy Tomato Pasta Mix
-Roasted Garlic & Olive Oil Pasta Mix
-Falafel Mix
-Lentil Pilaf
-Couscous
-Tomato Lentil
-Parmesan
-Toasted Pinenut
-Herb Chicken
-Broccoli & Cheese
-Curry
Pasta Roni (Quaker)
-Fettuccini Alfredo
-Garlic Alfredo
-Angel Hair Pasta with Herbs
-Angel Hair Pasta with Parmesan Cheese
-Angel Hair Pasta with Tomato Parmesan
-Angel Hair Pasta Primavera
-Garlic & Olive Oil with Vermicelli
Prego Pasta Sauces (Campbells)
-Tomato, Basil & Garlic
-Fresh Mushroom
-Ricotta Parmesan
-Meat Flavored
-Roasted Garlic & Herb
-Three Cheese
-Mini-Meatball
-Chicken with Parmesan
Ragu Sauces (Lipton/Unilever)
-Old World Traditional
-Old World with Meat
-Old World Marinara
-Old World with Mushrooms
-Ragu Robusto Parmesan & Romano
-Ragu Robusto Roasted Garlic
-Ragu Robusto Sweet Italian Sausage
-Ragu Robusto Six Cheese
-Ragu Robusto Tomato, Olive Oil & Garlic
-Ragu Robusto Classic Italian Meat
-Chunky Garden Style Super Garlic
-Chunky Garden Style Garden Combo
-Chunky Garden Style Tomato, Garlic & Onion
-Chunky Garden Style Tomato, Basil & Italian Cheese
-Pizza Quick Traditional
Note: You can download this pdf file created by the Center for Food Safety that provides guidelines for buying non-GMO foods in your local stores. This tells you what you can eat that is not GMO contaminated.
In addition, should you want more info concerning GMO products and the companies producing them, please take a look at this excellent list put together by Stephanie Ladwig-Cooper on Facebook.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Thought For Today
“You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…” Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
The Patrice Lumumba Story
In an August 18 meeting of the National Security Council, US President Dwight Eisenhower told Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Allen Dulles that Lumumba must be “eliminated” so that the Congo would not become “another Cuba.” On August 24, CIA head Allen Dulles cabled station chief Larry Devlin, authorizing the “removal” of Lumumba, up to and including his assassination.
By Tom Eley
Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the anti-colonial struggle in the Congo and its first democratically-elected prime minister, was removed from prison and murdered in the dark of night by a firing squad acting with the approval of the United States and Belgium. He was 35.
Lumumba and two of his associates, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were tied to trees and gunned down one by one. Weeks later, when questions surfaced over the official version of Lumumba’s death―that he had been killed by enraged villagers after attempting to escape―the Belgians returned, exhumed the bodies, hacked them up, dissolved them in acid, keeping as souvenirs Lumumba’s teeth and bullets removed from his body.
Belgium, which ruled the Congo until 1960, and the US have never been able to wash away the blood from this grisly crime. There was little doubt at the time, and even less now, that Washington was the primary force behind Lumumba’s execution.
The killing exposed not only the savagery and hypocrisy of US imperialism. It illustrated the hollowness of so-called independence for the African nations, whose absurd boundaries―and indeed very existence as modern political entities―had resulted from the predations of the European powers.
Though not a socialist, Lumumba’s demand that the Congo should control its own extensive mineral wealth proved to be his death sentence. The credibility of all the other newly-independent African nations was lessened by his murder; thereafter in every decision the continent’s leaders would have to reckon with Lumumba’s fate.
Nowhere is the failure of formal national independence better expressed than in the Congo. Lumumba’s former aide, Joseph Mobutu, assumed power in separate CIA-backed coups in 1960, when he removed Lumumba from power, and in 1965. A US proxy in the struggle against liberation movements in southern Africa, Mobutu ruled the Congo, which he renamed Zaire, as a kleptocracy, looting an estimated $5 billion before his removal in 1997 at the hands of invading Rwandan and Ugandan forces. The spilling over into the Congo of the Rwandan crisis of the 1990s―itself the legacy of the European-drawn borders in the region―cost as many as 5 million lives over the next decade.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s substantial working class and its tribal populations live in dire poverty. Average life expectancy is but 46 years. Out of every 1,000 live births, 114 Congolese babies will not live to see their first birthday; 195 will not live to the age of five. What little infrastructure exists is in a deplorable state.
Sitting atop this multiethnic and multilingual country of 70 million souls is a tiny layer of multimillionaires who derive their wealth through connections to what is still ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt governments, and through the export of the Congo’s mineral wealth―uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese, zinc―for the benefit of European and US corporations.
The rise of Patrice Lumumba
Patrice Lumumba was raised in a mud brick house without electricity in the Congolese region of Kasai. He learned to read and write at Catholic and Protestant mission schools, impressing his teachers and positioning himself for a job as postal clerk in Stanleyville (now Kisangani), which he assumed in 1954. It was here that Lumumba entered political life, working to form a labor union and joining the Belgian Liberal Party.
In 1957, Lumumba took a job as a sales manager at a brewery in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), and soon thereafter founded, with other nationalists, the Movement National Congolais (MNC). The MNC agitated for independence from Belgium and sought to unite the sprawling country’s many different tribal groups.
Lumumba quickly established himself as the leading Congolese nationalist, and in spite of his support for the Belgian Liberals, was considered by the authorities to be a dangerous radical. He was known for his eloquence, and by all accounts was a man of courage and conviction. Perhaps because he could not be bought off, like many African leaders, colonial authorities ordered Lumumba arrested and imprisoned in October of 1959 for “inciting riots” in Stanleyville. While in prison he was tortured.
In spite of the repression, it appeared an auspicious time for nationalist movements. In the aftermath of World War II, a revolutionary upsurge of the colonial peoples took shape first in Asia and then spread to Africa. The old colonial powers―Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal―either attempted to crush the anti-colonial movements, as France failed to do in Vietnam and Algeria, or else manipulated formal independence to preserve their interests, as Britain did through the communal partition of South Asia.
African decolonization
With its control over the Congo slipping and mindful of the disaster gripping its neighbor France in Algeria, Belgium agreed at conference held in Brussels beginning January 18, 1960, to recognize the independence of its prized imperial possession. This was to take place at the end of June, after national elections to be held in May. The Belgians were compelled to release Lumumba from prison to attend the conference because his party had gained the most votes in local elections held in December, 1959. In one year less a day, he would be gunned down by Belgian assassins.
Lumumba emerged from the May 11-25 elections, much to the chagrin of the Belgians, as the only truly national figure in Congolese politics. While not winning a majority, the MNC won far more votes and seats in parliament than any other party, and with it the right to form the government. Lumumba was selected as prime minister, while Joseph Kasa-Vubu, the leader of a tribally-based party, was placed in the lesser role of president.
At a ceremony granting formal independence on June 30, King Baudouin of Belgium delivered a patronizing speech lecturing the Congolese on the virtues of maintaining existing colonial structures and presenting the period of Belgian rule as entirely beneficial to the native population. In fact, between 1885 and 1908 as many as eight million Congolese died in the system of forced labor and political terror under the personal rule of Baudouin’s grandfather, King Leopold.
In his speech, Lumumba enraged the Belgian delegation by openly challenging the king. He said of independence that “no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”
“We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.... We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and night, because we are negroes.... We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws, which in fact recognized only that might is right.... We will never forget the massacres where so many perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown.”
The destruction of Patrice Lumumba
In the same speech, Lumumba declared that the Democratic Republic of the Congo was now “the equal” of Belgium. Only in terms of vote-counting at the United Nations could such a statement be true. All significant capital, especially the mining industry, remained in the hands of Europeans. In all of the Congo, there were only 30 black college graduates, no black military officers, and only a few black managers in the civil service. This was the result of a deliberate Belgian policy to keep the population in a state of dependence.
Mindful of the lack of trained African officers, Lumumba decided immediately after he assumed office to leave the new national army in the charge of Belgians, enraging Congolese soldiers. The Belgian commander of the Leopoldville regiment, Emile Janssens, provoked the African soldiers, gathering them and writing on a placard, “After independence = before independence.” Lumumba made matters worse by granting raises to all government employees except for the military officers.
By July 5, the army was in open revolt across the country, with Europeans fleeing in droves. Belgium seized on the supposed threat to the settlers to recommence military operations in the nation, in open violation of the one week-old country’s sovereignty. To deal with the disaster, Lumumba determined to reorganize the military as the Armee Nationale Congolaise. He made the fateful decision of placing his secretary, Joseph Mobutu, in charge of the new force.
What Lumumba didn’t know was that Mobutu was a paid Belgian agent, and that as early as the 1960 Brussels conference he had been spotted by US diplomats as a figure to be promoted. Of potential “assets” in the Congo, the US ambassador to Belgium, William Burden, noted, "One name kept coming up. But it wasn't on anyone's list because he wasn't an official delegation member, he was Lumumba's secretary. But everyone agreed that this was ... a man with great potential.”
Within days of Lumumba’s inauguration, Moise Tshombe declared Katanga province independent and immediately received the backing of Belgium and its force of 6,000 soldiers stationed there. Katanga was rich in copper, uranium, tin, zinc and cobalt―mineral wealth dominated by the Belgian mining concern Union Miniere. Soon another secessionist movement developed in another mineral-rich province, Kasai, where a former associate of Lumumba, Albert Kalonji, declared a new nation that he dubbed “Mining State.”
The marionettes in the Congo and in Belgium, a third rate and rapidly declining imperialist power, could not act without the backing of the US.
As continues to be the case in matters of foreign policy today, the New York Times played a critical role in articulating the government line and preparing opinion for the elimination of Lumumba.
Even during the election, its pages were given over to a campaign maligning the young nationalist. In a series of articles, the Times repeatedly referred to Lumumba as a “dictator,” a “ruler,” and a “messiah,” and nearly every report mentioned that he was “once convicted of embezzlement” as a postal clerk. The Times also published unsubstantiated allegations that Lumumba had committed election fraud and had received $200,000 from the Belgian Communist Party.
In an August 18 meeting of the National Security Council, US President Dwight Eisenhower told Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Allen Dulles that Lumumba must be “eliminated” so that the Congo would not become “another Cuba.” On August 24, CIA head Allen Dulles cabled station chief Larry Devlin, authorizing the “removal” of Lumumba, up to and including his assassination.
This information did not come to light until 2001. It had been revealed to a US Senate Committee by Robert Johnson, who took notes at the meeting. “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds, and the meeting continued,” Johnson recalled in secret testimony given to the Church Committee in 1975. The CIA first followed through on the Eisenhower order with an abortive plot to poison Lumumba.
Assassination plans were also afoot in Belgium. Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, then minister for African affairs, sent a telegram to Belgian officials in the Congo in October stating, “The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is clearly Lumumba’s definitive elimination.”
And Britain, fearful for its substantial interests in neighboring Rhodesia, also endorsed assassination. A British Foreign Office document from September 1960 notes the opinion of a top ranking official, who later became the head of MI5, that, "I see only two possible solutions to the [Lumumba] problem. The first is the simple one of ensuring [his] removal from the scene by killing him."
With the US, Belgium, and Britain moving against him and his hold on power disintegrating, Lumumba turned for support to the USSR, receiving Soviet defense minister Georgi Zhukov in Leopoldville on August 26. The Soviet Union supplied Lumumba with a limited amount of aid and “advisors.” This support only clinched his demise.
On September 5, President Kasa-Vubu ordered that Lumumba be removed from office, but this extra-constitutional order failed when Lumumba won two separate votes of confidence in parliament. Kasa-Vubu and Lumumba then each issued separate orders to Mobutu, as head of the loyal military, to arrest the other.
On September 14, Mobutu, acting with CIA backing, placed Lumumba under house arrest in Leopoldville. Two days later, he carried out a full coup, suspending both parliament and the constitution.
UN General Secretary, Dag Hammarskjold.
The UN under General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld actively collaborated in bringing down Lumumba. UN “peacekeepers,” who Lumumba had naively invited into the crisis, refused to allow loyal Congolese soldiers use of its airplanes for transport, in effect siding with Katanga and other secessionist movements, and after Lumumba’s vote of confidence the UN shut down the capital’s only radio station so his parliamentary victory could not be broadcast to the population. The UN also blocked Soviet planes supporting Lumumba from using its airfields.
On November 22, 1960, the UN General Assembly voted to recognize the delegation of Kasa-Vubu and military strongman Joseph Mobutu, refusing to sit delegates loyal to the democratically-elected Lumumba.
Lumumba being forced to eat a copy of his own speech
On November 27, Lumumba escaped from house arrest and attempted to flee to his political stronghold of Stanleyville. He was captured on December 1 by Mobutu’s forces. En route to his prison from Leopoldville airport, Lumumba was put on display in the back of a truck, hands tied and crowds were invited to taunt him. Bound in front of Mobutu, Lumumba was forced to eat a copy of a speech he had given asserting he was the rightful prime minister of the Congo.
Mobutu announced that the deposed nationalist leader would be tried as a rebel. He was then sent off to a military garrison 86 miles from Leopoldville in Thysville. There it is said that Lumumba nearly won the prison guards to his side.
With much of the population still in support of Lumumba, Count d'Aspremont ordered him transferred from Thysville to the renegade Katanga province and certain death at the hands of Tshombe. The move was first cleared with the CIA. During the January 17 flight to Katanga, Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okite were beaten so badly the pilot complained the plane was in danger of crashing. Later in the day the three were executed.
The murder still haunts the US and Belgium. A parliamentary investigation in Belgium in 2001 acknowledged that Baudouin and colonial authorities desired Lumumba’s death and were aware that he would be killed upon his rendition to Katanga, but it stopped short of admitting responsibility.
Though the US role in the coup and assassination is well-documented, there has never been any official acknowledgment. Frank Carlucci, a prominent Republican with close relations with the Bush political dynasty, who would later rise to defense secretary in the Reagan administration, worked as a covert CIA operative in the Congo under cover of a diplomatic assignment. Carlucci successfully sued to block Lumumba, a film released in 2001, from mentioning his name in the decision to kill the Congolese leader.
Lea’s letter referenced the passage in the book by Walton that said “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba ever amounted to anything. At present we do not know.”
Lea wrote that “Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park…. She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasha, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice meant head of MI6 there.”
Lea continues claiming that “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organized it.’”
by Abayomi Azikiwe
A recent letter to the London Review of Books has opened back up discussions about those responsible for the assassination of revolutionary Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba, a charismatic and popular organizer during the 1958-1960 period, captivated the hearts and minds of the majority of his people and the African continent during the struggle against Belgian colonialism.
David Lea, a member of the House of Lords, wrote the letter in response to a review of a book on the history of MI6 entitled “Empire and Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire” by Calder Walton. Lea’s letter referenced the passage in the book by Walton that said “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba ever amounted to anything. At present we do not know.”
Lea wrote that “Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park…. She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasha, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice meant head of MI6 there.”
Lea continues claiming that “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organized it.’”
This same British official reports Park felt, as many in the West did at the time, that if a pro-imperialist regime did not take control of Congo the country’s mineral resources would be taken by the Soviet Union. Lumumba was labeled as a communist during this time and such propaganda by the western press was utilized to justify the coup against him and his ultimate brutal assassination.
In an interview with The Hindu, Lea stressed “That’s the conversation I had with her and that’s what she told me. I have nothing more to add” in regard to how such allegations could be substantiated.
After retiring from the diplomatic and intelligence divisions of the British government, Park was appointed as a Life peer as Baroness Park of Monmouth. Her colleagues in the House of Lords noted that she was a spokesperson for the Secret Intelligence Service. In addition she had served briefly as the head of Somerville College, Oxford University.
MI6 refused to comment on the allegation made by Lea. Lumumba’s assassination sparked protests throughout Africa and the world.
Role of the U.S. in the Overthrow and Assassination of Lumumba
It was not only Britain that sought the overthrow of Lumumba. Many people believe based upon U.S. foreign policy at the time as well as the subsequent release of formally classified documents, that the White House under Dwight D. Eisenhower engineered the plot against the Congolese patriot.
The U.S. role in the assassination of Lumumba was documented by the 1975 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings, chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church. A former National Security staffer, Robert Johnson, reported about a senior level meeting involving President Eisenhower and high ranking intelligence officers where the decision was reached to assassinate Patrice Lumumba.
According to Johnson’s recollections, “At some time during the discussion, President Eisenhower said something—I can no longer remember his words—that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba who was then at the center of political conflict and controversy in the Congo. There was no discussion; the meeting simply moved on. I remember my sense of that moment quite clearly because the President’s statement came as a great shock to me.” (Taken from “The Congo Cables”, p. 54, by Madelaine Kalb)
Further confirmation of the role of the Eisenhower administration in the coup against Lumumba was made by Lawrence Devlin, who served as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) field officer in Congo during 1960. Devlin later admitted that he had received instructions to carry out an assassination plan against Lumumba.
Devlin, in his book entitled “Chief of Station, Congo,” said that the orders were given by CIA Deputy Chief of Plans Dick Bissel. He claims that one method of assassination contemplated was poisoning where Lumumba’s toothpaste would be laced with a deadly chemical agent.
Although Devlin claimed that he balked at the order and later abandoned it based upon his own political judgments about the situation involving U.S.-Congolese relations, such denials of refusing to carry out orders from superiors are highly unlikely in such an organization as the CIA. It has been well documented that the CIA was involved in numerous destabilization operations, coups and assassinations in Africa and other parts of the world. (See “In Search of Enemies,” by John Stockwell, 1984)
Devlin did admit to supporting two military coups led by Mobutu Sese Seko, the U.S. strongman in Congo. These coups took place in September 1960 against Lumumba and in November 1965 in response to the power vacuum left by the removal of secessionist Moise Tshombe who was later made prime minister of Congo in 1964 after his divisive role in the mineral-rich region of Katanga in 1960.
The former CIA station chief justified his support of Mobuto saying that it was correct for the U.S. to install an anti-communist dictator as a bulwark against leftist influence in Congo. Devlin was later appointed as head of CIA operations in Laos in efforts to prevent the revolutionaries from taking power from a Washington-backed regime during the Vietnam War.
Later Devlin served as the Africa Division Chief for the CIA. He worked for the Agency officially until 1974.
British Intelligence Documents Must Be Released on Congo
It is important in light of these allegations made by David Lea and the questions raised by Walton’s book that documents be released by MI6 on their role in Congo during 1959-1961. On the London Review Books’ blog, Bernard Porter wrote that these statements made by both Lea and Walton provide “All the more reason to open up the archives. For those of us who always suspected things like this were going on, only to be smeared by the authorities—i.e. the conspirators themselves—as conspiracy ‘theorists’….” (LRB, April 5)
At the same time Porter goes on to reflect that “On the other hand perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much. Another of the revelations in Walton’s book was that colonial officials sometimes destroyed incriminating documents and then replaced them with forgeries, to fool the historian. You can never know where you are with secret history, which only encourages the conspiracy theorists.”
The coup which overthrew Lumumba’s government and the brutal execution of the Prime Minister along with two of his comrades, Maurice Mpolo, the Minister of Youth and Sports and Joseph Okito, President of the Congolese Senate, on January 17, 1961, was a devastating blow to the African Revolution.
Congo became a strategic base for the CIA and its war to halt the inevitable total liberation of Southern Africa that was eventually realized in the 1990s after the massive intervention of Cuban internationalists in Angola between 1975-1989 and the fortification of the national liberation movements of the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) of Namibia and the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa.
Even today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is source of instability for the African continent. Large sections of the eastern region of the country that are mineral-rich remain outside the control of the central government in Kinshasha.
Multi-national mining corporations are continuing their theft of Congolese mineral resources and consequently fueling instability. The Congolese people are still tasked with the necessity of gaining complete control over their territory and state.
Mr. Abayomi Azikiwe is Editor of Pan-African News Wire and son to Nigeria's first President, The Right Honourable Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
The Leper and The Octopus; Thought for Today.
"They have driven us like oxen in a rice paddy, the West, without conscience. They raped our mothers, daughters and sisters as they sent their worst perverts after us, killing our fathers, sons and brothers. They have starved, abused and humiliated us.
But they do not see that they have unwittingly prepared us for this approaching catastrophe. They do not even realize that it is for them the bell tolls.
We, the so-called third world, especially Africans, have lived under their yoke forever and today have learnt to embrace this calamity they foresee and dread. What an irony, they have prepared us well for that which they cannot survive."~~culled from The Leper and the Octopus by Michael Dibiaezue
“It is a scandal that under the French monetary system so much of Africa remains poor and starving instead of benefiting from the vast natural wealth of the continent and the productivity of its people. Through monetary dominance exerted by Paris, Africa is propping up the economy of France and in turn the economy of Europe.”~~Christof Lehman, world renowned political commentator
by Finian Cunningham
The French neocolonial system of enslavement and exploitation across Africa persisted because the Francophile African leaders were allowed to amass personal fortunes and assets by France. That was their pay-off.
Ruthless dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic enjoyed private Air France Concorde flights to dine out in Paris and acquire palatial chateaux while their people starved under reigns of terror.
Bokassa also had the penchant for staving in the heads of children and eating the flesh of his victims – all good qualifications for terrorizing his country in the service of France.
Millions of Africans died from deprivation as their countries’ natural resources were extracted to enrich the French-backed dictators and French national treasury.
The DRC, whose capital hosts the summit this weekend attended by France’s Francois Hollande, is still recovering from decades of war, hunger and disease that claimed up to six million lives – horrors that France played a major role in inciting from the 1960s onwards, when the independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.
As political commentator Christof Lehmann notes, “It is a scandal that under the French monetary system so much of Africa remains poor and starving instead of benefiting from the vast natural wealth of the continent and the productivity of its people. Through monetary dominance exerted by Paris, Africa is propping up the economy of France and in turn the economy of Europe.”
Lehmann also points out that history shows that any African political leader who tried to break the Francafrique system of exploitation was invariably liquidated by France through coup d’etat or assassination.
The most recent case is that of Laurent Gbagbo, who until last year was the president of Cote d’Ivoire. Since independence in 1960, the West African country has been a leading exporter of cocoa and coffee. Corrupt elites, French export companies and the French treasury earned billions of dollars from the country’s fertile soil and laborers.
But after decades of lucrative earnings, the majority of the people still live in poverty, forced to toil as wage slaves on the country’s plantations.
Gbabgo, a history professor and active trade unionist, could see that his country would never develop and prosper unless it broke from the monetary shackles that France had imposed. The French government knew that he was planning to take Cote d’Ivoire out of the CFA Franc system.
In recent years, Gbagbo and some other African leaders, including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, were trying to set up a gold-based Pan-African dinar. The Cote d’Ivoire is the hub of the West African francafrique economies. The French could see the writing on the wall for their monetary enslavement of Africa if Gbagbo succeeded in extricating his country. Other countries would soon follow suite.
Says Christof Lehmann, “Laurent Gbagbo was one of the few African leaders who dared to challenge the oppressive status quo. He wanted to use the wealth of the African nations for the social well-being and development of Africa rather than enriching French and European capitalists.”
In late 2010, the Cote d’Ivoire Constitutional Council – the country’s supreme body – ruled that Gbagbo won a disputed presidential election. But French troops stationed in the country moved immediately to arrest him, killing many of his supporters in the process. They then installed the French-backed former IMF director, Alassane Quattara, as president.
Gbagbo is currently in custody in The Hague awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face allegations of crimes against humanity. His arrest, detention and prosecution are viewed by many as “victor’s justice” – political persecution to silence an inconvenient opponent.
International lawyer Christopher Black comments, “The arrest and detention of President Gbagbo does not conform to any standards of due process. He was arrested during a coup d’etat conducted by French forces allied with the rebels of Quattara, who was then installed in power to serve the interests of France, Britain and the US. The question of selective prosecution also arises.
Why was Gbabgo charged when Quattara’s forces are alleged to have committed terrible crimes in the northern region they controlled and during the election and the coup? The French forces shot down civilians when the latter tried to come to the aid of President Gbagbo, yet no French leader is before the ICC.”
Christopher Black adds, “Gbagbo’s arrest is a brutal example of how the ICC is used to justify the overthrow of governments that resist the diktats of the colonialist powers such as France, Britain and the US.”
Redolent of a bygone era, France has reemerged as a strident neo-colonialist power. It took a lead role in prosecuting NATO’s criminal war on Libya last year, culminating in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. It is also leading the current foreign covert war of aggression against its former colonial possession, Syria.
Along with the US and Britain, it is also targeting the people of Iran with criminal sanctions based on trite, unfounded suspicions.
And France has shown that any African leader who questions its monetary enslavement in the 21st Century will be summarily hauled in front of an international show-trial on trumped-up charges to face life imprisonment.
But history never repeats itself exactly. Unlike earlier colonial times, this time around the mass of working people in France are finding that they too – like the masses of Africa – are being treated like abject slaves by the monetary diktats of the French (and European) elite.
Bonuses and bailouts for the rich; austerity and exploitation for the masses; no questions tolerated.
This weekend in Kinshasa, Francois Hollande’s sanctimonious, elitist lecturing on democracy, rights and corruption will have as much significance for workers in France and Europe as it does in Africa.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Many of his recent articles appear on the renowned Canadian-based news website Globalresearch. He specialises in Middle East and East Africa issues and has also given several American radio interviews as well as TV interviews on Press TV and Russia Today. Previously, he was based in Bahrain and witnessed the political upheavals in the Persian Gulf kingdom during 2011 as well as the subsequent Saudi-led brutal crackdown against pro-democracy protests. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted many human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.
This weekend African leaders from the continent’s Francophone countries are gathering for a summit in Kinshasa, capital of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.
Topping the guest list is France’s President Francois Hollande. Speaking earlier this week ahead of the conference, Hollande sounded like a colonial master from centuries past. He warned that he would be conveying a tough message on democracy, human rights and corruption to his African guests.
Of equal concern, said Hollande, is the spread of terrorism in the Sahel region among the former French colonies of Mali and Niger.
The irony is that the French leader is the least competent to lecture on these matters. For decades, his country has sucked the natural wealth out of Africa like a giant parasite, causing poverty, disease and underdevelopment, which in turn have fuelled despair, conflict and violence.
And the parasitic arrangement continues to this very day.
For decades, France has contributed directly to the violence and instability that has wracked so much of Africa. Coups, counter-coups, assassinations, destabilization and abductions – perhaps no other country among the colonial powers has afflicted the Earth’s largest continent with so much grief and ruination.
Following the Second World War, France ushered in a new era of modern slavery for the African countries that it had acquired as possessions during the earlier colonial Scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th Century.
Financially and militarily devastated by WWII, France knew that it could no longer subjugate Africans solely by force of arms. So, a new means of domination was devised: monetary control. The plan was signed into action by post-war French leader Charles De Gaulle in December 1945.
Through a French-imposed Colonial Pact, the “colonies francaises Afrique” were given a new currency, known as the CFA Franc. In all, 14 countries were obliged to adopt the single currency.
They included Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Senegal in French West Africa, and Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon in French Central Africa. The pact has persisted more than five decades after France granted formal independence to its African colonies in the early 1960s.
The level of power usurped from these countries by France through monetary control is astounding. All members of the CFA Franc are mandated to deposit up to 85 per cent of their country’s foreign exchange earnings in the French national treasury.
France in turn has the right to invest this money in the Paris Bourse as it sees fit and it has the prerogative not to disclose to the African governments how much these investments earn.
Not only that but the French treasury is able to lend the money back to the African nations with interest charged to them for the privilege of borrowing their own money. Moreover, the loans are capped at a limit of 20 per cent of the countries’ current public revenues.
The irony is breathtaking. The same monetary mechanism that Nazi Germany deployed to subjugate occupied France was, and continues to be, used by the liberated French on their African territories.
Furthermore, France determines the exchange rate for the CFA Franc. Unilateral devaluations have ensured the flow of cheap African exports to France while impoverishing African workers.
An integral part of the Colonial Pact was the right of free passage to French military in the signatory countries. Even though these African states were supposedly independent, France was able to maintain military stations and dispatch troops whenever it felt the need.
And the need was felt when the French government deemed that a party or persons within its African sphere of influence was challenging its hegemony.
One of the earliest victims of French dominance was Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio. He was assassinated in 1963. A gifted economist who objected to the blatant exploitation of his people under the monetary arrangement, Olympio was eventually terminated by France and replaced by reliable stooges.
Another victim was Thomas Sankara, the leader of Burkino Faso, who was deposed and murdered in 1987 because he dared challenge French interference in his country’s internal affairs. He was affectionately known to his supporters as “Africa’s Che Guevara”.
The week before he was assassinated, Sankara said, “You can kill a revolutionary and an individual, but you cannot kill an idea.”
The French specialized in covert operations using mercenaries and special agents who would infiltrate target countries and recruit “rebels” to unleash terror campaigns against the people (the model currently being deployed in Syria). One of their notorious clients was former French soldier-turned-mercenary Robert Denard.
From the 1960s, Denard and his dogs of war engaged in coups, counter-coups and assassinations in Angola, Benin, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Mali, Mozambique and even the British former colonies Nigeria and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In the Comoros Islands, off East Africa, Denard was involved in four coups between 1975-1995 and is suspected to have had a hand in the assassination of three of its presidents.
All the while, the French government was afforded plausible deniability in the criminal sabotage carried out by “pirates of the republic”. But there is little doubt, from the disclosed involvement of French Special Forces in these operations and from subsequent legal protections afforded to renegades, that French leaders, including Georges Pompidou, Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterrand, knew full well and indeed most probably sanctioned them.
"(A)s long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy," Richard Falk, U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, in an online commentary (The Marathon Murders~~Foreign Policy Journal) blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on Tel Aviv.
