The real size of the African Continent

[Octafish]

16. Frank 'Carlyle Group' Carlucci was working in Congo then.

Not all that odd to read how the CIA man made it to the top of the MIC heap.

"Carlucci" bleeped from HBO version of Lumumba

Ex-CIA official threatened lawsuit

By Joanne Laurier
15 March 2002

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 Major 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.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/03/carl-m15.html

CIA never told President-elect Kennedy they were planning to assassinate Lumumba. Perhaps they assumed a President-elect Nixon would've approved.

These are gangsters, at heart, malaise. Thieving, mass murdering, racist gangsters who shot their way into power in Dallas.