Come On A Little Musical Trip With Me

I was a drug taker when I was a kid. College is one big drug-haze. I smoked weed every day and did most everything else whenever I could get my hands on it. Acid was special though. I didn't just drop acid willy nilly. Acid was always a very special experience for me, every single trip, something between 30 and 50 in all. And music was always a very important component of every acid trip I ever took-- and beyond just the Airplane, Dead and The Byrds. I certainly nearly wore out my copy of The Classical Music of Pakistan by the Ali Brothers, the most accomplished of the qawwali, singers, Salamat and Nazakat Ali Khan. Many wonderful, insightful trips listening to this, my friends:



I got so into it that I bought a VW van in Germany and drove to the Punjab to look for the Ali Brothers in the Lahore area, where there was a whole village of musical Ali Khans. They were away when I got there and I didn't get to see them on their home turf. However, a few years later I was working at de Kosmos, Amsterdam's meditation center. I was tired and eager to go home when one of my co-workers insisted I come with her to see some band from India playing upstairs. I was too tired but she talked me into it. And, as it turned out, it wasn't "some band from India." It was Salamat and Nazakat Ali Khan... what luck!

But that isn't the only music I listened to when I was stoned. My favorite band in the mid-'60s before I left the country, was the Rolling Stones. A new album release was always an occasion for an acid trip. And when Between the Buttons came out just before my birthday in 1967, I couldn't resist. I remember it well for many reasons. Recently a friend asked me if I felt weird with a shaved head. "No," I laughed. "I started shaving my head in 1967. I came off a fantastic acid trip in a tree next to an open window listening to Between the Buttons over and over for hours. I climbed down from the tree and went directly to the campus barber shop and had my head shaved." For me The Stones ended when Brian Jones was kicked out of the band and mysteriously died a month later. But he was in top form on Between the Buttons and "Ruby Tuesday," probably the best song on the album, was one of the only songs he ever wrote-- although he didn't get the credit.



The next year I ran into the Stones at Brad Pierce's new club at One Sheridan Square; Salvation was the name if I remember correctly. There was a very narrow, steep dark staircase going down into the club and I recall Jones was leaving as I was arriving. He gave me a long, wet kiss on the staircase and handed me a long-stemmed rose. I had never kissed a guy before. I kept the rose in a shoebox under my bed until I left for Europe in 1969.

One album-- or at least one side of one album-- I listened to on quite a few trips was The Missa Luba, a Congolese mass performed by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. It was originally recorded in 1958 and came out in the U.S. in 1965. The side of the album was six short songs. Whether you're tripping or not this Christmas evening, I hope you enjoy them:

Kyrie



Gloria



Credo



Sanctus



Benedictus



Agnus Dei



And speaking of the beauty of the Catholic Church and some of the good stuff it has offered-- and is offering right now-- to mankind...

JFK Was Right: The CIA Should Have Been Splintered Into A Thousand Pieces And Scattered To The Winds

After Kennedy took office, he was unaware that the CIA, in accord with an OK from President Eisenhower and working with the Belgians, had overseen the gruesome torture and brutal murder of the Congo's popular first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. With Lumumba already dead a month and his body dissolved in sulphuric acid, Kennedy called for him to be reintegrated into the new nation's government. The CIA-- Allen Dulles, who JFK foolishly kept on as director-- hadn't told him that they had carried out Eisenhower 's orders to have him murdered as a commie dupe. According to Stephen Kinzer's book about Allen and John Foster Dulles, The Brothers, "Less than two years later, Allen casually admitted that he might have exaggerated the danger Lumumba posed to the West. A television interviewer, Eric Severeid, asked him if he had come to believe that any of his covert operations were unnecessary. He named just one. 'I think that we overrated the danger in, let's say, the Congo,' Allen said. 'It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo. Well, it didn't work out that way at all. Now maybe they intended to do it, but they didn't find the situation ripe and they beat a pretty hasty retreat.'" There was worse to come.

Eisenhower had also authorized the assassination of Fidel Castro. When that didn't work out, he authorized a half-assed invasion of Cuban that came to fruition right after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs. As the clownish plot fell apart in the first minutes of the "invasion," the CIA and some elements of the military tried to get Kennedy to U.S. commit Air Force, Naval and Army resources. He thought they were all out of their minds and realized he had made a terrible mistake by keeping Dulles-- who was completely senile by then-- in office. Again, from The Brothers:

At White House meetings the next day, Kennedy fended off more pleas that he send U.S. forces to support the Bay of Pigs invaders. The strongest came from his chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who came into the Oval Office late in the evening with an equally agited [CIA official Richard] Bissell.

"Let me take two jets and shoot down this enemy aircraft," Burke pleaded.

"No," Kennedy replied. "I don't want to get the United States involved with this."

"Can I not send in an airstrike?"

"No."

"Can we send in a few planes?"

"No, because they could be identified as United States."

"Can we paint out their numbers?"

"No."

Grasping for options, Burke asked if Kennedy would authorize artillery attacks on Cuban forces from American destroyers. The answer was the same: "No."

Later that day Kennedy told an aide, "I probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles."

…More than one hundred of the invaders had died. Most of the rest were rounded up and imprisoned. For Castro it was a supreme, ecstatic triumph. Kennedy was staggered.

"How can I have been so stupid?" he wondered aloud.

Others were equally stunned. Criticism of the CIA, in both the press and Congress, rose to unprecedented intensity. Allen was not spared. The cover story in Time, headlined "The Cuba Disaster," questioned his very concept of intelligence.

…If Allen had not yet confronted the implications of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had. In private he cursed "CIA bastards" for luring him into it, and wished he could "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

He should have. America would have been much better off. But all he did was fire Dulles, too late to prevent the horrors the Dulles brothers committed in our names in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, not to mention the Congo and Cuba. Yesterday another CIA chief-- and another failed Republican scumbag who was foolishly held over by a Democratic president-- released his memoir.

President Obama eventually lost faith in the troop increase he ordered in Afghanistan, his doubts fed by top White House civilian advisers opposed to the strategy, who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.

In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy-- expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War is the first book describing those years written from inside the cabinet. Mr. Gates offers more than 600 pages of detailed history of his personal wars with Congress, the Pentagon bureaucracy and, in particular, Mr. Obama’s White House staff over the four and a half years he sought to salvage victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “controlling nature” of the Obama White House and the national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” Mr. Gates writes.

Digby's look at the release, Once a Bush loyalist always a Bush loyalist, makes more sense that Gates' self-serving critique and helps make the point that it is incumbent on a president to be highly skeptical on the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex-- unlike Eisenhower until his farewell address, the high-point of his 8 presidential years. Especially interesting is Digby's update from Max Fisher in the Washington Post:

... if Gates is going to take shots at Biden on this scale, it's worth asking how Gates would fare under similar scrutiny. I am not appropriately positioned to evaluate Gates's positions on "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." But I can tell you how he performed on the single most important one he ever confronted: ending the Cold War. He was, quite simply, dead wrong.

Back in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the United States faced a really big dilemma. Gorbachev professed to be a reformer. Should the United States work with him to reduce nuclear weapons, ease the U.S.-Soviet proxy battles that were at that point directly responsible for a number of deadly conflicts around the world and, just maybe, try to end the Cold War? This wasn't just a major, difficult question: It would turn out to be one of the most important U.S. foreign policy decisions in decades.

President Ronald Reagan eventually came around to the idea that, yes, he could and should work with Gorbachev. He was persuaded by, among others, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that Gorbachev was a man the West could do business with.

But Reagan had to overcome the fierce opposition of a top CIA Kremlinologist and eventual CIA director named Robert M. Gates, who maintained for years that Gorbachev was no reformer, that he was not to be trusted and that Reagan would be walking into a Soviet ploy.

Quite simply, Gates was wrong, overruled by Reagan, and the world was better off for it.

Historically, the United States would have been better off to use CIA Directors as negative indicators of action. They are always wrong, always wrong about everything. From day one, they missed everything important and disastrously misinterpreted everything they touched. The U.S. and the whole world would have been a lot better off had Kennedy-- or Truman, who had similar ideas-- splintered them into a thousand pieces and scattered them into the winds.

It Isn't Hard To Fool Beltway Media Hacks, Is It?

The White House, in a sad attempt to prove all the international support it has for bombing Syria, released a letter that a couple dozen countries signed onto. The letter (below) condemns the use of chemical weapons and strongly demands action by the UN. The UN is not the US-- and not all "action" is bombing. Here's the statement the 24 countries signed onto:

The international norm against the use of chemical weapons is long-standing and universal. The use of chemical weapons anywhere diminishes the security of people everywhere. Left unchallenged, it increases the risk of further use and proliferation of these weapons.

We condemn in the strongest terms the horrific chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21st that claimed the lives of so many men, women, and children. The evidence clearly points to the Syrian government being responsible for the attack, which is part of a pattern of chemical weapons use by the regime.

We call for a strong international response to this grave violation of the world’s rules and conscience that will send a clear message that this kind of atrocity can never be repeated. Those who perpetrated these crimes must be held accountable.

Signatories have consistently supported a strong UN Security Council Resolution, given the Security Council's responsibilities to lead the international response, but recognize that the Council remains paralyzed as it has been for two and a half years. The world cannot wait for endless failed processes that can only lead to increased suffering in Syria and regional instability. We support efforts undertaken by the United States and other countries to reinforce the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.

We commit to supporting longer term international efforts, including through the United Nations, to address the enduring security challenge posed by Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles. Signatories have also called for the UN fact finding mission to present its results as soon as possible, and for the Security Council to act accordingly.

We condemn in the strongest terms all human rights violations in Syria on all sides. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict, more than 2 million people have become refugees, and approximately 5 million are internally displaced. Recognizing that Syria’s conflict has no military solution, we reaffirm our commitment to seek a peaceful political settlement through full implementation of the 2012 Geneva Communique. We are committed to a political solution which will result in a united, inclusive and democratic Syria.

We have contributed generously to the latest United Nations (UN) and ICRC appeals for humanitarian assistance and will continue to provide support to address the growing humanitarian needs in Syria and their impact on regional countries. We welcome the contributions announced at the meeting of donor countries on the margins of the G20. We call upon all parties to allow humanitarian actors safe and unhindered access to those in need.

Among the governments signing on are several that have already specifically said they would not participate in any military action against Syria without a UN green light, like the U.K., Germany, and Italy. Others have no relevance to the discussion at all, like Honduras, Kosovo, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Albania. My guess is that the brutal dictators of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Morocco aren't in a domestic position to attack another Muslim country.

Did you hear the NPR report Monday about UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's murder? He was killed when he was trying to bring peace to the Congo, at a time when President Kennedy (later assassinated himself, probably by the same forces) was very supportive of him but when the American Military-Intelligence Complex wanted him dead. Eight months before, the CIA had the first Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, murdered. The BBC also reported on Hammarskjold's assassination Monday-- and, like everyone else looking at the story-- pointed out that everything seems to be pointing towards the NSA:

A commission looking into the death of former United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold has recommended that the UN reopen its investigation.

Mr Hammarskjold's plane was travelling to Congo on a peace mission in 1961 when it crashed in Zambia.

A UN investigation in 1962 failed to find the cause of the mysterious crash.

The commission said there were significant new findings, and that the US National Security Agency might hold crucial evidence.

...Mr Hammarskjold was trying to negotiate a peace agreement between Congo's Soviet-backed government and Moise Tshombe, who had declared independence for its mineral-rich province of Katanga.

The UN secretary general was going to Ndola to meet Mr Tshombe, who was backed by former colonial power Belgium and some Western mining interests.

Three investigations have failed to determine the cause of the crash, and many conspiracy theories have swirled around Mr Hammarskjold's death.

Two investigations held in the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, were followed by an official UN inquiry which concluded that foul play could not be ruled out.

The Hammarskjold Commission report, written by four international lawyers, said there was "significant new evidence."

It said the claim of an aerial attack, which might have caused the descent of the plane by direct damage or by harassment, was capable of being proved or disproved.

The report said that given the NSA's worldwide monitoring activities at that time, "it is highly likely" that the radio traffic on 18-19 September 1961 was recorded by the NSA and possibly also by the CIA.

The report said: "Authenticated recordings of any such cockpit narrative or radio messages, if located, would furnish potentially conclusive evidence of what happened to the DC6."

The Commission said it had made Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Security Archive, which were rejected on national security grounds-- but that an appeal had been lodged.

The report concluded that Mr Hammarskjold's death was "an event of global significance which deserves the attention both of history and of justice."

If you don't see the connection between part 1 and part 2, don't worry about it.

Why should you care about the Albertine Rift? The November National Geographic does a spectacular job of explaining

The Albertine Rift extends 920 miles from Lake Albert in the north to Lake Tanganyika in the south. The giant but much shallower Lake Victoria, by the way, isn't a true rift lake at all, though as the National Geographic article explains, its underlying geology explains why the East African Rift splits below Uganda into western and eastern portions. (By all means click to enlarge this map, which this isn't a National Geographic map, by the way. It's from the Woods Hole Research Center's PAWAR project.)


"As the global population soars toward nine billion by 2045, this corner of Africa shows what’s at stake in the decades ahead. The Rift is rich in rainfall, deep lakes, volcanic soil, and biodiversity. It is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth. A desperate competition for land and resources—and between people and wildlife—has erupted here with unspeakable violence. How can the conflict be stopped? Will there be any room left for the wild?"

-- the introductory blurb for the November
National Geographic feature "Rift in Paradise"

"The paradox of the Albertine Rift is that its very richness has led to scarcity. People crowded into this area because of its fertile volcanic soil, its plentiful rainfall, its biodiversity, and its high altitude, which made it inhospitable to mosquitoes and tsetse flies and the diseases they carry. As the population soared, more and more forest was cut down to increase farm and grazing land. Even in the 19th century the paradise that visitors beheld was already racked with a central preoccupation: Is there enough for everyone?"

-- from Robert Draper's main article text

"The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering."

-- from Geographic Editor Chris Johns's Editor's Note

"In the [Ugandan] capital city of Kampala, one gets a taste of what the end of the world might look like. Uganda is a country that can sustainably hold 8 to 9 million people. They're at 34 million now, on their way to 80 to 90 million by mid-century. The cars are out of a Mad Max movie. People cook meat in the dark by burning charcoal in tire rims. Mounds of garbage are everywhere. It's filthy, grueling, and crushing."

-- from photographer Joel Sartore's sidebar essay,
"Close Call in Paradise"

by Ken

I've written a number of times about one of my favorite New York City tour leaders, Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done tours organized by the Municipal Art Society, the New York Transit Museum, the Queens Historical Society (Jack is the Queens borough historian), as well as tours of his own (notably the more or less day-long "Life on the #7 train"), trying to explain that what sets Jack apart from other tour guides is in part his profession: not "architectual historian" or "urban historian," but urban geographer.

Oh, I know. You're saying, "OMG, this one is going to start yammering now about bleeping geography. There is truly no God."

What can I say? I know Americans hate geography. Almost as much as they hate history, and they only hate history more because they're more often poked and prodded about historical jibberjabber they don't want to know about. Whereas Howie and I have had lifelong fascinations with geography. Not identical fascinations, but fascinations strong and deep enough to be an important underpinning of our bond.

So when I do a walking tour with Jack Eichenbaum, I know I'm not going to get so much about the design of the buildings, as I will from other tour leaders. What I'm likely to get striking insight into is how the development of regions and towns and cities and neighborhoods has been shaped by the configuration of land and water as related to the surrounding area and impacted on by climate and weather. So much of New York City's development, for example, has been strongly influenced by transportation -- as with the arrival and placement -- all geography-influenced -- of trolleys and ferries, and later railroads and subways.

Which is by way of trying to explain why I've been blown away by a spectacular set of features in the November National Georgraphic focusing on a seemingly arcane subject: the Albertine Rift of East Africa. Oh, I've known in a general way about the East African rift system, and with maybe a little prompting I could have explained that it's a major north-south fault system at the juncture of the Nubian and Somali plates (to the west and east, respectively). But in truth I would have been kind of vague about what geographical form this rift system takes -- kind of vague, and wrong.

In my head I've got the phrase "East Africa Rift Valley," and so I always think "valley" -- that the rift takes the form of a valley in the region where the two great plates are pulling apart. And there is a certain amount of valley in the East African Rift system. But there are also substantial mountains and, perhaps most significantly, resource-rich highlands, along with those big lakes, the "Great Lakes of Africa."

This issue of the Geographic includes one of the society's famous "map supplements," a feature that used to excite me but hasn't much for a lot of years now. This one, though, has on one side the best map I've ever seen of the region, and on the other side a host of visual elements that help the reader understand just what goes into making up the region's geography. It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still beginning to digest this material. It actually shows us, not just tells but shows, the four basic kinds of terrain found in the Albertine Rift. Just extraordinary stuff. I'm sorry I couldn't find any of it online to share.

National Geographic caption for this photo by Pascal Maitre: Rule of the gun prevails in North Kivu, a conflict-ravaged province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Mai-Mai Kifuafua, one of many local militias, flaunts its power on a road where it extorts money from villagers and travelers. For almost 20 years near-constant fighting over land, mining riches, and power has terrorized the people.

In addition, before this issue I certainly wouldn't have understood how this underlying geography has set the stage, in the western part of this rift system, known as the Albertine Rift, for a goodly chunk of the worst violence and destruction taking place on the planet in recent decades. The paragraph I've quoted at the top of this post, from Robert Draper's main article, has its stage set by these two paragraphs:

The horrific violence that has occurred in this place -- and continues in lawless eastern Congo despite a 2009 peace accord -- is impossible to understand in simple terms. But there is no doubt that geography has played a role. Erase the borders of Uganda, the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania and you see what unites these disparate political entities: a landscape shaped by the violent forces of shifting plate tectonics. The East African Rift System bisects the horn of Africa -- the Nubian plate to the west moving away from the Somalian plate to the east—before forking down either side of Uganda.

The western rift includes the Virunga and Rwenzori mountain ranges and several of Africa's Great Lakes, where the deep rift has filled with water. Called the Albertine Rift (after Lake Albert), this 920-mile-long geologic crease of highland forests, snowcapped mountains, savannas, chain of lakes, and wetlands is the most fecund and biodiverse region on the African continent, the home of gorillas, okapis, lions, hippos, and elephants, dozens of rare bird and fish species, not to mention a bounty of minerals ranging from gold and tin to the key microchip component known as coltan. In the 19th century European explorers like David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke came here searching for the source of the Nile. They gazed in awe at the profusion of lush vegetation and vast bodies of water, according to the scholar Jean-Pierre Chrétien: "In the heart of black Africa, the Great Lakes literally dazzled the whites."

National Geographic Editor Chris Johns provides this up-front Editor's Note from which I've also quoted up top, which in fact I hadn't read until I was preparing this post:

What began as an attempt to do my job in Africa’s Albertine Rift still haunts me. A lovely young woman carrying firewood on her back was walking through lush forest. My guide, a local schoolteacher, asked the woman if I could take her picture. She readily agreed. Afterward I asked if it was appropriate to reward her graciousness. As I gave her a modest amount of money to make her life a little easier, a man swinging a machete burst out of the forest, screaming that he was her husband. In a drunken rage, he demanded more cash and threatened us. As we began to drive off, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the man beating her. I stopped and ran toward the stricken woman, but my guide pulled me back. He knew the man, he said. The situation could become more violent if I intervened. The man saw us and stopped his assault. They both waved me on. Reluctantly, I returned to my car, furious at the man and with myself, because I felt responsible for what had happened.

Five years later, in 1994, that region was the scene of more violence: the mass murder known as the Rwandan genocide.

The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering. For millennia, people have crowded into the region, attracted by its fertile land and minerals. “The paradox,” Draper says, “is that its very richness has led to scarcity,” and in the story you will read why. This dilemma provokes the unshakable worry: Is there enough for everyone? That’s the pervading question in this seventh story in our Seven Billion series on world population.

I think we're all familiar with place names like Rwanda and Burundi, with their recent history of genocidal violence, and of course perennially suffering Uganda (directly to the north of the Albertine Rift, but obviously intimately connected), and the eastern Congo city of Goma, which most of us are probably aware has become a catch basin for the horrific overcrowding and even more horrific violence besetting the region. It has grown from a minor regional outpost to a refugee-swollen dumping ground of 3 million, and to make matters worse, it's poised between two impending natural catastrophes: the already-active (and already-deadly) volcano Nyiragongo and the likely-to-explode vast concentrations of methane in Lake Kivu to the south.

Refugee-gigantized Goma (photo also by Pascal Maitre) is already a human disaster area, without reference to the potentially catastrophic dangers it faces from deadly volcano Nyiragongo and potentially explosive methane-loaded Lake Kivu.

One last point: At a time when the general assumption is that print magazines have no further use, this is a story that can only be told properly in print, with that map supplement at the ready. Good one, National Geographic!

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"Nous Ne Sommes Plus Vos Macaques!"-- Anti-Racist Words That Moved The U.S. Power Structure To Murder A Nation's Founding Father

All little boys grow up under the impression that their country is the best in the whole wide world-- except in the U.S. where we grow up not even knowing that there is a whole wide world out there aside from the land of the free and the home of the brave. So when did I start recognizing that my own country was every bit as bad-- if not worse-- than every other political cesspool through time and space? My atheist dad helped by explaining how religion was an effective system that kept working people from killing the rich crooks who oppressed them. And my socialist grandfather helped by explaining why the U.S. was taking the wrong side in Cuba right around the time I was crossing over into teenagedom. But the ultimate moment of realization came for me just about 50 years ago on the nose.

I wasn't even 12 when I first heard of Patrice Lumumba, then in the midst of agitating for independence for the Congo from the brutal and inhuman captivity of the Belgian royal family. On June 23, 1960 Lumumba was elected Prime Minister on the newly independent country but on Independence Day celebrations (June 30) the Belgian fascists tried one last humiliation by leaving the new Prime Minister off the program. Instead, King Baudouin tried to talk about how wonderful his country's savage and violent regime in the Congo had been. Lumumba took the stage and gave a more reality-based speech that horrified Western conservatives, as reality-based speeches often do:

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, 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 are no longer your monkeys!

The Belgians helped provoke a secessionist movement-- and civil war-- in Katanga, the mineral rich province they intended to hold onto for as long as they could. On September 15 the CIA backed a coup d’état by Joseph Mobutu, who promptly arrested Lumumba. Mobutu turned him over to the Katanga right-wing rebels where he was murdered by a firing squad commanded by Belgian army officers. Belgians later tried to destroy the evidence of the murder in sulfuric acid but some kept teeth and bullets from the body as souvenirs.

A few weeks ago, we looked at how the Nazi-oriented Dulles Brothers and their Republican Party allies illegally smuggled thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals into the U.S. for political purposes. But that isn't all the Dulles Brothers were up to after World War II.

Declassified U.S. cables from the year preceding the assassination bristle with paranoia about a Lumumba-led Soviet Communist takeover. The CIA was hatching plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and was accused of fomenting coups and planning assassinations worldwide. And Lumumba clearly scared the daylights out of the Eisenhower administration. "In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences... for the interests of the free world generally," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote. "Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective."

Even out of office, Lumumba remained under the microscope of Western spy services. His ties to Moscow frightened Washington. His fierce anti-colonialism unnerved Brussels. Belgium finally got its chance at Lumumba after Congolese authorities arrested him in December 1960. Belgian officials engineered his transfer to the breakaway province of Katanga, which was under Belgian control. De Witte reveals a telegram from Belgium's African-affairs minister, Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, essentially ordering that Lumumba be sent to Katanga. Anyone who knew the place knew that was a death sentence.

Firing squad. When Lumumba arrived in Katanga, on January 17, accompanied by several Belgians, he was bleeding from a severe beating. Later that evening, Lumumba was killed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian officer. A week earlier, he had written to his wife, "I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable, and with profound trust in the destiny of my country." Lumumba was 35.

The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut up the body with a hacksaw and dissolved it in sulfuric acid. In an interview on Belgian television last year, Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth he claimed to have saved from Lumumba's body.

What remains unclear is the extent, if any, of Washington's involvement in the final plot. A Belgian official who helped engineer Lumumba's transfer to Katanga told de Witte that he kept CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of the plan. "The Americans were informed of the transfer because they actively discussed this thing for weeks," says de Witte. But Devlin, now retired, denies any previous knowledge of the transfer.

Either way, Lumumba's death served its purpose: It bolstered the shaky regime of a formerly obscure colonel named Joseph Mobutu. During his three-decade rule, Mobutu would run his country, bursting with natural resources, into the depths of poverty. It took a civil war to oust him, and Congo has seen little peace since. Today, at least five countries are fighting in Congo and Lumumba's son, an opposition leader, spent several weeks in a Kinshasa jail cell on politically motivated charges.

At the time Lumumba was a hero to progressive young Americans and the CIA's involvement in his deposition and murder was a wake-up call for many, myself included.

Last week my friend Melody reminded me that January 17 was the 50th anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and their Belgian and Katangan stooges. Allen Dulles claims Eisenhower ordered him to have Lumumba killed. Melody wrote that "the events really were important in shaping the fate of the Congo, and Africa in general [and are] a reminder that the US has had it's hand in all sorts of dirty deeds. Although the U.S. media has always chosen to ignore what the CIA did in the Congo and the anniversary was resolutely ignored in this country (NY Times excepted this time), she suggested that DWT readers take a look at the story last week in the Guardian:

Between 1961 and 1973, six African independence leaders were assassinated by their ex-colonial rulers, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, who was killed 50 years ago today.

Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, was the second of five leaders of independence movements in African countries to be assassinated in the 1960s by their former colonial masters, or their agents.

A sixth, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was ousted in a western-backed coup in 1966, and a seventh, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the west African liberation movement against Portugal of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, was assassinated in 1973.

Lumumba's death in 1961 followed on from that of the opposition leader of Cameroon, Felix Moumie, poisoned in 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, leader of Togo was killed in 1963. Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition movement was kidnapped in France in 1965 and his body never found. Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo, fighting for independence from the Portuguese, died from a parcel bomb in 1969.

The loss 50 years ago of this group of leaders, who all knew each other, and had a common political project based on national dignity, crippled each of their countries, and the African continent. The effects are still evident today.

Ben Barka and Cabral were revolutionary theoreticians-- as significant as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Their influence reverberated far beyond their own continent. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, organised by Ben Barka before his death, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's closing speech referred to "one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Amílcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation."

The Third World Movement, challenging the economic and political world dominance of the colonial powers, the US, and the neocolonial leaders favoured by the west, would have two short decades of ambition and optimism despite the long shadow of its great leaders' deaths.

Today, it is impossible to touch down at the (far from modernised) airport of Lubumbashi in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo-- in 1961 known as Elizabethville, in Congo (then renamed Zaire)-- without a shiver of recollection of the haunting photograph taken of Lumumba there shortly before his assassination, and after beatings, torture and a long, long flight in custody across the vast country which had so loved him. This particular failure of the United Nations to protect one man and his two colleagues was every bit as significant as that in Srebrenica in 1995, when 8,000 men and boys were killed.

Lumumba's own words, written to his wife just four months after the exhilaration of independence day in the capital Kinshasa are a reminder of who he was and why he meant so much to so many people then, and still does today.

"Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity."

Lumumba would not have been surprised that his successor, Joseph Mobuto was the US strategic ally in Africa for 30 years. Congo was too rich, too big, and too important for the west to lose control as they would have had Lumumba lived.

How ironic that Mobuto was succeeded by Laurent Desire Kabila, whose 10th anniversary of assassination, by his own guards, falls just one day before Lumumba's?

UPDATE: Russ Baker Wants To Make Sure We're Aware Of The Bush Connection

Baker points out that the CIA was a sponsor of Mobutu's and that George H.W. Bush later welcomed the savage kleptocrat and tyrant to America as "one of our most valued friends." Three days after Lumumba was murdered, JFK was sworn in as President of the United States and Baker's nook, Family of Secrets makes a hard to deny case for the involvement of the CIA, Dulles and... George H.W. Bush. From Baker's WhoWhatWhy:

In my book, Family of Secrets, I cite evidence that the elder Bush was deeply involved in C.I.A covert operations during the time in which both assassinations took place. I document his close ties to mining interests comparable to the ones Lumumba himself had angered-- by declaring, as Hochschild recounts, that it was not enough for the Congolese to gain political independence from colonial rule, but that “Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil.”

More troubling are the many inconsistencies and gaps that I discovered in accounts by Bush and others concerning his activities on and around the day of the assassination, all of which are extensively documented and footnoted. These include:

•    Bush’s noted inability to recall where he was on November 22, 1963;

•    his longtime friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, a mentor and confidant to Lee Harvey Oswald;

•    a declassified FBI memo identifying Bush as a C.I.A officer working with Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination;

•    FBI records documenting a call Bush himself placed to the Bureau on Nov. 22 from a location near Dallas, offering to identify a possible triggerman in the assassination-- a man Bush knew far better than he revealed at the time, and who he knew could not have been the triggerman

•     Barbara Bush’s revelation in her 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, that the Bushes were having lunch the week of November 22 with Alfred Ulmer, an old friend who, research shows, was one of the C.I.A.’s experts in deposing leaders.

•    Bush’s close relationship with the military intelligence official whose unit and unit members played an astonishing array of roles on November 22, from forcing their way into the lead car of Kennedy’s motorcade to providing the interpreter who framed Marina Oswald’s statements in a way that implicated her husband.

Here's my presentiment: If we have much more "good for business" Republican misrule, it's not just poor Preston who's going to get his ass fired

Was President Mobutu swapping management tips
with the first President Bush?

These days I get most of my news, not from a newspaper, or TV or radio, or the Internet, but from the elevator in my office building. This 22nd-century technology may not have reached you yet, but in our elevators we have a little display screen that dispenses concise nuggets of wisdom along with ads, ads, ads.

This morning, for example, I learned that the IRS's corporate audit rate has dropped to 26% from 72% in 1990. I assume this is because corporations have become so scrupulous in their attention to even the finest points of the tax code, but it's a very small screen in the elevator, and there was no room to explain. Do you think there could be any other reason for the drop?

The tax-audit information was displayed while I was riding back down to the lobby, intending to go out to the coffee wagon down the block, where--if you get there early enough--you can get a really good (and really big) cinnamon roll for a dollar. If the cinnamon rolls are gone, you can usually still get a bowtie--not quite as many empty calories, but a serviceable day-starter. (Last week the woman ahead of me was thrilled to get what appeared to be the last chocolate-iced French cruller in Midtown.)

You also get a genuinely friendly greeting from the proprietor, who always seems authentically grateful for your business, even though you're only giving him a buck--and even that only on those days when you can't get through the morning without a sugar rush. As commercial transactions go, this is about the only one I look forward to, the one that leaves me feeling that both parties have come out ahead on the deal.

On the way back up to my office the Elevator Genie offered his/her daily word-improvment feature. Every day the Genie teaches us a new word, and today it was presentiment. I don't remember the Genie's definition, but the American Heritage Dictionary College Edition offers: "A sense of something about to occur; premonition."

But what I can't forget is the example the Genie offered. The day's word is always used in a sentence. The sentence for presentiment was:

"Preston had a presentiment that he was going to be fired."

Gadzooks!

Now I don't know this Preston fellow, and it may be that he deserved to have his ass fired. Maybe his coworkers can't believe that he managed to hold onto his job this long, though his vulnerability today seems to have been fatally enhanced by the too easy alliteration of his name with today's word, presentiment.

Gee whiz, though, is this truly the only kind of presentiment available to us in the Age of Bush? I mean, was it really so far-fetched for our Preston to have a presentiment that his boss was going to offer him a promotion and a raise? Alas, there are two things we can be fairly sure of in this case: (1) Preston's company probably was under no pressure from an impending tax audit, and (2) the poor guy was probably replaced with a nitwit. If he was replaced at all. It could just be "downsizing." I wouldn't be at all surprised if the managerial geniuses several levels above Preston, who likely have no idea who does what in the company, simply decided that his workload can be divvied up among his surviving coworkers. Somebody'll do it. That's what makes them geniuses.

Maybe this hit home because we just had a sudden and shocking firing in our company on Friday. And it was somebody way above poor Preston's pay grade. It was a fairly highly placed person--several levels above me, though that's not saying much. (Over the years I seem to have worked my way down the ladder to a rung lower than the lowliest clerk.) Still, this person wasn't so highly placed that she didn't have a level or two of fire-at-will management above her.

I spoke to my (former) boss briefly on Friday, and she indicated that she had had short notice--unlike Preston, she apparently did not have any presentiment. She said that when she got home she planned to have a giant martini.

Very likely that's what poor presentimental (yes, there really is such a word--it's in the dictionary) Preston will do when he gets home, probably before he breaks the unhappy news to the wife and kiddies--with or without reference to the unfortunate presentiment. I hope the poor sap doesn't have one of those creative mortgages that are destined for default under the best economic circumstances. Otherwise it's just a matter of time before he and his loved ones are out on the street.

This will, it appears, come as something of a shock to former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson. People are suggesting now that he may not have been absolutely on top of the looming mortgage crisis. Yesterday's Washington Post reported:

In late 2006, as economists warned of an imminent housing market collapse, housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson repeatedly insisted that the mounting wave of mortgage failures was a short-term "correction."

He pushed for legislation that would make it easier for federally backed lenders to make mortgage loans to risky borrowers who put less money down. He issued a rule that was criticized by law enforcement authorities because it could increase the difficulty of detecting and proving mortgage fraud.

As Jackson leaves office this week, much of the attention on his tenure has been focused on investigations into whether his agency directed housing contracts to his friends and political allies. But critics say an equally significant legacy of his four years as the nation's top housing officer was gross inattention to the looming housing crisis.

And it's only in the second Bush term that people have seemed subject to firing for these gaffes. In the first term, about the only way you could get fired was by disagreeing with the escaped-mental-patient "orthodoxies" of the World According to "Big Dick" Cheney, a man we now know doesn't have a sane cell in his brain.

It's sometimes said that economics adviser "Fat Larry" Lindsey was an exception, having been fired for failing to go along with Chimpy the Prez's "Run Like a Rodent" quasi-fitness program. Or then again, Fat Larry may have been fired for attempting to provide even a rudimentary answer to the question of how much our prospective adventure in Iraq might cost in actual taxpayer dollars. Everyone knows that if you have to ask how much a war is going to cost, you can't afford it.

In the second Bush term, throwing loyal lackeys overboard has become a lot more common, as the people in charge struggle to save their own sorry asses. Heck, if "Dandy Don" Rumsfeld could be made to fall on his sword, could anybody be safe? Why, eventually even that tamest, lamest lapdog, former counsel to the president and then-Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales got his marching orders. Say, did you see where Idiot Al can't seem to find a job? I'm not surprised. If he said, "Fries with that?" to me, probably the last thing on earth I would do is get the fries.

But then there was a "good news" story of a sort in this morning's Post, about how managerial responsibility and accountability seem to be gaining a foothold in the Congo as it tries to recover from the decades of catastrophic misrule by "the famously kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko" and political upheaval. Mobutu himself of course became unimaginably rich, and I think it's safe to say that a circle of his cronies made out pretty well too. However:

Graft and mismanagement have left the Congolese among the poorest people in the world. But with a years-long civil war for the most part over and a democratically elected government in place, investors are beginning to return to the resource-rich country.

This ought to be a feel-good story, and I certainly wish the Congolese all the luck they've been denied all these decades. I'm just a little spooked by that sentence, "Graft and mismanagement have left the Congolese among the poorest people in the world."

I wish this didn't sound so eerily like the Bush-McCranky Economic Policy. Especially as we head into recession, we have to hope that in this election cycle massive numbers of American voters--enough to offset not just Republican candidates, but Emanuelite and Schumeresque corporatist "Republican lite" Democrats---see through the dreadful misapprehension that Republican governance is "good for business."

Just ask poor Preston.

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