Torture: We Have Been Here Before
Why We Need Our Own “Truth Commission”
2009-08-26
By Del Walters

Attorney General Eric Holder knows all too well why an African American president should be outraged at the issue of torture and any potential violation of American civil rights.  We cannot stand idly by and say that what was done during the Bush administration should be excused and remain in the past. The past, it seems, has a way of haunting those who suffered the abuses long after the future has come and gone. Let’s review a few case studies.

Dr. Frank Olson 

In the ‘50s,  it wasn’t the War on Terrorism that was threatening our national security, but the Cold War.  In that time, the CIA drugged a scientist by the name of Dr. Frank Olson by lacing his drink with LSD.  A short time later, Olson plunged to his death by jumping from the upper floors of a New York City hotel. Olson was in charge of the CIA’s anthrax program at Fort Dietrich, Maryland.  The family was told that it was suicide, and was awarded $250,000 from the administration of President Gerald Ford.  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld posed for pictures with the family.  

Decades later while  I was working as an investigative reporter for the ABC station in Washington, D.C. we had the body exhumed and examined and proved the CIA got away with murder. Eric Olson, Dr. Olson’s son, spent his entire life trying to find out what happened to his father without the cooperation of the agency.  It was a lifetime wasted as we still don’t know everything that happened.

Patrice Lumumba

Last July ’09, the CIA released the document authorizing the CIA’s assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. No nation on earth has suffered more as a result of a single act on the part of this country.  Millions have died in the ensuing civil wars that grip the West African nation, and there is no end in sight to the fighting.  At the time of his assassination the Congo was one of the leading sources for many of the minerals the United States needed to fight, and subsequently win the Cold War.

CointelPro

Now fast forward to the 60’s.  The FBI, under then director J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party and several other Black Nationalist organizations as part of operation Cointelpro.  Among those who had their phones tapped and movements monitored by the FBI was Congressman John Lewis. The documents are available online but there is one major problem.  Most of the pertinent information remains blacked out even though it has been decades since the surveillance took place. 

There are three major historical reasons that we should be suspicious of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation to elicit information from alleged terrorist suspects in the days and weeks following the September 11th terrorist attacks. 

1. We have been here before with Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the others. If there was ever an administration that should have realized the dangers in walking over the rights of anyone, those who served with Nixon should top the list. Both men served as part of that administration.

2. We are still suffering as a nation because of what happened during those times when the civil rights of so many ethnic groups were trampled.  Case in point, Detroit, just this last weekend.  I was there screening my film “Apocalypse Africa: Made in America” and as always, the question of whether I believed AIDS to be a CIA designed ethnic weapon was asked.  Conspiracy theories live on in the black community mainly because of past abuses. To ignore that reality is to be blind. Just mention the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, Black Wall Street or Rosewood.

3. Sadly, those involved were once again people of color. This country has committed unthinkable horrors in the name of national security against people of color.  It began with the Indians, followed by slavery, Japanese internment camps during World War II, black civil rights violations in the ‘60s, and now CIA torture techniques against people of Middle Eastern descent.  Lest we forget, this is the same Bush administration that asked Middle Eastern men to come in for voluntary questioning.    

The only way to move beyond this arena of suspicion is for the Obama administration to appoint an independent commission to look into these matters. It should work as a sort of a ‘Civil Rights Truth Commission’. It should contain people from all walks of life, and all hues to make sure that every viewpoint is represented. It should not be a who’s who of black university professors, but instead those who have to work with the fallout of the government’s past abuses.  Many of those students attend the various community colleges across the country.

The President is right when he says it is time for America to look forward, and this commission should keep that in mind. Unfortunately, for far too many in this country, black, white, Japanese and Indian, looking forward has to involve taking a little time to look back and clean up the past.

Del Walters is the Producer/Director of Apocalypse Africa Made in America and an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter.