Stranger Than Fiction
there are facts behind the conspiracy theories America wants to dismiss
2008-04-01
By Del Walters

     The characterizations of Jeremiah Wright as racist and anti-American are far too simple, and reflect a gross misunderstanding of U.S. history.  Not U.S. conjecture or conspiracy theory or spin, but U.S. history.
 
     To be certain, much of the anger that permeates the black community is based on conspiracy theory and myth.  But it is the reality that proves most troubling. Does black America have reason to fear and be concerned about  the action of their government? Let’s examine the facts:

     Fact:  The US Government  issued blankets given to Indians were laced with smallpox. A few of those Indians live on reservations to this day. Most are dead.

     Fact:  The United States Government did withhold treatment for syphilis from black men in Tuskegee, Alabama in order to observe the progression of the disease.

     Fact:  A CIA scientist by the name of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb did travel to the Congo to poison the toothpaste of Patrice Lumumba, and while some historians argue he failed, a few weeks later Patrice Lumumba did indeed die.  It was all revealed fifteen years after Lumumba’s death in the now infamous Church Committee Hearings including his humorous code name:  Joe from Paris. 

     Fact: In the fifties and sixties blacks were used as human guinea pigs in a series of experiments under the top secret heading MK-Ultra. I interviewed a former subject of those experiments in the early nineties and he still suffered.  His name was Eddy Flowers, and he was unknowingly given LSD while an inmate inside a U.S. prison.  In the MK Ultra experiments, race was hardly the barometer.  Blacks, whites, gays and straight were all subject to overreaches by the government.  There are thousands of pages inside the National Archives in College Park, Maryland concerning those experiments and hundreds of others that represent some of the most sordid chapters in our nation’s history.

     Fact: Civil rights groups from the Black Panthers to SNCC, (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) were spied on as part of the top secret Cointelepro Program launched by the late J. Edgar Hoover. Many of the pages of those records remain highly redacted to this day.  As a result, the informants used by the FBI to spy on the ‘activists’ we now hold in high regard, (Georgia Congressman John Lewis among them) are hidden from history.
    
I know these things to be true, because as an investigative reporter working in Washington D.C. for two decades at the ABC TV affiliate, I won numerous awards for exposing each and every one of those programs.
   
What is more troubling is what we don’t know, and the attitude toward those who try to expose those hidden evils to a skeptical, colorblind and, yes, racist public.
   
 Last spring, at the Cannes International Film Festival, I revealed the latest chapter in which the U.S. declared war on the third world.  The film, NSSM…Guns…Greed and Genocide exposed the secret policies that were written in the dying days of the Nixon administration in which the third world, especially Africa, suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of both the CIA and the military industrial complex. Some audience members wept openly as they heard Nixon’s racist comments and then watched as his secret policies unfolded across the globe.

The National Security Study Memorandum 200 was the government’s secret plan to make sure Africa’s resources stayed in American hands.   In July of 1974 while the world focused on Watergate, Nixon and his cronies zeroed in on Africa, specifically its natural resources -- uranium, oil and diamonds.   Nixon secretly ordered an obscure study that paved the way for what some believe escalated the implosion of much of the continent.  It would be carried out under the seemingly innocent guise of Population Control.  It remained for decades the nation’s top secret population control document. Africa was the fastest growing continent on the planet. The populations our government wanted to control were not white.

The study, commonly known as NSSM 200, secretly declared the growing populations of the third world a threat to the national security of the United States.  Food and foreign aid were suddenly and inexplicably tied to population control.  Taxpayer funded sterilization and abortions were called for.  The Pope openly condemned the document. 

A day later Nixon ordered NSSM 201, which increased arms sales to what the state department called “Black Africa.”  He was told it would destabilize the continent. It did.

Roger Morris, who worked on the National Security Council in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations says, “This is a war the U.S. has been engaged in for the better part of a half century.”  Randall Robinson, the former head of the African Lobbying group TransAfrica goes one step further.  He says, “There is blood on America’s hands.”
    
Are they unpatriotic?  Was I for exposing the horrors of NSSM 200 and 201? 
  
Both questions speak to the heart of a larger issue.  Is free speech really free for African Americans seeking to right longstanding injustices in the black community?    The anger Barrack Obama, Jeremiah Wright and many others speak of can only be healed through the truth no matter how ugly it is. The mysteries surrounding topics of black conspiracy theorists must be tackled head on.  If bio-weapons were formed against African Americans, the reasons behind those programs must be examined. The truth will come out. It is only a matter of time.

Four decades after J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Nixon’s secret war on Africa, we know little about what really happened.  Mostly because we have left the job of seeking to the truth to pastors like Jeremiah Wright, who get some things terribly right and others terribly wrong.  No one has ever questioned the coincidence of black panthers dying in Compton, at the same time the U.S. declared its covert war on the Congo.  Four decades after the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela the invisible fence marking boundaries we are not allowed to cross works to perfection. The rape of Africa continues while we watch because every time someone like Jeremiah Wright questions the obvious they are shot down as another angry black man. This is not an opportunity to examine the anger, but the truth.  How much of what he said was true and how much was a lie? Is it now time for journalists white and black to set the historical record straight.      
     
NSSM is proof there are still things about our own government we know little about.  But the fact that I, a black man, exposed them, is also proof that much has changed, and this is still the greatest and most open society in the world.  Flawed yes, but as Obama put it so eloquently, the only country where either of us could succeed.

Richard Nixon’s NSSM is just another chapter in the long history that must be exposed. One few knew about before Cannes.  Ironically I have been told time and time again, to be careful; to worry about what my own government might do in response to my film.  It proves Jeremiah Wright isn’t all wrong.

Del Walters is an Emmy award-winning investigate reporter, filmmaker and author.