The Independent (UK) is reporting ( Eisenhower ordered Congo kiling ) on new claims that U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower may have ordered the murder of the Congo's (then Zaire) first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

    After the Congo achieved its independence from Belgium in 1960, there was a power struggle between the head of state Joseph Kasavubu, the military's colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, and Lumumba. Kasavubu and Lumumba each tried to dismiss each other and Mobutu sided with Kasvubu in 1961. In 1965, Mobutu in turn ousted Kasavubu and served as dictator until 1997 when he was ousted by current Congo dictator Laurent Kabila.

    After being ousted in 1961, Lumumba called on the Soviet Union for aid, but instead he ended up falling into the hands of Mobutu's forces and was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency had a handle in Lumumba's murder have remained steady over the years.

    Now a new book on the role the Belgium government played in the murder is also leading to new claims about the role the United Sates played. The book by journalist Ludo de Witte relies on declassified Belgium documents to charge that Belgium's then-African affairs minister Harold d'Aspremont Lynden called for Lumumba's "definitive elimination" in an October 1960 memo.

    A recently published transcript of a 1975 interview with Robert Johnson, who took minutes at some meetings with Eisenhower, is causing more controversy. In the transcript, which apparently only came to light by accident when it was misfiled with material relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, allegedly claims that Eisenhower ordered the killing of Lumumba at a meeting in August 1960. The interview is apparently from the House subcommittee that investigated assassinations in the mid-1970s and concluded that the CIA played a role in Lumumba's assassination and that evidence pointed to a direct role for Eisenhower in that decision.

    Did Eisenhower order the murder of Lumumba? Why not resolve the entire issue once and for all by opening up the records. Its long past time the CIA and other governmental records from that era were opened up and made available to resolve these sorts of historical questions. It is all well and good that the records from the former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe are confirming some of the worst suspicions about those regimes (and also, in some cases, disconfirming other claims), but without access to the CIA and U.S. military records, the world will still only have a partial understanding of Cold War events.