http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2009/Obama-Strange-Rise3jan09.htm
The Strange Rise of Obama
Progressive Review 3jan2009
As
we have noted, one of the unanswered questions about Barack Obama is
how a young politician of such little achievement got so far so fast —
from state senator to president in four years. Bill Blum provides new
light on the subject. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to
recognize that if a young Obama was vetted or otherwise used by the CIA,
it was not all that unusual. From the 1950s on, the agency repeatedly
interfered in the education of the talented young by recruiting or
co-opting them for its own purposes. Yale's Skull & Bones Club, for
example, was a classic case of a recruitment camp for future
intelligence types. The purpose — for the short run — is more
information, and — for the long run — a supply of US future government
officials whom the agency trusts and can use. And it often begins with a
bright college student an insider thinks might fill the bill. . . .
Bill
Blum, Anti-Empire Report — The question that may never go away: Who
really is Barack Obama? In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Fathers",
Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from
Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting
house to multinational corporations" in New York City, and his functions
as a "research assistant" and "financial writer." The odd part of
Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer.
However,
a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business
International Corporation [1]. Equally odd is that the Times did not
remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that
Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in
various countries between 1955 and 1960. [2]
The British journal,
Lobster Magazine — which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable
international publication on intelligence matters — has reported that
Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy
of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji. [3] In 1987,
the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office
because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone,
meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships
could not make port calls. [4] After the Fiji coup, the candidate
supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to
Washington's nuclear desires, was reinstated to power.
In his
book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to
say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no
significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International
has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions,
and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) [5] — it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable
Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this
world.
[1] New York Times, October 30, 2007
[2] New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40
[3] Lobster Magazine, Hull, UK, #14, November 1987
[4] William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”, pp.199-200
[5] Carl Oglesby, "Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement" (2008), passim
William Blum - Homepage: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer65.html
Colony
Net, 2008 — In an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials
during the primary campaign, the junior senator from Illinois — then in a
tight primary contest with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania — bragged
about the time he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton's
foreign policy "experience" consisted only of quick photo ops, while he
had spent "quality time" with "real people." Not only that, he had
actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip near the Pakistan city of
Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently impressed the gun owners of
Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch as Clinton won that primary by 10 per
cent.
Eager to impress the Pennsylvania crowd with his "foreign
policy experience" and knowledge of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact
that he'd been to Pakistan. (It is believed that he made two trips to
Pakistan.) There must have been more to that trip than meets the eye,
however, because the candidate has said virtually nothing about it
since. You won't find anything on the Obama campaign site. . .
Astute
readers may have begun to wonder how a struggling young college student
with a divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip
to Pakistan. . . But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges in
Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio. Chandio's
family owned a substantial amount of land in the region, and Obama
apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio is currently a
financial consultant in New York, and a donor to the Obama campaign.). .
.
Another of Obama's hosts in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian
Soomro, Obama's senior by about 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician
and himself a politician, who became interim President of Pakistan when
Pervez Musharraf resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that
"someone" personally requested that he "watch over" Barack Obama, but
will not name that individual . . .
A trip to Pakistan is no
doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans would consider
traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous place. In 1981, when
one of Obama's possible two trips there occurred, it was less safe.
Because of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, millions of
Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan, which was under martial law. The
Afghan "mujahedeen" fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back
and forth to fight the Soviets. . .
In the early 1980s, Pakistan
was one of the destinations Americans were prohibited from visiting — it
was on the State Department's list of banned countries. Non-Muslims
were not welcome, unless they were on official business, formalized
through the embassy of the country of origin. The simple truth is that
no young American would have a reason to or be able to visit Pakistan in
1981, unless he was on official government business of which the State
Department was aware. . .
Adding to the mix is the fact that Ann
Dunham, Obama's mother, had visited at least 13 countries in her
lifetime, and had worked for companies that required travel to Pakistan.
Her employers appear to have included the U.S. Agency for International
Development, the Ford Foundation, Women's World Bank, and the Asian
Development Bank. Note that USAID and the Ford Foundation have
(allegedly) been used as covers for CIA agents. . . .
The story
of Business International also includes its 1960s joint meetings with
members of SDS at the prodding of Carl Oglesby. Not everyone was happy
at the idea — including Bernadette Dorn — and probably for good cause.
Obama
also was one of eight students selected to study sovietology by
Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski who, if he wasn't a CIA official,
was as close as you can otherwise get. Brzesinski is now a member of
Obama's inner circle.
If the Obama Pakistan story sounds
somewhat familiar, it may because the Review was one of the few places
that reported one of Bill Clinton's similarly interesting trips:
"1960s:
Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by
biographer Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and
erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means
of support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at
the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government is
using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a
major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft.
According to former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich Clinton is told
by Oxford officials that he is no longer welcome there."
source: 6jan2008
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.
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