The 'Obama was (possibly) groomed by the CIA' thread

[sunny]

June 22, 2009
Obama and the CIA: The latest
Sometimes, I think that Cinie and I are the only bloggers who care about the possible links between Barack Obama and the intelligence agencies. Most people lump that line of research in with that "birth certificate" nonsense, not to mention the "Obi the Muslim" smear. I consider the possible CIA connections to be a much more serious area of inquiry. Here's a sampler of some of my previous writings on the topic.

No, I don't claim that these Agency links have been proven with the precision of a geometrical formulation. But the evidence is suggestive -- perhaps more than suggestive. Before we get to Cinie's latest, let's summarize the top ten reasons for suspicion:

1. Obama's mother Ann Dunham took Russian-language classes and married a potential up-and-comer on the Kenyan political scene, at a time when cold warriors considered Kenya "in play." If you don't think that the '60s-era CIA would have paid attention to such a woman, read a few books about the CIA in the 1960s.

2. Later, and despite her alleged "leftist" leanings, she married a key liaison between Indonesian tyrant Suharto and American oil companies. The CIA "made" Suharto by staging a bloody coup in Indonesia, all with an eye toward benefitting oil interests. No genuine lefty would have exchanged two consecutive sentences with hubby #2.

3. During Ann's Indonesia period, Tim Geithner's father Peter ran the Ford Foundation's microfinance program in Indonesia. Ann worked with him. Long story short: Ford Foundation = CIA.

4. Ann's extensive travels abroad, often under the Ford Foundation aegis, would provide excellent cover for intelligence assignments. Her talent for languages was just what the CIA sought and seeks. Nobody knows why she once visited Pakistan or why she tried to learn Urdu.

5. Nobody knows the real reason why Obama, who lived in Hawaii, chose Occidental College in Los Angeles, an expensive (but second-tier) private institution. Obama became very interested in politics at this time. The chief political science prof at Oxy was an old CIA hand, as well as a longtime crony of Zbigniew Brzenzinsky, who later became something of a mentor to Obama.

6. As a young man, Obama possessed both multiple passports and knowledge of a rather exotic (by American standards) foreign language. The CIA loves to recruit people like that. The CIA also likes to recruit people from CIA families.

7. In 1981, Obama traveled to Pakistan for no discernible reason, despite a State Department warning of unrest in the area. (There had been a coup.) At the time, Pakistan was a key cold war front, due to the CIA's efforts to supply the Afghan mujahadeen.

8. Nobody knows how Obama paid for these travels. He claims that he was then quite poor. Nobody really know how he paid for his expensive schooling, or why he was later accepted into a prestigious institution like Columbia despite having done indifferent schoolwork.

9. In Pakistan, Obama stayed with the powerful Ahmadmian Soomro -- a key mover-and-shaker in that nation. This, despite the fact that Obama knew no-one in the Soomro family. Soomro was asked to take in Obama by an unnamed personage at the American embassy, who was almost certainly CIA. Nobody knows what messages Obama may have given to Soomro.

10. Obama went on to live a strangely charmed life, perhaps due to off-stage helpers. For example, he received a princely sum for his first autobiography, despite being an unknown tyro author fresh out of college, with extremely vague ideas as to what he wanted to write about. One could cite many more examples to prove the point -- and one has done just that, over the course of many previous posts.

Okay, now let's get to Cinie's latest. She cites this WP story:
The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

In recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.

The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal.
Just imagine the outcry on Kos, DU and HuffPo if Bush had tried such a move!

Cannonfire

[MinM]

The question that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama?

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewt ... 733#244733

[sunny]

Thanks for posting the link MinM. I missed that one the first time around.

We can make this thread a repository for this sort of information.

(oh, and btw thanks for your diligence in resurrecting old threads. Keep it up. )

[JackRiddler]

(Prior thread, which is just me copying an article from NYT.)

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=21319

Obama's Years in NYC (1980s) - NYT, Oct. 2007


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/po ... nted=print

October 30, 2007
The Long Run
Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say

By JANNY SCOTT

Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.

“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man.

Like other transfer students, Mr. Obama lived off campus and bounced from one apartment to another. For a while, he said, he lived with a Pakistani whom he calls Sadik. He recalls that when he lived in a walk-up on East 94th Street, he would chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about the Knicks or the sound of gunfire at night.

He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.

In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period of study.”

“I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he was quoted as saying.

He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities, though, in recent interviews, several prominent student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role.

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.

Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”

Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.

“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Cathy Lazere, his supervisor at Business International, described him as self-assured and bright. “He was very mature and more worldly than other people — on the surface kind of laid back, but kind of in control,” she said. “He had a good sense of himself, which I think a lot of kids at that age don’t.”

After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.

Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.

“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.

Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[JackRiddler]

.

Satire that may actually be straightforward truth...

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_br ... y_debriefs

CIA Awkwardly Debriefs Obama On Creation Of Crack Cocaine

February 26, 2009 | Issue 45•09

WASHINGTON—In his first meeting with President Barack Obama, CIA crime and counternarcotics analyst Timothy R. McIntire haltingly explained to the nation's first African-American commander in chief the highly classified origin of crack cocaine and the resultant epidemic that swept across U.S. inner cities. "Well, you see, sir...thing is, we needed money to help those Contras back in '85, and we never really expected...so we distributed it, and...shortsighted...and, ha, well, Christ—is it hot in here?" McIntire said between exaggerated coughs. "Yikes, okay. See, it was a very tense time—not that that makes it right—and, uh, bottom line is, we're a different agency now."

McIntire went on to disclose several other secret CIA operations, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the recruitment, four years earlier, of a Kenyan grad student for a clandestine program at the University of Hawaii.

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[JackRiddler]

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The question of a spook background is a natural one, and not only for Obama but for any politician or official who achieves a key national security state position in the post-1947, post-Mockingbird, post-1963, post-Church Committee United States. It's hard to believe the spooks would allow anyone to become president who had not accumulated bona fides and blackmailable offenses (real or otherwise).

Honestly, I don't think this avenue will get anywhere constructive because the well has more poison than water in it, thanks to the "birth certificate" and "Muslim" and other plentiful anti-Obama woo, not to mention the more traditional racist tropes and the idea of Obama as a socialist agent (the last a favor-of-sorts that was also conferred on Clinton as he implemented his own neoliberal agenda).

Looking at the list, I'm surprised they left out Obama's years in New York, where the Occidental U transfer student was tutored at Columbia by none other than Brzezinski and Khalilzad and where he worked as a researcher in a possible cover job at a generically titled company, doing things that seem not so necessarily mysterious as unclarified.

Cannon's a bit of a nut, of course, and yes, I am talking about his insane partisanship last year on HRC's behalf - now if there was ever a long-term spook sleeper in politics, you'd have to look at her and her husband fourth (after Papa Bush, Cheney and Porter Goss, who are slam-dunks).

For a start, he and "Cinie" should go over their list again with rigorous skepticism and see what's left standing afterward. Here are some problems I see, mostly minor details but still worthy of correction or doubt:

2. "Genuine lefties" don't necessarily exist in this pure form. There's the famous cliche of the limousine liberal or bourgeois who talks and emotes radically but ultimately follows personal and class interests. Someone can believe something honestly for years and still be attracted to a person with politically opposite views. One can imagine the expatriate community in Indonesia was a tight little village where they might have met many times and gotten hot for each other without giving consideration to politics.

4. "No one knows why she once visited Pakistan or why she tried to learn Urdu" makes it sound more ominous than it might be. For example, I once visited the Soviet Union and tried to learn Russian, and Joe Cannon has no idea why.

5. Again, the language is unnecessary: "Nobody knows the real reason..." as though any reason need be given. People apply to various colleges and pick one if they can get in and get a scholarship or otherwise pay for it. However, this set of circumstantial facts is interesting. Which is why how you spell Brzezinski matters.

6. CIA loves multiple passports, languages, etc., yeah yeah, whatever. General, tenuous.

7. Again, potentially interesting facts are given ominosity through the choice of adjectives. For example, one could write of me: "In 1988, JR traveled to Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank for no discernible reason, despite a State Department warning of unrest in the area. (The first intifada was still underway.) At the time, Egypt and Israel were key cold war fronts..." Now I went on this trip for just a couple of thousand dollars I'd earned in the summer because it seemed like I'd have a great time, and it was! Cannon should tone this down and see if he can actually find out anything about Obama's travels.

8. So what was Obama's "indifferent" GPA at Occidental, that it wasn't good enough for Columbia? At the risk of saying something controversial, it's perfectly obvious why Columbia would accept a brilliant and charming young man who also met their diversity criteria.

9. and 10. Now we're talking!

Again, some interesting points in there. His case would be better served by taking the above critiques to heart.

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[Nordic]

Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.

“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.

The world is run by salesmen.

Ah, to be a good salesman .....

Wish I had more of that.

Thanks for this thread. I've been meaning to look up a lot of this stuff.

[JackRiddler]

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I added a link to this thread to Cannon's comments. Let's see if he comes over and has a look.

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[lupercal]

Entirely plausible, but I get the impression we're not supposed to think so. So thanks Sunny for another TGFRI moment because I was beginning to think I was losing my screws. I've had a nagging suspicion since his FISA stunt last June and the more I see the more I think you're onto something. More later.

[Nordic]

lest we not forget:

St. Paul, Minn. — Shortly after taking office in 1999, Jesse Ventura writes he was asked to attend a meeting at the state Capitol. He says 23 CIA agents were waiting for him in a basement conference room.

Ventura's account of the meeting is detailed in an advance copy of his new book, which is scheduled for release in April. He claims the agents' questions focused how he campaigned for office, or as Ventura writes "how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off?"

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/displa ... /jessecia/

Basically, Venture was not supposed to win the governorship of Minnesota.

[smiths]

there was definately another thread that went into this in the lead up to his election,

i shall search for it

[mentalgongfu2]

Sherman Skolnick claimed long before Obama's presidential candidacy that he was a spy working for the Brits.

[jingofever]

I added a link to this thread to Cannon's comments. Let's see if he comes over and has a look.

Was it this one?

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
posted by Anonymous : 2:08 PM

Here is Cannon's response:

I really couldn't care what the dolts at RI think of me. I keep better company.
posted by Joseph : 2:56 PM

Well the joke is on him because Peter of Lone Tree posts here. At least he used to, until he found better company.

[DrVolin]

Sometimes, I think that Cinie and I are the only bloggers who care about the possible links between Barack Obama and the intelligence agencies.

You aren't

Groomed, quite possibly. But by whom? Obama certainly fits the profile of other groomed past presidents. There have largely been two kinds of presidents since 1900: The dynasts and the orphans. The dynasts include the Roosevelts, Taft, the Kennedies, and the Bushes. The orphans include Hoover (significantly, see below), Ford, Clinton, and Obama. The rest were selected because they had no hope of forming rival dynasties (Wilson had three daughters for example, Harding had no children). With the exception of Carter as the last throes of the Republic, and the shot-into-submission Reagan, every president since 1973 has been either a dynast or a groomed orphan. I hope I have time to finish writing about that some time soon.

But look more closely at the parallels between Hoover and Obama. They are very instructive. Both are orphans, children of first generation immigrants, apparently self-made men with a history of community organizing and significant time spent abroad (China and Australia for Hoover). Both led "charmed lives" from the moment of their unlikely admission to an elite university (Stanford in one case, Columbia in the other). And both were put in the White House just in time to preside over economic calamities.

Obama was clearly supported by the Kennedy clan and eventually accepted by the Bush clan, after intervention by the Ancestral Roosevelt Hegemon who heads the rules and bylaws committee of the DNC. So who groomed him? If it was the CIA, wouldn't he have shown up as a Bush candidate?

[Sweejak]

No less than conspiracy hater Alexander Cockburn lends a little credence to the birth certificate issue when he writes:

A substantial number of Americans argue strongly that his father’s Kenyan citizenship, not to mention the refusal of the state of Hawai’i to release his original birth certificate, throw Obama’s eligibility into question. But since Obama will obviously not step down from the presidency even if every allegation is proved true, then Article 2 will be on its way to becoming a dead letter, encouraged in that process by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his supporters.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06192009.html