Obama: The President With No Past

April 11, 2011 at 00:35:30

The President with No Past: Obama's Electability in 2012

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall (about the author)

What are the chances of a president who has all his pre-presidential records sealed winning re-election to a second term? At the moment, because of Executive Order 13489, the public and press have virtually no way to independently verify much of what Obama tells us of his early life. Except for Fox News, the mainstream media has virtually ignored Executive Order 13489 (http://www.fas.org/sgp/obama/presidential.html), which Obama signed immediately on assuming the presidency. In my view, this poses a major public relations problem for a president who has broken all his campaign promises and who has no public record prior to 2004.

Among pre-presidential records declared "sealed" when the press has asked to see them are (see http://tinyurl.com/2g3k5vp):

• All college records from Occidental College, Columbia University or Harvard Law School.
• All Harvard Law Review articles and University of Chicago scholarly articles
• Obama's client list from the law firm he worked for in Chicago
• His Illinois state senate records and schedules (which are supposedly lost)
• His passport records.
• His parents' marriage license and divorce decree.
• His mother's marriage license from her second marriage.
• His adoption and kindergarten records

What's Obama Hiding?

Except for a few reactionary birthers, who believe the president was secretly born in Kenya (with an American mother, he would still be a US citizen under current law), the most popular theory is that Obama spent his early adult life working for US intelligence. The Russians apparently had their suspicions when they detained Senator Obama in 2004, following a three day disarmament fact finding mission and demanded to search his aircraft (http://tinyurl.com/43tgu28),

It's also a matter of public record that Business International Corporation (BIC), which employed Obama for one year after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983 was a front company the CIA used for economic intelligence gathering (New York Time s 12/27/77). According to the Times, BIC used journalists as non-official cover (NOC) agents in a number of foreign countries. A NOC (Valerie Plame is the best example) is an intelligence operative who assumes a covert role in an organization with no official ties to the government they are spying for. Obama's job was to do research and to write for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_International_Corporation)

Reverend Manning's Mock Treason Trial

Following Obama's inauguration, Harlem pastor Dr James David Manning propelled Obama's past into public view with a highly publicized mock treason-sedition trial in May 2010. In my view, the transcript of Dr Manning's trial makes a pretty convincing case that Obama didn't attend Columbia University in 1982-83, the years he claims to have been there. He's not listed in the year book or the graduation roster, and no one in the political science department (his major) recalls ever seeing him there.

The rest of the case is based on hearsay evidence from a phone conversation a Manning witness had with an alleged KGB-CIA double agent named Krezonoski. According to the double agent, Obama was really in Afghanistan in 1982-83, as the lead agent for the CIA operation training mujaheddin guerrillas to fight the Soviet occupation. In his testimony, the same witness implicates Obama in a vast liberal conspiracy which also involves Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal.

Wayne Madsen's Investigation Into Obama's Elusive Past

Wayne Madsen, whose intelligence credentials (see below) make his allegations more plausible, also claims that Obama was in Afghanistan between 1981 and 1983. However his sources (unnamed intelligence operatives and arms dealers in Kabul) are only slightly more credible than an alleged phone conversation with a supposed KGB/CIA agent.

Obama admits that he was in Pakistan in 1981, visiting his mother, who had been transferred from Indonesia to Lahore. However there are some interesting unanswered questions about this trip, such as why a 20 year college student would be staying with a high level Pakistani official Muhammadmian Soomo (who would become acting president of Pakistan in 2008) and why the President has sealed these passport records.

The Foundations Obama Worked for in Chicago

In 1984, Obama left Business International Corporation (BIC), to move to Chicago, where he became a civil rights lawyer. From that point on, he only had indirect links with the CIA, through his involvement in "left gatekeeping" foundations, many of which have a well-documented history of accepting CIA funding (see Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders - 1999, Granta Books London)

Obama first gained public prominence as the chairman of the board of the "liberal" Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). However strong links between CAC and Chicago's business elite, as well as their successful attacks against teachers' unions (by empowering Local School Councils to fire hundreds of teachers and principals), raise serious questions about CAC's "liberal" credentials. This becomes especially significant in light of Obama's appointment of former Chicago school district CEO and school privatization champion Arne Duncan as director of the Department of Education (see blog).

As Webster Tarpley points out in Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography, one of the strongest supporters of CAC was Chicago corporate mogul Thomas Ayers. By an amazing coincidence, Ayers was the father of the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Nevertheless Tom Ayers has impeccable corporate credentials, which include heading Commonwealth Edison for seven years in the seventies, and serving on the board of General Dynamics, Searle, Chicago Pacific, Zenith, Northwest Industries, First National Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Tribune.

Bill Ayers, the Ex-Weatherman Terrorist

Stranger still Bill Ayers, the ex-Weatherman terrorist, wrote the grant to secure Annenberg funding for the CAC and credits himself as one of its co-founders. He was also influential in getting his friend Barack Obama, a 34 year old with no education credentials, appointed as CAC's first chairman. Obama's annual salary as board chairman was $70,000 (in addition to his substantial income from his law practice).

All this raises the tricky question of how Bill Ayers transformed himself from a bomb making terrorist facing the death penalty to a tenured Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and pre-eminent education reformer. Many former Students for a Democratic Society (from which the Weathermen formed their splinter group) believe the Weather Underground was actually created by US intelligence, with the objective of discrediting, fragmenting and/or shutting down SDS. This view is substantiated by FBI documents that came to light in 1973, revealing the role of agent provocateurs in instigating much of the violence attributed to the Weathermen. Ayers successfully used this evidence to get his weapons and bomb making charges dismissed.

Obama's Fictional Autobiography

For me, Madsen's most interesting and credible findings concern Obama's family, rather than the President himself. I think they establish quite clearly that Obama's parents, maternal grandparents and stepfather -- like the Bush family -- all had intelligence links. And that Obama has fabricated many details about his past to conceal this.

The scenario Obama lays out in Dreams from My Father about his parents' background differs markedly from limited information available from school and other public school records. He indicates his parents first met in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii in [1960] ( In Dreams from My Father , Obama says 1959, when her yearbook indicates she was still in Seattle attending Mercer Island High school). However Wayne Madsen points out that Stanley Armour Dunham, Ann's father, already knew Obama senior. He has a 1959 photo of Dunham officially welcoming Obama senior with a traditional lei ceremony. This suggests that Stanley Armour probably relocated to Hawaii in 1959, with his family following a year later. Moreover the photo raises the interesting question of why an alleged furniture salesman, with no prior connections to the Honolulu business community or the University of Hawaii is welcoming the first Kenya student to enroll there.

Dunham and Obama Sr: front 3rd and 4th from right by Opinion Maker

Madsen believes that rather than being a simple goat herder, as Obama claims, his father was one of 280 students from British eastern and southern African colonies sponsored to study in the US under the CIA-inspired Airlift Africa project. http://www.voltairenet.org/article166741.html The goal of the project was to counter the influence of Soviet and Chinese backed rebels and leaders as these colonies gained independence.

It's also Madsen's belief that furniture sales was merely a cover, that Stanley Armour Dunham had a CIA role in overseeing Airlift Africa and other foreign students at the University of Hawaii. Even more mysterious is Madsen's photo of the family in Beirut, Lebanon in the early fifties (http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/08/special-report-the-story-of-obama-all-in-the-company-part-iii/). Madsen also notes the existence of an FBI file on Armour Dunham (J Edgar Hoover commonly kept files on covert CIA agents) which was allegedly destroyed in 1997.

Who Was the Real Ann Dunham?

Obama also likes to portray his mother as a struggling single parent and a free spirit and "sixties child." However Madsen has compiled considerable evidence suggesting she was actually a career employee (and possibly a NOC -- an agent under non-official cover like Valerie Plame) for a series of known CIA fronts (the USAID-funded Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen, Development Alternatives Inc., the Ministry of Industry Provincial Development Program, the Ford Foundation Southeast Asia regional office, and the Asian Development Bank). Among her other duties in Indonesia in the 1970s, was "anthropological" field work. Madsen believes this was actually intelligence gathering to consolidate the CIA-sponsored coup (1965-67) that overthrew Indonesian president Sukarno. (see http://www.t-room.us/2011/03/by-wayne-madsen-obamas-cia-mommy-dearest-%E2%80%94-identifying-indonesians-for-assassination/).

Among other evidence, Madsen cites a resolution passed by the American Anthropological Association in the mid-sixties condemning "intelligence meddling" of the CIA and Defense Department in anthropological field work. He also quotes the 1966 Beals Report (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/154/3756/1525.citation), which states that "several anthropologists, especially younger ones who had difficulty in securing research funds, were approached by "obscure' foundations or were offered support from such organizations only to discover later that they were expected to provide intelligence information to the CIA."

Colonel Lolo Soetoro

In 1962 Stanley Ann Dunham divorced Obama senior and met retired Indonesian Colonel Lolo Soetoro. She married him in either March 1964 or March 1965 (her passport records list two different dates). However Ann remained in Honolulu when Soetoro returned to Indonesia in 1966. She and five year old Barack joined him in 1967, after she received her bachelor's degree in anthropology.

According to Madsen, Soetoro was linked to the CIA via his participation in the 1965-67 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Sukarno, Indonesia's first democratically elected president. Madsen disputes Obama's claim that Soetoro did "topicological surveys" for the Indonesian army when he returned from Hawaii in 1966. I, too, find it extremely implausible that the fascist general Suharto would employ an experienced combat officer to perform geological surveys in a country racked by extreme political instability and violence. Although his evidence is sketchy, Madsen believes Soetoro returned to active duty to fight communist insurgents in Java (see http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/08/special-report-the-story-of-obama-all-in-the-company-part-iii/).

By the time Ann joined Soetoro in Jakarta in June 1967, Suharto had consolidated the coup and installed himself as acting president (March 1967).

Madelyn Dunham

In 1962 Stanley Ann Dunham divorced Obama senior and met retired Indonesian Colonel Lolo Soetoro. She married him in either March 1964 or March 1965 (her passport records list two different dates). However Ann remained in Honolulu when Soetoro returned to Indonesia in 1966. She and five year old Barack joined him in 1967, after she received her bachelor's degree in anthropology.

According to Madsen, Soetoro was linked to the CIA via his participation in the 1965-67 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Sukarno, Indonesia's first democratically elected president. Madsen disputes Obama's claim that Soetoro did "topicological surveys" for the Indonesian army when he returned from Hawaii in 1966. I, too, find it extremely implausible that the fascist general Suharto would employ an experienced combat officer to perform geological surveys in a country racked by extreme political instability and violence. Although his evidence is sketchy, Madsen believes Soetoro returned to active duty to fight communist insurgents in Java (see http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/08/special-report-the-story-of-obama-all-in-the-company-part-iii/).

By the time Ann joined Soetoro in Jakarta in June 1967, Suharto had consolidated the coup and installed himself as acting president (March 1967).

***

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and political and national security commentator for Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers.

www.stuartbramhall.com

I am a 63 year old American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. My recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE www.stuartbramhall.com describes the circumstances that led me to leave (more...)

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