Obama, the passport scandal, and a murder

A reader has asked me to blog about a strange murder case, although I'm not sure if I can bring any "value added" to the discussion. All I can say is this: Though the incident is a year old and the sources cited leave me feeling queasy, the allegations do convey a substantial intrigue factor.

According to the Moonie Times of April 19, 2008,

A key witness in a federal probe into passport information stolen from the State Department was fatally shot in front of a District church, the Metropolitan Police Department said yesterday.

Lt. Quarles Harris Jr., 24, who had been cooperating with a federal investigators, was found late Thursday night slumped dead inside a car, in front of the Judah House Praise Baptist Church in Northeast...

A full year later, many right-wing blogs are treating this story as though it were literally yesterday's news. (See, for example, the wackiness on display here.) I wonder why?

Harris was a witness in a strange mini-scandal which some of you may recall. In March of 2008, various news articles revealed that State Department employees had rifled through the passport files of candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

The original reports mentioned only Obama. Naturally, the progbloggers concluded that eeee-vil Hillary Clinton -- who, in the fevered imaginings of the Kossacks, ran the Bush State Department -- was the culprit. The comments here are a reminder of just how sick "the left" became:

And that in tern makes it quite possible that it was the Clinton people rather than any Republican campaign that was doing it.

Methinks Hillary has some 'splainin to do!!!

Interesting Clinton connection there... Of course, with the incestuous infolds of Penn, Black (and Rove and Mehlman), all information is probably shared between the McBush and Clinton teams at any rate. Bush probably sells it to them.

Olberman was strongly intimating Clinton supporter involvement.

Maybe Hillary would have to resign her Senate seat too.

And how is it that nobody spied on Hillary or McCain?

And so on, and so on. As an emitic, those old Kos threads serve a useful function.

Turns out someone at State did spy on Hillary and McCain, albeit at different times and (perhaps) for different reasons. The Kossack Konspiracists presumed that these latter revelations were bogus, intended to take the heat off what they are pleased to call the "Clinton-Bush crime family."

Which brings us back to the present day.

One of my least favorite right-wing bloggers, Pamela Geller -- who is still pushing the "certificate of birth" nonsense -- connects the passport scandal and the Harris murder to Obama's strange 1981 trip to Pakistan. Much as I loathe Geller, the Pakistan thing is like catnip to me. And so...

(excuse me while I affix a clothespin to my nose)

...let's see what Pammikins has to say about that:

On April 8, 2008, Obama confessed to having taken a trip to Pakistan in 1981.

Much speculation has been made about what national passport Obama used when he traveled to Pakistan in 1981.

So Obama confessed to this trip two weeks after his passport was tampered with.

Pakistan was in turmoil in 1981 and ruled of martial law. Millions of Afghan refugees were living in Pakistan, while the Afghan Mujahedeen operated from bases inside Pakistan in their war with the Soviets. One of the leaders that based his operation in Quetta, Pakistan was Usama Bin Laden (The Sheik).

Pakistan was on the banned travel list for US Citizens at the time and all non-Muslim visitors were not welcome unless sponsored by their embassy for official business. (more here)

The link goes to one of those Obi-the-Muslim crank sites. We may safely ignore that side-journey.

Nevertheless, it is true that Obama did go to Pakistan in 1981, even though the State Department strongly advised against doing so. Geller also notes (or rather, quotes) the following:

According to published reports in Pakistan, Obama in 1981 also stayed at the home of a prominent politician, Ahmad Mian Soomro, in an upscale Karachi suburb, and went on a traditional partridge hunting trip north of Karachi. Soomro’s son, Muhammad Mian Soomro, is a senior politician who served as acting president before the appointment of President Asif Ali Zardari last September.

It's pretty clear that Geller and the other right-wingers want to paint Obama as a secret jihadi. The right-wingers are hinting, without stating, that the passport scandal and the murder of Harris resulted from an attempt to uncover that disturbing past -- or, perhaps, to hide it.

I don't buy that theory. Despite the crazed assertions of many reactionary nutters, Obama is not a Muslim, and certainly not a kill-crazy jihadist.

Nevertheless, something odd definitely was a-brewing in Pakistan back then. Ask yourself: Aside from jihadis, who else went to that part of the world in that era?

Forgive my putting the matter in pop cultural terms, but James Bond himself made the trip not many years later, in The Living Daylights. Bond was hardly a Muslim, now, was he? No. His journey was all part of the great game against the Russkies.

In previous posts, I have argued that young Barack Obama may have been inveigled into some rather Bondian adventuring. That scenario would explain, in part, the strange visit to Pakistani bigwig Soomro.

While in Karachi, Obama had stayed at the residence of his college friend, Hassan Chandio. In Jacobabad, he was the guest of Soomro family. Muhammadmian Soomro confirmed this information and said it was his first meeting with Obama.

"Yes, he had been our guest and spent three days in Jacobabad," he told The News. Soomro, presently in the US, his second home, said an American friend had told his father, Ahmadmian Soomro, about Obama's arrival in Pakistan and asked him to look after the American. Soomro's father was the deputy speaker of West Pakistan Assembly and had also later served in the Senate.

Ahmadmian Soomro had also served in banking industry and was considered a pioneer in cooperative banking. By the time Soomro's father had hosted Obama, he was only a college student who went to Pakistan on his way from Indonesia where his mother was working with the Ford Foundation's micro credit finance project. Also Obama's mother was a frequent traveller to Pakistan and according to Time Magazine, she had a little bit proficiency in speaking Urdu.

When Soomro was asked about the person who referred Obama to his father, he said he nowadays lived in some country in South America. He was, however, reluctant to disclose his identity, saying he will have to seek permission from that man before giving his profile.

Although, Obama has not disclosed his link with Soomro, he mentioned it during his canvassing campaign while talking to a Pakistani American, Shahid Ahmad Khan, member of Board of Trustees Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The mystery man who arranged the Soomro/Obama meeting sure smells like CIA to me. Your nostrils may work differently.

But why in hell would the Agency act on behalf of a feckless American college student? I mean, during my college days, I had plenty of feck, yet the intelligence community would never have introduced me to any foreign movers-n-shakers. Sniff.

And how the hell could Barack Obama -- allegedly penurious and wearing thrift store clothing -- afford such a trip?

And even if he scraped together the lolly by selling magazine subscriptions, why would a young American who had never seen the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre want to go to freaking Karachi?

In my previous posts, I have argued that Obama was recruited for this trip by a political science professor at Oxy. This prof had (and has) a CIA background, as well as close ties to Obama's political mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. At this point, of course, we can only guess as to what the purpose of the mission was. Presumably, the Agency had to deliver a message to Soomro -- a message that could not be entrusted to either phones or mail.

Ah, but why would this prof pick out young Barack Obama for this task, as opposed to one of his other students?

Passports.

As a former Indonesian citizen, young Barry probably possessed two passports. The Agency just loves people who have two. At that time, the Indonesian passport would have made travel to (and within) Pakistan much easier.

There's another reason why Obama may have been recruited. I have argued that Obama comes from a rather spooky family. As mentioned above, Stanley Ann Dunham, our current president's mother, also went to Pakistan -- for reasons that have no discernible link to her career path. She even learned Urdu. Why?

Certainly, Barack Obama Sr. -- an up-and-comer in a nation in danger of turning to the Soviet bloc -- was exactly the kind of person the CIA likes to keep an eye on. The Agency would have been seriously off its game if it had not noticed his liaison with Ann as they pursued left-wing studies in Hawaii.

Ann later married an Indonesian executive who was the liaison between the Mobil corporation and the dictator Suharto. The CIA had installed Suharto by way of a very bloody coup, in order to further Mobil's interests in Indonesia. Obama pretty much admits all of this -- including the CIA connection -- in Dreams From My Father, although he is suspiciously coy about admitting his stepfather's actual job.

Later still, Ann worked with the Ford Foundation, a very well-known cover for CIA personnel overseas. (See here.)

The evidence adds up. Of course, for a die-hard Obi fanatic, no amount of evidence will suffice, but many others will see the pattern. In short and in sum: I suspect (but cannot prove) that Ann was recruited by the Agency -- or rather, by one of our spy agencies -- and that her many overseas activities had a covert component.

She was spooky. And spookiness tends to run in the family.

Nota bene: Obama kept his hair-raising Pakistan adventure completely under wraps for many years. He never alluded to it in public. He wrote two autobiographies without once mentioning a dangerous trip to an exotic war zone -- a trip that most guys would consider rather thrilling and colorful.

Does that reticence strike you as odd? Sure strikes me as odd.

Even odder: One month after the passport scandal, Obama -- a propos de rien -- let slip that he had been to Pakistan.

Did he have reason to suspect that the fact would soon come out? Was he thinking "It's better if people hear about this from me first"?

Hm. Methinks I did add a little value to this story after all. Alas, I still have no theory of the Harris murder.

Spies, lies, Barry and his mom

The election is very near, and I see little reason to attempt to persuade anyone to vote for John McCain -- or, more properly, against Barack Obama -- since every reader has by now surely made a decision. In all likelihood, Obama will win. Even so, the closeness of the race remains risible, given the disaster of the Bush years.

I can live with the results, whatever those results may be. True, I had planned to compose an An die Schadenfreude in the event of a McCain win, but an Obama presidency will eventually grant us Puma-folk some lovely told ya so opportunities. Besides, Barack Obama has such a fascinating history that I now would prefer to keep him in the spotlight.

What I call "The 1981 mystery" (discussed here) seems the most promising area of research. Although the proposition that American intelligence recruited a young Barack Obama may seem absurd at first, this theory explains quite a few things.

(I don't see why Obama supporters should be afraid to track these clues. Who knows? The truth may work to his credit.)

For quite some time, this blog has asked questions about Barack Obama's charmed college years. Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard are all very expensive schools. How did he pay for his education, relocation, and living expenses? Loans could explain much of the story, though not all of it. Scholarships? He was, by all accounts, a less-than-diligent student, at least until Columbia.

His grandmother earned a decent living but was not wealthy. After Columbia, he took a $12,000 a year job as a community organizer, which indicates that he felt unpressured to repay loans.

How did he become President of the Harvard Law Review? Via a "writing contest," or so we are told, although Obama refuses to allow us a glance at the winning opus. He never wrote anything for publication during his Harvard period, although any truly ambitious law student would have done so. Obama defenders have argued that other Presidents also had a phobia for writing, but this is not true.

And how did this little-known, utterly unpublished "author" score a massive advance for the autobiographical Dreams From My Father? Nothing about the project indicated high sales -- in fact, Obama had only a hazy idea of what he wanted to write about, even after he cashed the check for his advance. Most tyro authors are very lucky to sell 5000 copies of a first book, and the writer gets maybe a buck a copy. Obama received enough money to maintain an office, to keep his family in comfort, and to finance a trip to Bali. And even under those luxurious circumstances, he missed the deadline by a wide mark. (Some believe that he used a ghostwriter; see also here.)

"The 1981 mystery" refers to Obama's earlier mystery trip to Pakistan and India. He went on this very expensive sojourn during the summer between Oxy and Columbia, at a time when he reportedly wore thrift store clothing. During his days at Occidental, Barack Obama apparently came to know a Political Science professor who was also a key CIA consultant on Soviet matters. He had also made the acquaintance of two Pakistanis from influential families.

At first, one might suppose that his rich friends paid for the journey, at least for the Pakistani portion. (He also went to visit his mother in Indonesia.) But other factors appear to have been in play. Forgive the self-quotation (and skim ahead if this stuff is familiar), but some of you may have missed the weekend postings:

1. In 1981, Pakistan was under martial law, and U.S. travel was discouraged or forbidden. At the very least, we can say that a trip to a strife-torn forbidden zone would have constituted quite an adventure for any young man. So why does Obama refuse to mention this adventure in his books?

Think about it: If you were writing an autobiographical work, wouldn't you want to fill it with dramatic incident?

2. At the time, the CIA was offering clandestine support to the anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, who counted Osama Bin Laden among their numbers. Much of this support effort was run through Pakistan, using cut-outs.

3. Obama may have held an Indonesian passport, due to his Indonesian stepfather. This factoid is of unhealthy interest to those rightwingers pushing the "Obama as Muslim" smear. I'm not interested in that nonsense. I am interested, however, in the suggestion that a student holding such a passport could get into places where most Americans could not easily go.

A CIA-linked professor would have immediately understood that such a passport offers very interesting possibilities. For obvious reasons, the Agency likes to recruit people who hold multiple passports.

All of which may seem like insufficient grounds for suspicion of an intelligence link. Recently, however, the current de facto Prime Minister of Pakistan, Muhammadmian Soomro, made a startling revelation:

While in Karachi, Obama had stayed at the residence of his college friend, Hassan Chandio. In Jacobabad, he was the guest of Soomro family. Muhammadmian Soomro confirmed this information and said it was his first meeting with Obama.

"Yes, he had been our guest and spent three days in Jacobabad," he told The News. Soomro, presently in the US, his second home, said an American friend had told his father, Ahmadmian Soomro, about Obama's arrival in Pakistan and asked him to look after the American. Soomro's father was the deputy speaker of West Pakistan Assembly and had also later served in the Senate.

Ahmadmian Soomro had also served in banking industry and was considered a pioneer in cooperative banking. By the time Soomro's father had hosted Obama, he was only a college student who went to Pakistan on his way from Indonesia where his mother was working with the Ford Foundation's micro credit finance project. Also Obama's mother was a frequent traveller to Pakistan and according to Time Magazine, she had a little bit proficiency in speaking Urdu.

When Soomro was asked about the person who referred Obama to his father, he said he nowadays lived in some country in South America. He was, however, reluctant to disclose his identity, saying he will have to seek permission from that man before giving his profile.

Although, Obama has not disclosed his link with Soomro, he mentioned it during his canvassing campaign while talking to a Pakistani American, Shahid Ahmad Khan, member of Board of Trustees Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

I cannot think of a reason for Soomro to lie about such a thing. Can you?

If we dismiss the idea that Obama was working on behalf of American intelligence, then why else would Soomro's mysterious American friend make sure that the young student came under the protection of one of Pakistan's most powerful families? Obama had met no member of the Soomro clan during his Oxy period.

In my previous piece, I suggested that the mystery American must have been CIA. On reflection, I must admit that he might have worked for the diplomatic corps. For all practical purposes, the end result would be the same. Roughly half the people in any given embassy are working for their home country's intelligence service.

In my opinon, the fact that Soomro considers America his "second home" tells us much.

Some of my readers have suggested that we should trace the "fingerprints of intelligence" to an earlier period. Perhaps this is a family affair. Perhaps Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, also worked for the Agency.

Her proclivity for foreign adventures and her talent for foreign languages certainly made her the sort of person the CIA loves to recruit. Some would argue that her left-wing political views mitigate against such employment. Her outward political stance may have been a cover -- at any rate, the Agency has managed to recruit some rather unlikely "helpers" over the years. (Timothy Leary once claimed that he was aided by a "liberal" faction of the CIA, which he considered "the best mafia" in the world.)

All of which leads me to ask: What was Ann Dunham doing in Pakistan prior to 1981? Why would she learn so obscure a language (to Americans) as Urdu?

Ann spent most of her time in Indonesia, where she was married to an executive with the American Mobil corporation. The CIA had, of course, played a key role in Indonesia's history. At least one Agency veteran of the time has said that "the CIA took it upon themselves to make, not just to enact, policy in this area." (Also see here and here.)

To make a long and very gruesome story far too short: Back in the 1960s, two oil companies linked with the Rockefeller dynasty -- Stanvac and Caltex -- felt that their investments in Indonesia were threatened by President Sukarno, who was considered soft on Communism. Stanvac, for our purposes, is simply another name for Mobil.

To protect American business interests, the CIA engineered a coup in Indonesia in the 1965-67 period, which led to one of the most appalling episodes of mass murder in history. Over 500,000 people died in the resultant bloodbath, which ended with the installation of a CIA puppet named Suharto.

Lolo Sotero, Barack Obama's stepfather, was the key liaison between Mobil/Stanvac and the Suharto regime.

These events may now seem "long ago and far away" to many modern Democratic voters. But the situation was quite different in 1967, when Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro. An active leftist -- which Ann Dunham supposedly was -- with an interest in international affairs would have known all about the bloodbath. It was in the newspapers. Any true student radical would have refused to eat lunch with a Suharto/Mobil functionary.

And yet she married the man.

Does that seem likely to you?

Here's a question for those of you who dwell on the left: Can you recall any "socialist" of your acquaintance making such a match? If you are old enough to recall the student radicalism of that era, ask yourself: If a fellow activist had married a key functionary of a murderous, right-wing regime (Suharto has been rightly compared to Chile's Pinochet), would you not have felt just a little suspicious of that person's lefty bona fides? Wouldn't Ann's choice have set off your paranoia alarms?

There is reason to suspect that the Agency contacted (or at least kept an eye on) Ann during her marriage, if marriage it was, to Barack Obama Sr. See my earlier piece here.

Incidentally, one of the above links on Indonesia goes to a fine work by Lisa Pease -- who is now, I am sorry to say, a strong Obama supporter. (I met Lisa long ago, although she would not remember me.) Lisa, if you happen to read these words, let me ask this: What would you say about someone with Stanley Ann Dunham's history if her son had become the Republican presidential frontrunner? What conclusions would you reach? Be ruthlessly honest. How quick would you then be to rationalize away the connection between this "leftist" lady and the Suharto government?

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 Brzezinsky, 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!

The money: A spooky story

I'll be sad, but not too sad, if Obama wins the election, as he now seems likely to do (thanks to the ill-timed financial meltdown). On November 5, the fun starts.

A switch will flip -- listen closely and you'll hear the sound -- and the media will segue from Adoration Mode to Investigative Mode. The Kos Krowd expects America to be transformed into a Whole Foods Elysium, and when Obama does not give them what they want, all of those adoring progs will turn into outraged progs. The nation's citizenry may come to despise O almost as much it dislikes W.

The process of transforming Obama into Public Enemy #1 will take a couple of years, maybe more time, maybe less time. Our job will be to push things to the told ya so stage as soon as possible.

One way to accomplish that goal is to focus on the financing of the campaign now drawing to a close. The whole affair has stunk for a long time, yet few in the mainstream media have bothered to comment on the stench.

A friend once told me that he would watch in fascination, day after day, as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker grossly oversold time shares at their little holiday camp. My friend would pop open a beer and stare at the TV while while muttering: "Do they really think they can get away with this? In public?"

Eventually, a day of reckoning came for the Bakkers. Eventually, a day of reckoning will come for Obama.

If you want to hear a faint pre-echo of that day, visit Slate. Yes, I said Slate, the web outlet of the Messiah Supporting National Barack Company. The headline tells the story: "Yes, He Can: Barack Obama should be able to disclose his small-dollar donors pretty easily. Indeed he should -- but he won't do it, and his excuses for not doing it are even thinner than the Lightbringer's skin. Slate lists good reasons for making the list available:

Finally, making the list public would rebut McCain's broad and unsubstantiated claims that the list (and the huge sums of money it represents) is shot through with fraud.

Heh heh heh. And we know that those charges cannot possibly be true. Right? Because they are unsubstantiated. Right? If the Obama camp denies an accusation, then the accusation must not have any validity. Denial equals disproof, at least where the Lightbringer is concerned. Right? Right? [Whistles tunelessly] My. It sure is dark. Is that a graveyard we're passing...? [More whistling]

By this point, you've probably heard about the obviously fake names on the Obama donor list. The problem is massive:

Until very recently, the Obama campaign had no safeguards in its online fundraising Web site designed to weed out foreign donors. Instead, its operations appeared to be designed specifically to enhance the flow of illegal money....

In addition to the donations the campaign has disclosed, however, it has taken an unprecedented $218 million from donors whose names it is keeping secret, according to FEC spokesman Robert Biersack.

That money came from individuals who in theory never passed the threshold of $200, the limit the FEC set for public disclosure of a donor’s name and place of residence, so there is no way of knowing how much foreign money could be included in that amount.

Or see here:

You can contribute to Obama’s campaign via his Web site in amounts from $5 to $2,300, in each instance. There appear to be no sensible checks in the submission form, and there’s only a simple note at the bottom of the page that states that an individual can only contribute up to $2,300 per election and that the contribution made on the Web site page “is designated for the general election.”

But, this reminder is virtually meaningless since no wording on the Web site page states that donors must use their real names. Nor does the Obama donation page require that you confirm that you are using your real name.

In other words, in Barack Obama’s world, your decision to obey FEC (Federal Election Commission) laws is entirely voluntary.

If the money is funny, where is it coming from?

Most believe that laundered funds are pouring in from foreign sources. I posit that these donations are coming from wealthy "friends" who entered Obama's orbit when he was quite young.

When Obama went to Occidental College in Los Angeles (a private school for rich kids who don't have the grades for USC), he befriended several affluent foreign students, among them Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid. In 1981, as Obama made the transition from Occidental to the more prestigious Columbia, he celebrated by taking a long vacation in faraway lands -- specifically in Pakistan, where he visited with the families of Chandoo and Hamid.

No-one has any idea how Obama -- who claims to have been on food stamps not long before -- managed to afford such a trip. Here is a description of Obama during his Columbia period:

There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits - when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare.

How then, could he pay for that very expensive education at Columbia, not to mention a summer-long world-wide jaunt? (Oxy isn't cheap either.) After graduation, Obama took a $12,000 a year job as a Community Organizer. If he had relied on student loans to pay for Columbia and Oxy, how did he intend to pay back the money?

Strangely, Obama did not mention the Pakistan foray in either of his memoirs. When pressed, his campaign has offered these words of explanation:

In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary.

"Enhanced his foreign policy qualifications" seems a rather grandiose way to describe hanging out with a couple of party-hearty college buds. On the same trip, he also visited Hyderabad, India, home to another pal from Oxy, Vinai Thummalapally.

Oxy, in my view, holds the key to this mystery. During his time there, Obama appears to have made contact with a professor of Politics who was one of the CIA's chief experts on the Soviet Union. This same prof was also, I am told, an associate of Zbigniew Brzenzinski, later to become Obama's foreign policy mentor. (Zbig probably hooked up with Obama at Columbia.)

Could this spooked-up "educator" have paved the way for Obama's trip? Did something more than the travel bug prompt the journey?

It may seem, at first, quite absurd to speculate that the young Hawaii-born Oxy student had been recruited into the American intelligence apparat. The seeming absurdity of that idea lessens when we consider these factors:

1. In 1981, Pakistan was under martial law, and U.S. travel was discouraged or forbidden. At the very least, we can say that a trip to a strife-torn forbidden zone would have constituted quite an adventure for any young man. So why does Obama refuse to mention this adventure in his books?

Think about it: If you were writing an autobiographical work, wouldn't you want to fill it with dramatic incident?

2. At the time, the CIA was offering clandestine support to the anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, who counted Osama Bin Laden among their numbers. Much of this support effort was run through Pakistan, using cut-outs.

3. Obama may have held an Indonesian passport, due to his Indonesian stepfather. This factoid is of unhealthy interest to those rightwingers pushing the "Obama as Muslim" smear. I'm not interested in that nonsense. I am interested, however, in the suggestion that a student holding such a passport could get into places where most Americans could not easily go.

A CIA-linked professor would have immediately understood that such a passport offers very interesting possibilities. For obvious reasons, the Agency likes to recruit people who hold multiple passports.

4. According to this right-wing-site,

One of Obama’s hosts in Pakistan is Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama’s senior by 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician, who later becomes interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf resigns in August of 2008. Soomro states that “someone” personally requested that he “watch over” Barack Obama, but Soomro will not name that individual - who today allegedly lives in South America.

It is unknown who financed Obama’s costly 1981 trip.

We have a bit more information from a Pakistani journal, here:

Soomro, presently in the US, his second home, said an American friend had told his father, Ahmadmian Soomro, about Obama's arrival in Pakistan and asked him to look after the American. Soomro's father was the deputy speaker of West Pakistan Assembly and had also later served in the Senate.

Ahmadmian Soomro had also served in banking industry and was considered a pioneer in cooperative banking. By the time Soomro's father had hosted Obama, he was only a college student who went to Pakistan on his way from Indonesia where his mother was working with the Ford Foundation's micro credit finance project. Also Obama's mother was a frequent traveller to Pakistan and according to Time Magazine, she had a little bit proficiency in speaking Urdu.

When Soomro was asked about the person who referred Obama to his father, he said he nowadays lived in some country in South America. He was, however, reluctant to disclose his identity, saying he will have to seek permission from that man before giving his profile.

So Obama's babysitter was "American" -- and, very likely, CIA. If you think that's a presumption, then I must ask you to consider the profile: This mysterious "American" was in Pakistan at a time when the country was off limits, he had befriended a powerful individual, he was later posted to South America, and Soomro now hesitates to mention the man's name. That resume seems very spooky to me -- and I'm not saying that simply because I write on Halloween.

Soomro comes from a famed political family in Sindh. (Chandoo is another Sindhi name.) Soomro has worked for a number of important banks in the Islamic world (including the National Bank of Pakistan, Faysal Islamic Bank of Bahrain and the Muslim Commercial Bank) and for the Bank of America.

Until 1981, the Bank of America partly owned the notorious BCCI, a money launderer's haven founded in Pakistan. American intelligence used BCCI as a conduit for funding the Afghan mujahadeen. However, I do not yet know precisely when Soomro worked for B of A, and thus cannot claim that he has a BCCI background.

Chandoo is now a financial consultant in New York. Hamid works for Pepsi. Both are major donors to the Obama campaign, and Chandoo has been identified as a "bundler" and fundraiser.

I am not painting a grand conspiratorial tableau here; we lack sufficient data. For now, I note only that whatever the apparently ill-to-do Obama was getting up to in 1981, it brought him into contact with the worlds of big money and, yes, international intrigue.

Is it too much to posit that the people he came to know then may be helping him today? Will these connections to the powerful sons of Sindh cause Obama one day to say "Peccavi"?

I have no doubt that many will scoff at me for bringing up these links -- now. Eventually, the scoffing will stop, and the digging will start. In this post, I have listed several places where you may want to begin the process of turning over the topsoil. I will soon list others.

"The name's Obama -- BARACK Obama."

Of all the outside-the mainstream notions I've posited on this blog, the one that annoys the most people is my suggestion that the CIA recruited young Barack Obama during his days at Occidental College. I would further suggest that the Agency link runs in the family. I believe that, at an earlier time, the Agency (or some other branch of the intelligence community) may have recruited his mother, Ann Dunham.

For earlier posts in this series -- may I call it a series? -- see here, here, here and here.

And now we have this intriguing shard of additional data:



The eye-opener here concerns Obama's first job out of college. He was recruited by Business International Corporation, accused of functioning as a CIA front company.

You don't have to take the word of John Pilger, the man in the video. Here's Wikipedia:

The company has been identified as cover organization for the Central Intelligence Agency, e.g. see Lobster Magazine, issue 14 in 1987. According to a lengthy article in the New York Times in 1977, the co-founder of the company told the newspaper that "Eldridge Haynes [the other founder] had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960".

I see no reason to presume that the CIA/BIC relationship ended in 1960. Lobster is a quirky but reliable publication.

William Blum, a left-wing CIA expert, made the same catch:

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.

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.

Obama's bios are as important for what they leave out as for what they reveal. I first became suspicious of his now-infamous trip to Pakistan (which he took in the summer between Occidental and Columbia) because he refused to mention this adventure in his books.

Think of it: We are talking about a man who compiled not one but two autobiographical works before the age of 46. We are talking about an ambitious politician intent on establishing his foreign policy cred. Yet he refused to mention a dangerous trip to Pakistan which he made at a time when travel to that country was discouraged by the State Department. That country was then the focus of the CIA's largest covert operation, the supplying of the Afghan mujahadeen. While there, this callow college kid met with one of the most powerful men in Pakistan -- a meeting arranged by an unnamed personage with the American Embassy. (Spook-watchers know what that means.)

If the trip was a pleasure jaunt, why did Obama keep it a secret? And how did he pay for the journey?

This site encapsulates a series of points which I had earlier made at greater length:

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. . . .

Like mother, like son. Ann worked for at least two organizations notorious for providing CIA cover. Barack went straight from college to an organization known to provide CIA cover. Coincidence?

Let's put it this way: How often do such things happen in your family?

Supposedly, Ann was a leftist. Yet she married Lolo Sotero, a key intermediary between the American oil companies and Indonesian strongman Suharto, installed by the CIA in an extremely bloody coup. (Obama admits the CIA connection in his book.) No genuine lefty would have had anything to do with Suharto or his cronies.

I do not claim to have conclusive evidence. Then again, one must ask: When we try to sort out who's who and what's what in the clandestine world, what constitutes hard evidence? If you are emotionally invested in Obama, then no amount of proof will ever suffice -- except, perhaps, for a signed note by CIA director Panetta, saying "Yes, he worked for us."

The oval office as a covert op

I had hoped to leave the previous post up throughout the day. People need an alternative to all the 9/11 talk. But a couple of readers have asked for my response to a strange article by David Ignatius, in the Washington Post.

Basically, Ignatius compares Obama to a CIA operative in such a heavy-handed fashion that even the least paranoid among us must wonder: "Is Ignatius indulging in metaphor -- or is he giving us something more than metaphor?"

Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving “mission accomplished” speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in “Dreams From My Father,” you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.

Not exactly subtle, is it? One blogger was pissed off by this column...

David Ignatius is screwing the President in public, serving as a proxy for the covert world that has been intimidating the Presidents and his staff since he entered on duty. All of the above is a a fabrication, and Ignatius, in serving up this blatant misinformation (a covert action in and of itself) is in violation of the law.

This blogger goes by the name of Marcus Aurelius, a name previously unfamiliar to me (unless we're talking about the Roman emperor). He links to earlier posts which, in his view, prove that Obama has had a hostile relationship with spook-world.

This piece deals with  Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., of UC Berkeley, who was part of Obama's transition team. Edley made a startling comment on the oft-debated topic of why Obama did not prosecute Bush or Cheney.

President-Elect Obama’s advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would oust him in a coup and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama’s top transition advisers.

Here's the original Op-Ed news piece featuring Edley. It was published just a few days ago.

Edley responded to my request for additional information by providing a description of the transition team's fears. Edley said that transition officials, not Obama, agreed that he faced the possibility of a "revolt."

Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he'd been party to very high level discussions during Obama's transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they've done anyhow).

Details, please. Is Edley offering opinion or something more substantive? Who told him what, exactly?

Later, we learn this:

I never discussed these matters with the President Elect; the summary offered by one of the senior national security folks was, "We don't want to engage in a witch hunt..."

"We don't want to engage in a witch hunt" is very different from "We're scared of getting whacked." So which is it?

How much of an "insider" could Edley have been, anyways? It's not as though he's in the administration right now. He did not talk to Obama directly on this topic; Obama himself never said anything about fear of a revolt. And did anyone, back in 2009, seriously believe that the Republicans would have reacted to the election of a Democrat (any Democrat) any differently than the way they did act?

As for a military/intelligence revolt -- come on. Seriously, what could they have done? They don't go for the Dallas option these days. Besides, there were plenty of people in the intel community who were pissed off at Bush and Cheney; the Agency got treated like crap under Dubya.

Of course, there is a revolt underway right now. This revolt is led by the Koch brothers, Fox News and all the usual suspects. But that rebellion is not what Edley seems to be talking about.

In sum, I don't think that anything Edley has to say debunks anything that David Ignatius has to say.

You probably already know what I have to say: Obama's whole history -- and his family's history -- is spookier than a gothic novel.

My main earlier posts on this topic are here and here and here and here.

(Since I wrote my earlier pieces on that theme, I've had a chance to glance through Janny Scott's A Singular Woman, a bio of Obama's mother. The book offers explanations for some of the anomalies surrounding the strange life of Stanley Ann Dunham, but hardly all. By all means, read that book -- but read cautiously.)
Here's a summary of the key points from my previous work:

In 1981, Obama was allegedly an ill-to-do student at Occidental University in L.A. Yet he chose to make a covert trip to Pakistan -- his first trip out of the country -- at a time when the place was under martial law; the State Department was advising Americans not to travel to that part of the world. Pakistan was, of course, a key part of the covert resupply effort for the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan.

There, a local "diplomat" at the U.S. embassy (obviously CIA) set up a meeting with one of the most powerful players in Pakistan -- Ahmadmian Soomro. We are given no explanation as to why a poor student would meet with the nation's most powerful banker and deputy speaker of the Assembly.

At Oxy, Obama took classes in politics, and one of his likely professors (whom I have never named) has a "former" CIA background. (With the CIA, you always have to put the "former" in quotes.) This man was also close to Zbigniew Brzezinski -- who later became a key adviser to and influence on Barack Obama.

At the time, young Obama had an Indonesian passport. It's known that the Agency likes to recruit young men with multiple passports, which can aid in plausible deniability. (For example: Obama's passport would not have a Pakistan stamp.)

Obama never seemed to have any trouble paying for his expensive university career. After college, he went to work for a firm which was later exposed as offering cover for CIA personnel oversees. 

His mother, Ann Dunham, had a remarkably spooky background, working for AID and the Ford Foundation, both well-known for offering cover for the CIA. Although an alleged leftist, she married a man who was the key liaison between Mobil oil and the CIA-installed Suharto regime, which came to power on the backs of some 500,000 corpses. I think it is fair to posit that no real leftist would even have lunch with a guy like that. (Ann made her own mystery trip to Pakistan in 1981 -- and was even learning Urdu!)

There's much, much more to be said on this topic, but I will let you discover it for yourself. Just click on the links given above.

The one factor that I find most telling is this: Barack Obama never mentioned the Pakistan trip (which must have been quite an adventure) in the two autobiographies who wrote before the age of 46. This, despite the fact that he was an ambitious fellow trying to establish his foreign policy credentials.

Come on. You gotta admit that that is weird. 

Wayne Madsen has taken my argument much further (without ever crediting me). But, as is always the case with Madsen, one never knows whether his unnamed sources are fictional.

Maybe David Ignatius could tell us whether I am on the right track...?

Young Obama in Pakistan: Bad paranoia and good paranoia

In previous episodes -- start here -- we discussed the outlandish theory that young Barack Obama's 1981 trip to Pakistan (then an international hotspot) had something to do with the CIA.

A ludicrous notion? Perhaps. But it has the virtue of explaining why Obama completely neglected to mention his only overseas trip in his two autobiographies, even though establishing his foreign policy credentials could only have helped him. My theory also explains why an unidentified official at the American embassy arranged for the then-unknown Obama to stay with Muhammadmian Soomro, who was arguably the most powerful mover-and-shaker in Pakistan. (That unnamed official stinks of Agency.) It also explains how the allegedly impoverished Obama managed to pay for the trip.

(You may also want to see this blogger's take.)

David Remnick has written a biography of our president called The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. When I belatedly gained access to this book, my first thought was to see what Remnick had to say about that enigmatic 1981 Pakistani vacay. Would this esteemed writer for The New Yorker and The Washington Post be able to explain the mysteries?

Here's what Remnick has to say about the trip, in toto:

In the summer of 1981, before arriving in New York, Obama traveled to Asia for three weeks, first to Pakistan to visit Chandoo and Hamid, and then to Indonesia to see his mother and Maya. "They took a trip in Pakistan together that Fox News tried to twist into something awful," Margot Mifflin said. In fact, the trip reacquainted Obama with some of the realities of the developing world. "When Obama came back," Mifflin said, "he said he'd been shocked by many things, but especially the poverty. When they rode through the countryside, he was amazed at how the peasants bowed to the landowners in respect as they passed. It blew his mind."

"It's true," Hamid said. "The trip gave him a grounding of sorts. To be exposed to a place like Pakistan as an adult, he saw how differently people live. He stayed with me and Hasan in Karachi, but he also wanted to get out in the countryside, and we went to rural Sindh, to the lands of a feudal landlord who was in school with me in high school and before. We went to this person's lands, where the feudal system is still strong. Barack could see how the owner lives and how the serfs and workers are so subservient.... Barack also met an individual there of African descent. Africans were brought to Pakistan years ago by the Arabs--part of the slave trade, though in another direction. And to see people like that was very striking for Barack. He sat across from him and, even though they didn't share a common language, they tried to communicate. It was a moment that stayed in his mind."

Obama spent much of his time in Pakistan with his friends' families--Chandoo's family is fairly wealthy, Hamid is upper-middle-class by Pakistani standards--but he also played basketball with kids in the street and explored the neighborhoods of Karachi during Ramadan. By talking with his friends, he got a deeper sense of the political and religious divisions of an infinitely complex political culture. "I am from the Sunni sect and Hasan from the Shia, so he learned a lot about the dialogue between the two," Hamid said.

Nothing here about Soomro. Nothing about that mysterious official at the embassy. Nothing about Obama's strange reluctance to mention this trip in his two books. Nothing about how he paid for this trip.

Remnick does, however, make a reference to Fox News. It is true that various right-wing pseudojournalists have offered twisted interpretations of the 1981 mystery. Basically, the wingnuts point to this trip as "evidence" favoring their absurd contention that Obama is a Muslim.

Not for the first or the last time, a really stupid right-wing conspiracy theory has scared reasonable people away from investigating what I consider a legitimate area of research. Maybe that's why these really stupid right-wing conspiracy theories receive so much publicity in the first place.

Cannon's law: Bad paranoia discredits good paranoia.

If we were to take a closer look at Mr. Remnick's career, would we be indulging in good paranoia or bad paranoia? I haven't yet studied the allegations made on this site -- but on first skim, I can't help noticing a reference to Remnick in connection with Steve Coll, who has also worked for the WP and The New Yorker. (Coll also appears to be an associate of Richard Perle.)

Though The New Yorker frequently publishes articles about MLB and the CIA, The New Yorker never connects the CIA to narcotrafficking or MLB. An unfortunate situation, both because The New Yorker is an intellectual publication with a large audience, and as it is one of the few “mainstream” publications left that writes anything critical about the CIA.

So who is Steve Coll, in addition to being an enemy of the people? He is a CIA Special Agent. And his editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, is fully aware of Mr. Coll's top level employer. So is CNN who like to invite Steve Coll on to preach his murderous CIA propaganda to the public at large, keeping Coll's real professional position cloaked behind the phony “New America Foundation” and “The New Yorker” cover stories.

Is there anything to this? The afore-linked site does seem a tad crankish. Then again, a few people have said as much about this site.

(Update: Make that more than a tad crankish. The place is run by YET ANOTHER 9/11 "CD" nut.)

Are we dealing with bad paranoia or good paranoia? Did Remnick intentionally ignore the key questions to arise out of the 1981 trip? It's your Coll.

Bin Laden, Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia, and John Brennan

On August 8, the New Yorker published a lengthy piece by Nicholas Schmidle which purported to tell the full story of the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden. This allegedly authoritative account made no reference the numerous published reports that Pakistan's military gave the Americans covert aid during this operation.

We've discussed Pakistan's hush-hush operational role in a couple of earlier posts; see, for example, here.

Schmidle, as noted in a previous post, is an interesting character in his own right.

His father is Robert E. "Rooster" Schmidle, Jr., "a former general in special operations and is now a Lt. General serving as deputy commander of Cyber Command." Schmidle the younger is funded by the Institute of Current World Affairs and New America Foundation, both long suspected of having intelligence links.

Not only does the NAF often host talks by former and currently serving CIA personnel (see also here), they are huge supporters of the drone attacks in Pakistan. NAF actually keeps tallies on every single drone attack and fatality.

Russ Baker takes a close look at both Schmidle and this very mysterious raid. (Fallout from the operation seems to have seriously wounded American/Pakistani relations, already rather iffy). Baker's piece is long, meaty, and definitely worth your while.

Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

...a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

Schmidle's primary source -- perhaps his only source -- was Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. (Obama was going to name Brennan director of the CIA, but dropped that plan due to controversy over Brennan's pro-torture public comments.)

As Baker documents, this same Brennan initially gave an account of the Bin Laden which differs in most details from the narrative now considered "authoritative."

Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated—and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.

Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist.

Was the Bin Laden raid an act of justice -- or was it undertaken to silence someone who knew too much?

According to Schmidle's piece, the decision to dump the body into the sea was not impromptu. Brennan came up with that plan before the raid, after consultation with the Saudis. Baker:

Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.

Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.

In a previous Cannonfire post (August 9, 2011), we discussed the Saudi link. That article cites a Firedoglake post written by a spooked up lady named R.J. Hillhouse, who confirms what we already knew from other sources -- that ISI worked closely with the Americans on the raid. (I find the Hillhouse account more persuasive than Schmidle's.)

Moreover,

Next they approached the chiefs of the Pakistani military and the ISI. The US was going to come in with or without them. The CIA offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse: they would double what the Saudis were paying them to keep bin Laden if they cooperated with the US. Or they could refuse the deal and live with the consequences: the Saudis would stop paying and there would be the international embarrassment...

So let's put it all together: The Saudis knew Bin Laden was in Pakistan (and probably knew the exact location). They paid the Pakistanis to keep him alive and comfortable. Apparently, the Americans found out about this arrangement and quietly pressured the Saudis to change their ways. Or -- and perhaps more likely -- Americans knew all along about Saudi Arabia's protection of Bin Laden. The Saudis accepted the American plan to kill Bin Laden because dead men tell no tales.

If so, then why did Obama make the sudden decision to kill Bin Laden? Perhaps the president simply wanted to shore up his sagging approval numbers.

Or perhaps Bin Laden was threatening to spill certain beans.

Let's take another look at John Brennan. In 2008, while serving as Obama's chief foreign policy and intelligence adviser, Brennan also headed up something called The Analysis Corporation. Some of you may recall that Brennan's company played a role in a passport scandal which briefly flared up at that time...

On Friday, the department revealed that Obama's passport file was improperly accessed three times this year, and the security of passport files of the two other major presidential candidates -- Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain -- had also been breached.

When this story broke, the Kos Krowd made an abortive and inane attempt to point fingers at Hillary. In fact, she had nothing to do with the matter. Brennan did. And that means Obama did.

Three contract employees are accused in the wrongdoing, including the one who works for Analysis Corp. and who was disciplined. That contract employee accessed McCain's file in addition to Obama's. None of the contract employees was identified.

The Washington Times, which broke the story Thursday night that Obama's records had been improperly accessed, reported Saturday that the State Department inquiry is focusing on the Analysis Corp. employee.

The moment the evidence pointed toward Obama, the Kos Kids dropped the story. Alas, the damned birthers soon grabbed hold of the tale, rendering the whole matter toxic. Not for the first or last time, our nation's hordes of moronic right-wing conspiracy-mongers fulfilled their role of deflecting media attention away from an important investigation.

We're left with two questions:

1. What prompted this clandestine peek into those passport records? Personally, I have little doubt that Brennan directed the operation. (The Analysis Corporation pretty much is the CIA, operating under a very thin covering.) It's worth noting that, shortly before the passport imbroglio, the tale of Obama's mystery trip to Pakistan came out. As I've noted in previous posts, he probably made this trip with an Indonesian passport.

2. Why was a high-ranking career CIA guy such a close adviser to Barack Obama's campaign? When Brennan joined the team, Obama was a long shot; everyone considered Hillary a shoo-in.

Incidentally, The Analysis Corporation is now called Sotera Defense. Isn't that cute?

Added notes on "The name's Obama -- Barack Obama"

A few posts down, I once again discussed my pet theory that young Barack Obama had been recruited by the CIA, a theory which annoys some and intrigues others. (See, for example, the strange blog here.) One piece of evidence favoring this idea concerns Obama's post-college gig at Business International Corporation, a New York firm never named or accurately described in his book, Dreams From My Father. A number of sources have pegged BIC as a company which has provided cover for CIA operatives.

This New York Times story on Obama's New York period offers further insights. The story refers to a blog called Analyze This, maintained by one Dan Armstrong. Unfortunately, that blog has slipped the surly bonds of the internets. When blogs die, the corpse usually lingers online for a good long time -- but Analyze This, alas, has vanished entirely. A pity, that: I've heard that it contained some interesting comments by other BIC alumni.

As does this NPR story.

Armstrong said Obama's book exaggerates just how respectable Business International was, with its description of suits and ties and meetings with German bond traders. There was no dress code, Armstrong said. And there was nothing corporate about it.

"It was a company full of low-paid, hard-working, fun-loving young people," Armstrong said. "It wasn't part of a high-powered consulting or finance world. It was a little sweatshop."

The relevant section of Obama's book, and a counter-piece by Armstrong, can be found here. Obama portrayed the place as as a high-powered consulting house. Armstrong (who worked down the hall) replied:

First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.

Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.

I must confess: That does sound like a humdrum gig. Still, I wonder what life was like for the "country correspondents." I can easily see a CIA agent using that job title as cover.

Here's how Armstrong describes Obama's somewhat misleading account of his days at BIC:

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. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.

Obama left the job without having any other source of income lined up, and his reason for leaving -- guilt over not being true to himself -- strikes me as unconvincing.

If my pet theory has merit, then we may posit that Obama, having done a service for the Agency in Pakistan, was granted a temporary gig at a firm with which the Agency had good relations. In other words, someone was looking out for him.

And just who was the someone? Possibly Zbigniew Brzezinski: Obama was one of only seven students to study sovietology under Brzezinski at Columbia, or so it says here.

The previous post also noted that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, traveled the world while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women's World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. USAID is notorious for working with the CIA, as is the Ford Foundation. (For further background, see "The Ford Foundation and the CIA.") But what of the other two groups?

The Asian Development Bank, headquartered in the Philippines, is a financial institution ostensibly devoted to raising Asia's poor out of poverty. A laudable goal. Frankly, though, after reading this Wikipedia entry (which reads like ad copy), I'm still not sure how this organization does what it says it does.

Even the most laudable and respectable organization may still provide cover for CIA-linked individuals, and the Asian Development Bank may have done just that. So, at least, claims the venerable German "spook-watching" publication Geheim!. They published an Agee-like list of CIA personnel serving under various guises throughout the world, a list compiled, it seems, from previous issues of the magazine.

One alleged Agency-linked personage is "Cinnamon N. Dornsife" of the "Asian Development Bank - Manila." Her name is actually N. Cinnamon Dornsife, and she was the "U.S. Ambassdor" to the bank, or so it says here. (I didn't know that countries sent ambassadors to banks. One learns something new every day.) Her resume is here. She was graduated from SAIS, a CIA-linked institution, and then went on to work for six years in Indonesia.

I wonder if she knew Ann?

Women's World Banking provides microcredit financing to woman-owned businesses internationally -- a very commendable goal, to be sure. I've found nothing linking this group to spookery.

So what does it all mean? Perhaps nothing -- after all, many people have worked for BIC, USAID, the Ford Foundation and Asian Development Bank without having any connection to the intelligence community. There's a difference between providing cover for CIA personnel and functioning as a CIA front.

Still, both Barry and his mom have interesting employment histories. Once again, I have to ask: How often does this sort of thing happen in your family?

An added note to the added note: A rather full account of Ann's foreign adventures can be found in a Google machine translation of a piece originally published in an Indonesian blog. The title of the post googles into English as "During the Rose of Heaven All her life Doing Good So Much Amazing That Called Stanley Ann Dunham." I get the impression that the author may have a bias. At any rate, it turns out that her work for the Asian Development bank took her to Pakistan in 1986-87.

Still more on emailgate

Earlier today, I published a piece on emailgate, in answer to some nonsense spewed by Lord HA HA Goodman. My focus was on the Drumheller/Blumenthal angle, because that's the stuff I've written about in the past, and because that was the topic of Lord HA HA's discourse. But those weren't the only  emails. Two interesting articles give us a wider view of this pseudoscandal.

Fox News gives us a scary headline: Despite Clinton claims, 2012 email had classified marking"

Ah. I hear a distant schwing: Did Lord HA HA suddenly become erect? (We've all noted that the BernieBots tend to get very excited about Hill-hate stories published by Fox and other right-wing sources.)

Alas, the body of the article is rather...deflating.

The “C” - which means it was marked classified at the confidential level - is in the left-hand-margin and relates to an April 2012 phone call with Malawi's first female president, Joyce Banda, who took power after the death of President Mutharika in 2012.

"(C) Purpose of Call: to offer condolences on the passing of President Mukharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in."

Oh....my...GOD.

Hillary, you...you FIEND! You dared to offer condolences regarding the passing of Malawi's president? That's kind of intel is TOP SEEKRIT ULTRA COSMIC GODHEAD! What's next, Hillary? Are you planning on handing the nuclear launch codes to Vladimir Putin?

Actually, confidential is the absolute lowest classification marking. A letter marked "confidential" can be sent via ordinary mail. Back in the pre-internet days, I had quite a few letters arrive in my mailbox "accidentally" opened (which was an all-too-common scenario among the politically active), so I feel confident in saying that Hillary's server was much safer than snail-mail.

From a distance, it seems possible that Clinton’s messages were more secure on her server than they would have been on the State Department’s servers, even if the latter were protected by a technically superior firewall. The State Department’s systems are reportedly regular targets of hackers. Few knew that Clinton used a personal server for business emails, so hacker attacks may have been far less common if they happened at all. Also hackers often gain access to systems by fooling users into downloading malicious programs or clicking on malicious web sites. Since few people had accounts that accessed Clinton’s servers, the chance that someone might inadvertently open a door to hackers is most likely much less. Finally, after a few months, transactions with Clinton’s servers were reportedly encrypted. Because of the difficulties posed by the need to accommodate different server and computer generations, the government has lagged behind the private sector in encryption.

Americans may rest easy tonight: Our nation's many enemies did not learn about Hillary's polite note to the president of Malawi. Frankly, I have no idea as to how or why a condolence message would receive any kind of classified marking -- the guidelines here indicate that the marking should be reserved for data of more weight.

Sorry, Lord HA HA, but I strongly doubt that Hillary is going to be indicted over a condolence message sent to the leader of Malawi -- a message that never deserved any kind of classification marking.

A more substantive story appeared in the Wall Street Journal. This article is not really about Hillary's private server, although careless readers may leap to that conclusion.

A paywall may prevent you from seeing the full text, so I will put it below the asterisks. But first, I'll give you the gist:

The CIA was droning "terrorists" willy-nilly, which pissed off certain Pakistani officials whose compliance was necessary to the program. So the State Department insisted on having a say in the process. But there was a communications problem: The more secure communication systems did not allow State Department officials outside of DC to talk to the folks at CIA in a timely fashion. (We're talking about a 20-30 minute time frame.) So some folks at State used the "low side" system, a less-secure way of sending messages. Naturally, they spoke in rather vague code words: "Ixnay on the Ombay," "cancel the candygram," that sort of thing.

I see no problem here.

Okay, I do have a fundamental problem with the entire drone program -- but that's a separate issue. I certainly favor having the CIA talk to the State Department before a strike. (And I'm kind of stunned to learn that they don't have a system in place that is both very secure and very rapid.)

As you skim the story below, please note the boldfaced paragraphs. There will be no indictment. They'd have to indict a whole bunch of other people at the DOD and the Justice Department, for they too traversed the low side.

It'll be very amusing to see the BernieBots claim that Hillary deserves indictment because she tried to keep tabs on the CIA. Come to think of it, Bernie's message has been pretty hilarious these past few weeks: "Vote for me, comrades! I'm more trustworthy with classified information! Venceremos!"

And now, here is the WSJ piece...

* * *

At the center of a criminal probe involving Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information is a series of emails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side’’—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs. Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said. Investigators have raised concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s personal server was less secure than State Department systems.

The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said.

The still-secret emails are a key part of the FBI investigation that has long dogged Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, these officials said.

They were written within the often-narrow time frame in which State Department officials had to decide whether or not to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger, the officials said.

Law-enforcement and intelligence officials said State Department deliberations about the covert CIA drone program should have been conducted over a more secure government computer system designed to handle classified information.

State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials. It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast and the U.S. diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

Emails sent over the low side sometimes were informal discussions that occurred in addition to more-formal notifications through secure communications, the officials said.

One such exchange came just before Christmas in 2011, when the U.S. ambassador sent a short, cryptic note to his boss indicating a drone strike was planned. That sparked a back-and-forth among Mrs. Clinton’s senior advisers over the next few days, in which it was clear they were having the discussions in part because people were away from their offices for the holiday and didn’t have access to a classified computer, officials said.

The CIA drone campaign, though widely reported in Pakistan, is treated as secret by the U.S. government. Under strict U.S. classification rules, U.S. officials have been barred from discussing strikes publicly and even privately outside of secure communications systems.

The State Department said in January that 22 emails on Mrs. Clinton’s personal server at her home have been judged to contain top-secret information and aren’t being publicly released. Many of them dealt with whether diplomats concurred or not with the CIA drone strikes, congressional and law-enforcement officials said.

Several law-enforcement officials said they don’t expect any criminal charges to be filed as a result of the investigation, although a final review of the evidence will be made only after an expected FBI interview with Mrs. Clinton this summer.

One reason is that government workers at several agencies, including the departments of Defense, Justice and State, have occasionally resorted to the low-side system to give each other notice about sensitive but fast-moving events, according to one law-enforcement official.

When Mrs. Clinton has been asked about the possibility of being criminally charged over the email issue, she has repeatedly said “that is not going to happen.’’ She has said it was a mistake to use a personal server for email but it was a decision she made as a matter of convenience.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said: “If these officials’ descriptions are true, these emails were originated by career diplomats, and the sending of these types of emails was widespread within the government.”

U.S. officials said there is no evidence Pakistani intelligence officials intercepted any of the low-side State Department emails or used them to protect militants.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the agency “is not going to speak to the content of documents, nor would we speak to any ongoing review.’’

The email issue has dogged Mrs. Clinton for more than a year. Despite her success in nailing down the Democratic presidential nomination, polls show many voters continue to doubt her truthfulness and integrity. Her campaign manager has acknowledged the email matter has hurt her.

Republican rival Donald Trump has attacked Mrs. Clinton repeatedly on the issue, calling her “Crooked Hillary,’’ saying what she did was a crime and suggesting the Justice Department would let her off because it is run by Democrats.

Beyond the campaign implications, the investigation exposes the latest chapter in a power struggle that pits the enforcers of strict secrecy, including the FBI and CIA, against some officials at the State Department and other agencies who want a greater voice in the use of covert lethal force around the globe, because of the impact it has on broader U.S. policy goals.

In the case of Pakistan, U.S. diplomats found themselves in a difficult position.

Despite being treated as top secret by the CIA, the drone program has long been in the public domain in Pakistan. Television stations there go live with reports of each strike, undermining U.S. efforts to foster goodwill and cooperation against militants through billions of dollars in American aid.

Pakistani officials, while publicly opposing the drone program, secretly consented to the CIA campaign by clearing airspace in the militant-dense tribal areas along the Afghan border, according to former U.S. and Pakistani officials.

CIA and White House officials credit a sharp ramp-up in drone strikes early in Mr. Obama’s presidency with battering al Qaeda’s leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas and helping protect U.S. forces next door in Afghanistan. Targets have also included some of the Pakistan government’s militant enemies.

In 2011, Pakistani officials began to push back in private against the drone program, raising questions for the U.S. over the extent to which the program still had their consent.

U.S. diplomats warned the CIA and White House they risked losing access to Pakistan’s airspace unless more discretion was shown, said current and former officials. Within the administration, State Department and military officials argued that the CIA needed to be more “judicious” about when strikes were launched. They weren’t challenging the spy agency’s specific choice of targets, but mainly the timing of strikes.

The CIA initially chafed at the idea of giving the State Department more of a voice in the process. Under a compromise reached around the year 2011, CIA officers would notify their embassy counterparts in Islamabad when a strike in Pakistan was planned, so then-U.S. ambassador Cameron Munter or another senior diplomat could decide whether to “concur” or “non-concur.” Mr. Munter declined to comment.

Diplomats in Islamabad would communicate the decision to their superiors in Washington. A main purpose was to give then-Secretary of State Clinton and her top aides a chance to consider whether she wanted to weigh in with the CIA director about a planned strike.

With the compromise, State Department-CIA tensions began to subside. Only once or twice during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State did U.S. diplomats object to a planned CIA strike, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials familiar with the emails.

U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and Washington usually relayed and discussed their concur or non-concur decisions via the State Department’s more-secure messaging system. But about a half-dozen times, when they were away from more-secure equipment, they improvised by sending emails on their smartphones about whether they backed an impending strike or not, the officials said.

The time available to the State Department to weigh in on a planned strike varied widely, from several days to as little as 20 or 30 minutes. “If a strike was imminent, it was futile to use the high side, which no one would see for seven hours,” said one official.

Adding to those communications hurdles, U.S. intelligence officials privately objected to the State Department even using its high-side system. They wanted diplomats to use a still-more-secure system called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Community Systems, or JWICs. State Department officials don’t have ready access to that system, even in Washington. If drone-strike decisions were needed quickly, it wouldn’t be an option, officials said.

Some officials chafed at pressure to send internal deliberations through intelligence channels, since they were discussing whether to push back against the CIA, congressional officials said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the State Department-CIA tug-of-war over the drone program in 2011.

Under pressure to address critics abroad, Mr. Obama pledged to increase the transparency of drone operations by shifting, as much as possible, control of drone programs around the world to the U.S. military instead of the CIA. An exception was made for Pakistan.

But even in Pakistan, Mr. Obama recently signaled a shift. The drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour last month was conducted by the military, not the CIA, and the outcome was disclosed.

While the CIA still controls drones over the tribal areas of Pakistan near Afghanistan, the pace of strikes has declined dramatically in recent years. U.S. officials say there are fewer al Qaeda targets there now that the CIA can find.