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!