Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Raymond Ibrahim: Europe Welcomes It's Historic Enemy (Islam) with Open Arms

From RaymondIbrahim.com: This is a brief video interview of Raymond Ibrahim at Emerald Robinson found here (only 10 minutes total). Raymond Ibrahim begins speaking at the 4:55 mark, but the entire video is worth a look. 




Monday, February 26, 2024

Putin was Correct: NYT Confirms CIA Built "12 Secret Spy Bases" In Ukraine & Waged Shadow War For Last Decade

From ZeroHedge:

On Sunday The New York Times published an explosive and very belated full admission that US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making, but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago.

Among the biggest revelations is that the program was established a decade ago and spans three different American presidents. The Times says the CIA program to modernize Ukraine's intelligence services has "transformed" the former Soviet state and its capabilities into "Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today."

This has included the agency having secretly trained and equipped Ukrainian intelligence officers spanning back to just after the 2014 Maidan coup events, as well constructing a network of 12 secret bases along the Russian borderwork which began eight years ago. These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders' communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory

This means that with the disclosure of the longtime "closely guarded secret" the world just got a big step closer to WW3, given it means the CIA is largely responsible for the effectiveness of the recent spate of attacks which have included direct drone hits on key oil refineries and energy infrastructure. 

"Without them [the CIA and elite commandoes it's trained], there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them," according to Ivan Bakanov, former head of the SBU, which is Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency.

A main source of the NYT revelationsdisclosures which might come as no surprise to those never willing to so easily swallow the mainstream 'official' narrative of eventsis identified as a top intelligence commander named Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy.

Clearly, Kiev and Washington now want the world to know of the deep intelligence relationship they tried to conceal for over the past decade. It is perhaps a kind of warning to Moscow at a moment Ukraine's forces are in retreat: the US is fighting hand in glove with the Ukrainians. And yet the revelations contained in the NY Times report also confirm what President Putin has precisely accused Washington of all along.

While the lengthy NYT report is full of fresh revelations and confirmation of just how deeply the CIA has always been involved in Ukraine, below are seven of the biggest contained in the story...

Description of secret spy bunker

The report contains a surprisingly detailed description of one of the 'secret' underground command centers established by the CIA near the Russian border... location undisclosed of course:

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.

The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.

There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the CIA.

Elite commando force

Within two years after the 2014 West-backed coup in Ukraine, the CIA had set up a training program for elite Ukrainian operatives:

Around 2016, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)

And the CIA also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.

Ukraine transformed into an "intelligence-gathering hub"

The US intelligence network in Ukraine (which is tantamount to NATO intelligence network too) has in reality been more extensive than pretty much all prior media speculation has envisioned. Ukraine has long been a massive "intelligence gathering hub" for Washington and its partners:

In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kyiv, Ukraine, could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.

Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back.

Huge NYT admission that Putin was basically right

Below is a hugely ironic excerpt from the Times report. The section begins by noting that Putin has repeatedly blamed the US-NATO for expanding its military and intelligence infrastructure into Ukraine. Not only had this precisely been going on for the past decade, as is now being admitted, but was presented by the Kremlin as a key cause of the Russian invasion of Feb.24, 2022. Putin and his officials were adamant on the eve of the invasion that NATO was militarizing Ukraine. The Times appears to now fully admit that, yes - this was actually the case: 

Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.

Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

...U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the CIA and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the CIA’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.

2014 Coup... and Crimea

The report indirectly references this very critical period which set Ukraine and Russian on their tragic collision course: 

With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John Brennan, then the director of the CIA. He told Nalyvaichenko that the CIA was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

To the CIA, the unknown question was how long Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. The CIA had been burned before in Ukraine.

...The result was a delicate balancing act. The CIA was supposed to strengthen Ukraine’s intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership.

Operation Goldfish

Money and advanced tech given by the CIA has allowed the Ukrainians to establish eavesdropping operations far beyond what they would otherwise be capable of. All the while, elite commando teams were being trained by the CIA in European cities as part of a program called 'Operation Goldfish'. The NYT reporting includes a bit of a 'boast' of the Ukrainians now being able to hack into Russian military networks: 

In the bunker, Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the CIA. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications networks.

“This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,” Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.

...The CIA began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.

A stunning admission: "Tiptoeing Around Trump"

Among the most interesting and curious moments of the NYT report is a description of the CIA program's expanse under the Trump administration. The report suggests that the true scope may have even been hidden from Trump. The Russian hawks in his administration quietly did the 'dirty work', we are told: 

The election of Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their CIA partners on edge.

Trump praised Putin and dismissed Russia’s role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate his Democratic rival, Biden, resulting in Trump’s first impeachment.

The report then emphasizes, "But whatever Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as CIA director and John Bolton as national security adviser. And further, "They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases." Given the attempt to place Trump in a negative light (he had to be 'tiptoed around'...), it will be interesting to see how he and his campaign respond to

the report. But more consequential will be the reaction of Putin and the Kremlin in the coming days.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Armstrong: Push to Start World War III Now Underway Before 2024 Election

Hat/tip to Martin Armstrong's private blog (which I subscribe and recommend to you as well)

 

Ukraine will have right to strike with F-16s on legitimate targets in Russia - NATO chief

From MSN

Ukrainian pilots of F-16 fighter jets will have the right to strike legitimate military targets in Russia, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

When asked when Ukraine would be able to deploy the F-16s, Stoltenberg said it was impossible to say.

He confirmed that all of Ukraine's allies want the fighter jets to be in Ukraine as soon as possible, but noted that the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if the pilots are well trained and the crews and other support personnel are well prepared.

"So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and delivering the F-16s. The sooner the better," he said.

According to Stoltenberg, each ally will decide for itself whether to supply F-16s to Ukraine, and the allies have different policies.

But at the same time, the Secretary-General noted, the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Kyiv has the right to self-defense, including strikes on legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

F-16s for Ukraine

Last August, the Netherlands and Denmark promised to provide Ukraine with 61 American-made F-16 fighter jets.

Recently, it became known that the Netherlands planned to prepare six additional F-16s for Ukraine. Ukrainian pilots are being trained in Denmark and the United States.

Earlier, CNN reported that the first group of Ukrainian pilots, consisting of four people, will complete the F-16 training program by the summer of 2024.

Vladimir Putin's ally warns 'masks have been dropped' as he issues WW3 threat

By Ewan Gleadow & John O'sullivan at Newsbreak (originally Irish Star)

Alexander Lukashenko, a close friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin, has warned that the West is on the " edge of the abyss " of World War Three. The Belarusian President voiced his "legitimate concerns" about the possibility of a global conflict and accused the West of fuelling war tensions and pushing the world towards disaster.

"We are literally covered with an information wave of the so-called premonition of the third world war, which just a lazy one still hasn't mentioned. And there are grounds for these fears," Lukashenko said, according to Sky News.

Speaking about the tension between East and West, Lukashenko added: "The masks have been completely dropped."

World leaders and military experts had previously worried that the dictator would invade countries like Poland after he launched his full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022. However, Lukashenko called it "complete stupidity" to think Russia was planning to attack the Baltic countries.

Lukashenko's comments come as he announced his military had received a new batch of weapons. This included two anti-aircraft missile divisions and two divisions of Iskander-M missile systems, which are made and deployed by the Russian military.

Estonia's Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, has announced that the country has successfully stopped a "hybrid operation" by Russian operatives on NATO territory. This news comes just a day after reports of Russian security services attempting to encroach on Estonian land.

Kallas took to social media to share: "Estonia has successfully stopped a hybrid operation by Russia's security services on our territory. We know the Kremlin is targeting all of our democratic societies. Our answer: be open and reveal their methods. This is the way to deter harmful actions and make us resilient."

Local media have suggested that this incident may be linked to an attack on an Estonian minister's car last year, believed to have been carried out by Russian special services.

PJW: Our 'Diversity' Bullshit is Out of Control

Some comments on YouTube:

@Safe-and-effective

"There is no anti-white, anti-West, anti-Christian agenda" is my favorite conspiracy theory.

@ClownHunt69

If the British soldiers of WWII could foresee what their country would become, they wouldn’t have put a single foot on that beach.

@ngashjr

I'm an African and I'm fed up with this nonsense. We had our own kingdoms, chieftains, people, legend, myths, fables... And such a beautiful history but these fools would rather blackwash other people's history.

@psychedelicvoyager9331

Being Scottish, i am ashamed of what we are allowing happen in our country.

@Salvidrummer

Im Hispanic and im so fed up with the whole "Diversity" and Anti-white crap.

@larsliamvilhelm

Proud of my Germanic Scandinavian heritage, and we owe it to our ancestors to put an end to this.

@joey86bu1

Pattern recognition is antisemitic. Logic is racist. Incompetence is our strength. Diversity is unity.

@nicholaslynch522

I'm so sick of forced diversity. I'm white and so proud to be part of the best race!

@davidnierzwick2775

So proud to be White! Civil, law abiding, and creative.

@leighprice-4911

I'm White and I'm proud.

@BingoBet-It-AllBeaver

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

@falstaff9716

No sense in sending your kid to school if you have to spend an hour or two de-programming them every night. Buy hard copies of old textbooks and classic books -- and hide them.

@Stew282

How is painting the entire world black 'diverse'?

@AmsterdamHeavy

"I understand youre looking for a picture of a white family. However I am unable to generate images for prompts that could be construed as discriminatory or offensive." The agenda is very, VERY clear.

@BlackfailureWhiteguilt

2 days ago

Just remember it’s okay to be white.

@twentysecondcenturywoman

This is done on purpose. The amount of damages colleges have done in the U.S., Canada, & Europe is unfathomable. If I had a business & was able to train people on the job, I wouldn’t hire a single soul that attended “higher education”.

@cindywho3581

“Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

@rockhead69

I'm white and my white heritage built America... I'm white and I stand tall looking down !

@brianlopez8855

1984 was literally correct. "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

@neogeo1670

seeing black vikings has to be one of the most racist thing ive seen against my culture

@domiy13

By this logic, we should claim that the Holocaust and Crusades were carried out by Black Hindu women. Because diverse representation is important.

@pimpslapization

Keep hard copies of books, all of them: math, science, literature etc.. We will need them to rebuild from the ashes in 15 years or so.

@masonjc8597

My nan was born in 1927 and travelled all over for her work and said she didn’t see a black man until the 1960s and they were not very common even decades later. So we are meant to believe that blacks were here as part of our population in the beginning then suddenly left and then came back in the 1980s until now. Laughable

@Kael89

I’m asian and I thank my white brothers and sisters for bringing christianity and all of its values in our country. They died for it so that we can hear about Christ and be able to know Him. The government and social reforms were just secondary to the wisdom of Christ.

@madeinfoxtrap5539

Netflix is now being sued for 2 Billion as a result of portraying Cleopatra as black

Friday, February 23, 2024

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Warns CPAC of 'Dark Forces' In Our Country

 Nayib Bukele took on the very dark forces in his country and won. This video is worth a listen. Turn on the subtitles in English as the audio is ok, but not great.



 

 

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

T.L. Davis: They Really ARE that Evil

Guest Post by T.L. Davis (at Substack)


We have plenty of treason. It isn’t hidden. It isn’t even debated. The fact of it is recognized, but what is lacking is a will to engage that treason with consequences. Who would do it? The average person on the street sees it, recognizes it as such, but they are and have been indoctrinated in the rule of law, so they expect that out of the hundreds of thousands employed in law enforcement that the law would be enforced. Why does that seem so irrational?

No one with a brain and the ability to do math believes that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Everything logical speaks against it. The rock-star-like reception Trump gets everywhere he goes and the sparse crowds that accompany Joe Biden make that narrative an obvious lie. No one has been willing to examine the votes taken or the illegality of the law changes at the last moment before the election (most of which required an alteration of the state constitution to change the law). They just don’t want to see it.

But the people know.

The border is not secure, despite the fact that the constitution promises us a republican form of government and protection against invasion. We have neither. The constitution provides for the president to faithfully execute the laws passed by congress. None of that is happening; he’s making laws with Executive Orders, preventing laws from being enforced and even when the Supreme Court orders him to enforce the laws, he refuses. Biden presides over a rogue government as few of his secretaries are following their charters and in most cases are acting in opposition to their charters.

The people know this, too.

For what purpose is there a congress and a judicial branch if they can and are systematically thwarted by a president who refuses to accept any limitations on his power? Who flaunts the law and the legal means of holding him and his administration accountable? The only way this is possible is with a wealth of media outlets and former officials who provide the political cover for it, who treat these actions as normal and acceptable. Most Americans don’t investigate the issues with enough effort to discover the truth by themselves.

The people know this, too, but it’s clouded behind false testimony and arrogant lies on the news channels.

Lives are being lost, industries destroyed and enemies given aid and comfort. Yet, no one will stand up against it and what few do find the courage are arrested, cancelled or killed. Everything that is unapproved of by the criminals acting with the power of government is punished severely.

Is this the America we will leave to all subsequent generations?

For three years the people of America have been subject to outlandish violations of law and the constitution. The system has had time to correct the malfeasance. It has had time to restore the order and replace those who have committed crimes while serving the people. There is no excuse for leaving the people in the lurch with no logical, reasonable or effective resort. This is a violation of trust, one that has the power to end the United States of America.

Around the world, the other nations, the ones who looked to America for inspiration and many who codified its principles of freedom into their laws stand in total revulsion as to how the American people have allowed this destruction to come to their nation.

Many in America feel the same way.

Elections used to be the means of turning the ship of state around, to go into a different and more beneficial direction. The people used to have some say, if not a great deal, often enough to let the natural inclination of the masses guide it away from the more disastrous of futures. It was this means that taught politicians how far they could go in any given direction, but the unwillingness to let the people speak through these elections means that there is no civilized way to change course.

That leaves only the uncivilized.

When the captain of a ship is clearly insane, or reckless, endangering the lives of the crew and indeed the ship they all need for survival, there are means of removing him from his position. There’s logic and reason, but when all else fails and the lives of the crew are at stake, only mutiny will suffice. It’s ugly and is fraught with danger, because, if unwarranted, it can lead to a death sentence, but someone has to utter the word, someone has to suggest the unthinkable to resolve a condition that is likewise unthinkable.

The trouble with America, right now, is that there is no more sane person to put in the captain’s chair [Doug here: TRUMP! with his warts and all; if he can avoid assassination or massive cheating]. There is no way to effect a mutiny when the officers are as insane and reckless as the captain. It’s as if everyone in charge of anything significant is infected with the same suicidal, destructive disease.

And, it’s the people who will pay, not only in the immediate, but in the future as well.

We are facing the end of the United States of America no matter what we do, or don’t do. The financial situation just got worse with the passage of the Continuing Resolution (CR) and only more inflation can come of it. There is no political will to stop the disastrous spending put into every congressional bill. The BRICs nations will benefit from this act, more aid and comfort to those trying to destroy the US, but the competing nations are doing so because they recognize the insanity that has gripped the officers of our ship of state. Those nations see as well as most citizens that the United States is acting in increasingly irrational and self-harmful ways, taking their investments down with it, so they’ve stopped buying our debt and started liquidating our bonds as a defensive measure against our recklessness.

Americans can not just continue to use the means and methods that have always worked before, they no longer work. Elections, legal action, petitions, protests and revolts have been hijacked, turned into criminal activities instead of political expressions of disapproval. That ensures the United States can do nothing other than collapse, taking all of us down into the dark, cold sea.

Unless the common sailors stand up and challenge not only the officers, but any in authority, they will go down with the ship. In this scenario, they will try to kill us all before we can do that, but they’re doing that just to get to some enormously stupid Net-Zero. They are that evil.

And when the historians are asked why a prosperous and largely peaceful nation like the United States failed and drifted into chaos and irrelevance, they can reply: They stopped being Americans.

'Barack Obama' Was Entirely a CIA Project: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA

From Covert Action Magazine: “A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA”

Despite his liberal pretensions, Obama’s foreign policy was dreamed up at Langley—which should not have been surprising given his background

[This essay is another in CAM’s series on the history of the CIA. Obama has been in the news this week for overseeing groundbreaking on his presidential center. This center has sparked controversy because it will not house any actual documents and is being built on the supposedly protected Jackson Park on Chicago’s southern lakefront. Hugh Iglarsh wrote in Counterpunch that the main tower—which resembles a giant upraised cell phone—will be “a Great Tower of Nothing, a monument to hubris, chutzpah and Chicago-style clout…which rivals the Pyramid of Khufu in its brutal, enigmatic grandiosity.“—Editors]

In the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other U.S. agencies to support rebels in Syria seeking to oust Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad—a nationalist who had allied with Iran and stood up to U.S. proxy Israel.[1]

Costing more than $1 billion, Operation Timber Sycamore evolved into the largest covert operation since the arming of mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

U.S. Special Forces under Timber Sycamore again trained Islamic fundamentalists, this time in Jordan, who again carried out a reign of terror.[2]


U.S. Special Forces operative training Syrian fighter at terrorist training camp financed by the Obama administration in Jordan. [Source: worldinwar.eu]

A voracious consumer of intelligence, Obama’s trademark throughout his presidency was to move war into the shadows, a light-footprint approach designed to expand U.S. power covertly.

General Joseph Votel, head of the special operations command (SOCOM) characterized the Obama era as a “golden age for special operations.” Green Berets were deployed to 133 countries—70 percent of the world—in 2014 alone.[3]

In a meeting about Afghanistan, Obama told CIA Director Leon Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted.”[4]

The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”[5] an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”[6]


President Barack Obama with John Brennan in the Oval Office, May 1, 2009. [Source: politico.com]
  

Source: thebureauinvestigates.com]

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.



[Source: thebureauinvestigates.com]

The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.


[Source: courant.com]

Additionally, the Obama administration a) protected longtime CIA assets from prosecution, like Rwandan mass murderer Paul Kagame; b) waged war by proxy in Yemen through the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to which it sold nearly $27 billion worth of arms; c) provided weapons to drug cartels in Mexico under the Operation Fast and the Furious while ramping up the War on Drugs through the Plan Mérida; and d) oversaw establishment of a clandestine arms pipeline from Libya to Syria by Ambassador Chris Stevens as part of Operation Timber Sycamore.[7]

Obama and Rwandan President Paul Kagame who killed three heads of state and whose forces ran open air crematoria to more efficiently dispose of the bodies in the Rwandan killing fields. [Source: chimpreports.com]
  
Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi in 2011 before he was killed by terrorists. Described as having a “talent for breaking bread with men in camouflage fatigues,” Stevens oversaw an illegal arms pipeline from Libya to Syria as part of Operation Timber Sycamore designed to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. [Source: timesofisrael.com] 
Obama shakes hands with the “butcher of Eastern Ukraine,” Petro Poroshenko, who gained power after an Obama administration backed coup in Ukraine. [Source: bbc.com]

CIA Family Connection—Ann Dunham

Obama’s record as president should not have been surprising given his family background.

His mother, Ann Dunham, worked for U.S. government agencies and allied NGOs—the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives Inc., and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—in Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s as well as Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.

Ann had training in the Russian language which, with everything combined, made her a “CIA recruiter’s wet dream.”[8]

The microfinancing projects that she worked on to help turn traditional craft industries into sustainable businesses were designed to “tether third world masses to the mentality of finance capitalism,” as Obama’s unauthorized biographer put it.


Ann Dunham at Borobudur in Indonesia in the early 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

Dunham’s boss at USAID in Indonesia, Dr. Donald Gordon Jr., author of Credit for Small Farmers in Developing Countries for USAID (1976), was identified in Julius Mader’s 1968 book, Who Who’s in the CIA, as a CIA agent.[9]

Peter Geithner [Source: findagrave.com]

Another boss, Peter Geithner, was future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s father.

Ann obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii, writing a thesis which argued that Indonesian villagers were dynamic and could produce greater wealth if they had access to market incentives and capital.

Ann went to Indonesia in the mid 1960s at the time that the CIA supported a military coup led by General Suharto against the left-wing regime of Sukarno.

Over two million suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were rounded up and massacred in its aftermath and thousands more were imprisoned—many for decades.


Indonesian leftists being sent to their deaths during mass pogroms supported by the U.S. [Source: timorarchives.wordpress.com]
Ann Dunham  [Source: voltairenet.org]

Much of Ann’s anthropological and consulting field work was carried out in East and Central Java, which provided a hotbed of support for the PKI—including among members of the Javanese women’s association and labor federation.

The CIA at this time employed anthropologists and development workers as undercover agents to gather information on villagers’ political affiliations, in which Ann, according to her thesis adviser, Alice Dewey, had taken an interest.

After her arrival in Indonesia, Dunham taught English at the American Embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra.

Dunham also worked for the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute in Jakarta, a suspected CIA front. One of her closest colleagues, Adi Sasono, had been the leader of the Muslim students during the overthrow of Sukarno. 


Ann in Indonesia in the later 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

While Ann’s recruitment as a CIA agent has never been openly acknowledged, she was among the few U.S. government employees with the language skills and access to fulfill this role effectively. Development projects in the region were explicitly designed to pry villagers away from the PKI orbit, and Ann’s work would have contributed to this.

In March 1965, Ann married an Indonesian Lieutenant Colonel, Lolo Soetoro, whom she met at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center, a “kinder, gentler version of the School of the Americas,” according to one writer, and “cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to create agent nets,” as U.S. Information Service (USIS) Director Frank Scotten described it.

[Source: flickr.com]

The head of the East-West Center in 1965 was Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia from 1958 to 1965.[10]

Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the PKI as an ally of China.

Howard P. Jones with Sukarno against whom the U.S. plotted. [Source: larouchepub.com]

Jones later defended the coup in The Washington Post, writing that Suharto was merely responding to a communist coup against Sukarno led by Colonel Untung—which was actually set up by the CIA.[11]

A friend of Ann’s told her biographer that the marriage to Lolo was arranged, suggesting that Ann may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets and help them obtain U.S. citizenship.

Lt. Col. Lolo Soetoro, left, with Ann Dunham, and Maya Soetoro, and Barack Obama, aged 6, in Indonesia in 1967. [Source: nytimes.com]

Hailing from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno’s land reform, Soetoro was recalled to active duty in July 1965 before General Suharto’s right-wing coup and worked as an army geographer in Java and Papua New Guinea, where the Indonesian army brutally suppressed popular revolts.

Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose economic policies Dunham praised.

CIA Family Connection—Stanley Armour Dunham


Ann Dunham with her father, Stanley, and her children, Maya and Barack. [Source: npr.org]  


Obama’s grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham—who helped raise him—served with the 9th Air Force Division in World War II.


Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during World War II. [Source: sfgate.com]

He was pictured in a military uniform with no insignia, which suggests an intelligence unit.

Another photo featured his daughter Ann, with the insignia of an elite school in Lebanon on her shirt in the 1950s, where Stanley may have worked with the CIA or another U.S. government agency.



Stanley Armour Dunham, center, with his wife Madelyn, right, in the early 1950s and young Ann. The insignia on Ann’s uniform reads NdJ which is thought to stand for College Notre-Dame de Jamhour, a private Jesuit Catholic French language school in Beirut—whose graduates included three former presidents of Lebanon—Amine Gemayel, Bashir Gemayel and Charles Helou who were all close to the U.S. [Source: algora.com]

In the early 1960s, Stanley Dunham was part of a group photo taken with Barack Obama, Sr., on his departure from the University of Hawaii.

Obama Sr. had been part of a State Department/CIA exchange financed in part by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation that brought future African leaders to the U.S. who were being groomed to serve U.S. interests in the Cold War.

Barack Obama, Sr., with leis, with Stanley Armor Dunham to his right. [Source: eslkevin.wordpress.com]

The photo would suggest that Dunham was one of the coordinators of the exchange, indicating work for the State Department or CIA.

According to his official biography, Dunham worked as a furniture salesman for the Standard-Grunbaum Furniture Company, which led to his frequent travel and family moves.


William J. Lederer [Source: nytimes.com]

Independent researchers believe, however, that this job was a cover for his work as an intelligence agent, who surveilled radical groups, or military or Air Force production facilities, which is what brought him to Hawaii.

Dunham’s favorite bar in Honolulu, to which he brought young Barry, perhaps not coincidentally was owned by William J. Lederer, a known CIA agent who wrote the Cold War classic, The Ugly American.

 

 

 

 

 

Barack Obama, Sr.

Obama’s purported Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama, Sr., had met his mother in 1960 when he was twenty-three and she eighteen in a Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii.


Barack Obama, Sr., and Ann Dunham [Source: politico.com]


Tom Mboya [Source: wikipedia.org]

The leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) condemned the exchange Obama was part of for favoring certain tribes—the majority Kikuyu and minority Luo—over other tribes to support the Kenyan African National Union (KANU).

The latter’s leader, Tom Mboya, was a favorite of the CIA and opposed the Pan-Africanist currents on the continent. He was the one who selected Obama Sr. for the scholarship.

Obama Sr. returned the favor by going back to Kenya to work for the Kenyan Finance and Transport Ministries and an oil firm in Kenya before dying in a car crash in 1982. Mboya himself was assassinated in 1969.
 


Barack Obama, Sr., and Barack in Honolulu airport in 1971. A study published in The American Report questioned the authenticity of this photo and the one featured above with Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham based on discrepancies found in Obama sr.’s fingernails in the two photos and fact that the Honolulu airport had windows that did not appear in the photo where they should have. Obama Sr. generally had no relationship with his alleged son and is purported to have visited Hawaii at Stanley Armor’s request so Obama Jr. could gain admission to Punahou Academy. [Source: nytimes.com]


Punahou School in Honolulu. [Source: punahou.edu]
Frank Marshall Davis [Source: wikipedia.org]

Far-fetched as it sounds, Obama Sr. may not have been Obama’s real father.

Obama Sr. and Ann never lived together or had a real wedding, and Obama Sr. had no contact with his son, except for a short two-week visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, which may have been for the purpose of securing Obama a spot in the coveted Punahou Prep School.[12]

The photo of Stanley and Obama Sr. is suspicious because what father in his right mind would be pictured smiling with the man who impregnated his teenaged daughter and then abandoned her?

There is evidence to suggest that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, an African American journalist, sexually libertine poet, political radical and alleged target of Grandpa Dunham’s surveillance.

 

Keith Kakugawa, left, and Obama, right, in Punahou high school yearbook. [Source: nypost.com]

Obama’s friend Keith Kakugawa told an interviewer that Ann had had an affair with Davis because she was angry that the family had to move to Hawaii, away from her high-school friends who were all attending the University of Washington.

Ann became pregnant and, to hide the truth, Dunham paid Obama Sr.—whom he knew through the University of Hawaii exchange—to marry Ann, giving him the opportunity to extend his visa to attend Harvard.

Ann in her yearbook at Mercer Island High School in Seattle in 1959. [Source: seattletimes.com]

Barack eventually found out the truth, writing in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, that “the visits to Frank’s house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t understand.”[13]

Obama paid tribute to his actual father in a 1981 poem published in the Occidental College Literary Journal called “Pop,” which attributes to him features that resemble Davis, and references “Pop’s poetry, written before his mother died.”

Barack Sr. was not a poet and, although Stanley dabbled in poetry, Barry called him “gramps” and his mother committed suicide before his eighth birthday.[14]

Madelyn Dunham

One other connection between Obama and the U.S. national security state lies with his grandmother Madelyn—whom Obama called Toot.

Though lacking a college degree, Madelyn rose to the rank of Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii—which suggests she had high level personal connections.

In that job, Madelyn handled escrow accounts used to pay American Cold War clients in Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere—including through CIA proprietaries.

The Bank of Hawaii further had dealings with Nugan Hand Bank of Australia through which the CIA funded the constitutional coup d’état against Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.[15]

Madelyn Dunham on right with the future president. [Source: alchetron.com]

Covering Up the Truth

Obama and his handlers effectively covered up the truth about Obama’s family history.

They marketed Obama as a multi-racial candidate whose sensitivity to divergent cultures around the world would help restore America’s international reputation following the Bush years.

In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama presents his mother as a 1960s rebel and beatnik who partook in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, married outside her race twice, and decided to devote her career to setting up micro-lending projects for poor women in Indonesia and later Pakistan whose language and culture she absorbed.[16]

Obama claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her background and the fact that they were reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time—favorably.

Of further significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.[17]

Regarding his own story, Obama has promoted falsehoods at every step.

In A Promised Land, he neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC), a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries around the world.

Headed by a close friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Jr., the former Governor of Minnesota who was involved with Humphrey in the purge of suspected communists in the Farmer-Labor Party, BIC had functioned as a CIA front.


Hubert Humphrey, with Kennedy and Johnson Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Jr., the former governor of Minnesota and BIC head, during the 1968 presidential election. [Source: outlet.historicimages.com]

Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of promoting disruptions in targeted economies.

An activist with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) described BIC as the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress (Marshall Plan for Latin America): “They’re the left-wing of the ruling class.”[18]

Besides underplaying his employment with BIC, Obama in his writings omits the fact that his work as a community organizer was for the Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of his mother’s old employer the Ford Foundation, whose underlying aim was to prevent class solidarity and the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inter-racial poor people’s movement.[19]

 

Obama as a community organizer. He actually worked for a large corporate foundation. [Source: chicagomag.com]  








Obama embraces Tony Rezko, one of his earliest and top fundraisers who was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2011 for participating in political kickback schemes. Obama helped Rezko secure more than $14 million in taxpayer subsidies to build low income housing facilities of poor quality after promoting the privatization of public housing. [Source: politico.com]

Obama’s timeline for his life story, meanwhile, is often wrong. In A Promised Land, for example, he claims to have spent three years in New York after transferring from Occidental College to Columbia after his sophomore year; however, it is believed that Obama spent the 1981-1982 school year in Pakistan and only studied at Columbia for one year.[20]

Obama: Defender of the U.S. Empire

Obama’s abysmal foreign policy record was telegraphed in his three major books where he promotes a defense of U.S. foreign policy while maligning and advancing stereotypes about the 1960s movements and critics of U.S. foreign policy.

In his first memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes 1960s Black Power icon and anti-imperialist Stokely Carmichael as a “madman” and claims to have witnessed two women selling literature outside a lecture hall where he heard Carmichael speak calling each other names like “Stalinist pig” and “reformist bitch.”

Anti-imperialist Stokely Carmichael. Obama ridicules him in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father. [Source: historynewsnetwork.org]

Obama editorialized that movement activists who clung to the ideals of the 1960s had become completely “removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve” or “just plain crazy.”[21]

In his latest memoir, A Promised Land, Obama pats himself on the back for “questioning his own assumptions,” which he writes “inoculated me against the revolutionary formulas embraced by a lot of people on the left at the dawn of the Reagan era.”[22]

Obama goes on to recount arguments he allegedly had with friends in college who insisted that “the American hegemon was the root of oppression worldwide.”

Obama’s second memoir is filled with falsehoods and omissions, yet it received glowing reviews in major newspapers and has made Obama even richer than he already was. [Source: amazon.com]

Obama writes that he knew better, having “lived overseas,” and would extol the “idea of America, the promise of America.”

According to Obama, the argument “would usually end with some smug bastard dropping a newspaper in front of me, its headline trumpeting the U.S. invasion of Grenada.”[23]

These arguments could not actually have taken place in the way Obama suggests because Obama graduated from Columbia University in May 1983, and the U.S. invaded Grenada in October 1983.

At the time of that invasion, Obama was actually working for the CIA front corporation, BIC, whose employees were unlikely to have insisted that the American hegemon was the root of worldwide oppression or to have condemned the U.S. invasion of Grenada—which had been based on false pretexts.

Obama’s Ties to the Crowns and Pritzkers

One other thing omitted by Obama is his close connection to the Crown and Pritzker families.

The Crown family—whose net worth stands at over $10 billion dollars—has long owned a significant stake in General Dynamics, manufacturer of Trident missiles, Stryker troop carriers, bunker buster bombs, LAV-25 amphibious armored vehicles, Abrams tanks, sniper rifles, and nuclear-powered submarines and naval destroyers.

[Source: globaldefensecorp.com]

Lester Crown [Source: aspentimes.com]

During Obama’s presidency, General Dynamics bought out 11 firms specializing in satellites, geo-spatial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and amassed contracts from 16 intelligence agencies after investing $10 million in annual lobbying.

The company further embraced “every intelligence driven style of warfare,” developing small target and identification systems and equipment that could intercept insurgents’ cell phone and lab-top communications and computer software used for cyber and psychological warfare.[24]


Susan Crown [Source: chicagobusiness.com]

James Crown [Source: aspeninstitute.org]
The Crown family gave at least $86,636 to Obama campaigns between 1990 and 2012 and raised an additional $3,205,233 between 2007 and 2012 while paying $135,000 for Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Susan Crown, Lester’s daughter, sat on the board of Northern Trust, which gave Obama a sweetheart loan for purchase of a $1.65 million Georgian revival mansion in Chicago’s Hyde Park complete with a thousand-bottle wine cellar.

James Crown, who was the target of a congressional and criminal probe as chairman of the J.P. Morgan Chase & Company’s risk committee, was Obama’s fundraising chair in his 2004 campaign for the Senate.[25]

The Crowns’ investments in Obama paid off —General Dynamics’ revenues shot up to over $30 billion in 2016, a three-fold increase from 2000. The Crowns’ net worth doubled in the Obama years, causing the family to rise in the Forbes ranking to the 27th richest family in the United States.[26]

Obama’s Hyde Park mansion. [Source: enjoyillinois.com]
The Crown mansion in Winnetka, Illinois. [Source: chicagomag.com]

Penny Pritzker of the Pritzker banking dynasty—ranked number 9 on the Forbes list with a fortune of $32.5 billiongave $500,000 to Obama’s second inauguration—earning her appointment as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

Pritzker had helped finance Obama from the beginning of his political career, having allegedly met him in the early 1990s when her kids were playing on a basketball team coached by Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson.

During Obama’s 2008 White House run, Pritzker served as the national chairwoman of his campaign finance team, which shattered fundraising records, and in the 2012 reelection effort, she was a top bundler.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Obama announces Penny Pritzker’s nomination as Commerce Secretary in May 2013. [Source: harvardmagazine.com]

The Pritzker family—which made its fortune through ownership of Hyatt hotels—had long ties to the CIA. They were leading depositors in the Bahamas-based Castle Bank, a CIA outfit founded by one of the CIA’s mob liaisons, Paul Helliwell, which specialized in off-shoring money.[27]

The Pritzkers were also war profiteers. In 1953, family patriarchs Jay and Robert Pritzker founded the Marmon Group, an industrial holding company which includes the subsidiary Marmon Aerospace and Defense which manufactures wires and cables for aerospace, military vehicles, combat systems, radar installations and naval shipboards.

Obama flanked by public health officials dressed in military garb. He pleased his donors with large military budgets that outstripped those of war hawk George W. Bush. [Source: slate.com]

The Pritzkers—like the Crowns—thus personally profited from Obama’s mammoth military budgets, which outstripped those of President Bush by an average of $18.7 billion per year, Obama’s naval buildup in the South China Sea and his overseeing more sales of military weaponry than any other president—$60 billion more than President Bush.[28]

Conclusion

As the first Black president, Obama is often placed on a pedestal as a moral beacon and compared to such historic figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

These comparisons are off base, as Obama is an opportunistic and often deceitful politician who has shown a lack of moral integrity throughout his career.

Obama’s deep ties to and support of the CIA and offshoot agencies like the NED fueled great foreign policy disasters which ravaged numerous countries.

After he left the presidency, Obama worked through his consigliére John Brennan to help conjure up the “Russia Gate” scandal, which revived Cold War-era demonologies, poisoned U.S.-Russia relations and greatly increased the threat of nuclear war.

Media outlets including those on the Left continue to perpetrate many myths about Obama and to assume a defensive posture in the face of right-wing attacks.

While these attacks may be nefarious, they should not preclude sober and critical analysis about America’s forty-fourth president and the dark forces behind his rise to power and reign.


  1. Mark Hosenball, “Exclusive: Obama authorizes secret U.S. support for Syrian rebels,” Reuters, August 1, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-syria-obama-order/exclusive-obama-authorizes-secret-u-s-support-for-syrian-rebels-idUSBRE8701OK20120801

  2. See Mark Taliano, Voices From Syria (Montreal: Global Research, 2017).

  3. The size of SOCOM expanded by almost 25 percent during Obama’s presidency, increasing from 55,800 people to 69,700.

  4. Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 252.

  5. Peter Baker and Mark Mazetti, “Brennan Draws on Bond with Obama in Backing CIA,” The New York Times, December 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/us/politics/cia-chief-and-president-walk-fine-line-.html

  6. Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2019), 21. Brennan was head of the Analysis Corporation, a CIA contractor firm during the period before the 2008 election when employees of it rifled through Obama’s passport file at the State Department. This may have been a major factor behind Brennan’s closeness to Obama and promotion.

  7. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 100, 135, 267. In Libya, the Obama administration supported the overthrow of pan-Africanist Muammar Qaddafi, who resisted the establishment of a giant AFRICOM military base in Libya. Libya’s first president after Qaddafi’s overthrow, Mohammed Magariaf, was recruited by the CIA in the 1980s into a counter-revolutionary force in Chad. The Obama administration also supported General Khalifa Hiftar, who had coerced people into joining the CIA’s anti-Qaddafi Contra army in the 1980s by putting them in hot, windowless, crowded rooms with floors ankle-deep in sewage for long periods of time if they did not agree.

  8. Mondo Frazier, The Secret Life of Barack Hussein Obama (New York: Threshold editions, 2010), 113.

  9. Gordon helped barricade the U.S. embassy during the 1965 Suharto coup. Julius Mader, Who’s Who in the CIA (Berlin: Julius Mader, 1968), 139. In the latter book he is listed as Dr. Gordon Donald Jr. He is said to have been a U.S. naval veteran who served as special advisor of the Office of Analysis and Research for the Soviet Bloc in the Department of State and in Djakarta and Lahore, where Dunham followed him.

  10. The section on Ann Dunham is drawn from Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars; Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President (self-published, 2012); Webster Tarpley, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2008). For more on Dunham’s background, see also Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).

  11. Wayne Madsen, “The Story of Obama: All in the Company,” Wayne Madsen Report, August 18, 2010, https://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/43457/

  12. After Barack was born, Ann moved to Washington State for a period while Barack Obama Sr. completed his studies at the University of Hawaii before going to Harvard.

  13. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995); discussed in Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, ch. 2.

  14. See Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars.

  15. After the bank’s collapse, its founder, Frank Nugan, was shot to death near Sydney. Nugan Hand had been used to launder CIA drug money at the end of the Indochina War.

  16. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Publishers, 2020), 6, 7. Ann’s mentor at the University of Hawaii, Alice Dewey, described her as a “garden variety democrat” and not a leftist radical. There is no evidence of her having attended civil rights or anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, which were rare when Ann was a student in the early 1960s.

  17. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006). Obama claimed that the “story of the coup and purge was slow to appear in American newspapers,” which was not the case.

  18. James Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970), 112; Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars. Kunen notes that BIC supported the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on issues related to civil rights and student control of universities but differed on the question of imperialism. An informed source told journalist Wayne Madsen that Obama’s tuition debt at Columbia University was paid off by BIC.

  19. Tarpley, Barack H. Obama, 62.

  20. Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President, 145, 146. University Clearinghouse records indicated that Obama only attended Columbia University in 1982-1983, though the school later claimed there was a “computer error,” which appears rather dubious, and that Obama attended in 1981-1982. Obama himself refused to release his college transcripts or name a single classmate or associate from his time at Columbia. There are no photos and very few people, students and faculty, remember him at the school, prompting suspicion and conspiracy theories. Obama’s passport records meanwhile have been destroyed. During his time in Pakistan, where his mother was then working, Obama stayed at the home of the family of Muhammed Soomro, who became acting president after the resignation of Pervez Musharraf in August 2008. According to unidentified sources, Obama and his stepfather partook in unknown CIA business. At the time, Pakistan was a major hub for the recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Andrew Kreig, Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters (Washington, D.C.: Eagle View Books, 2013), 23, 24.

  21. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 139, 140.

  22. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Publishers, 2020), 13.

  23. Obama, A Promised Land, 14.

  24. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20, 21, 37, 38. Henry Crown, Lester’s father, established Material Services Corporation (MSC), which was one of the government’s largest World War II contractors but was sued for over $1 million by the Office of Price Administration for price gouging. In 1962, its successor, General Dynamics, in which Crown remained the largest investor, was target of a major influence-peddling investigation by the Senate Government Operations Committee after being awarded a $7 billion Pentagon contract for TFX fighter bombers (later F-111) that was quashed after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the 1970s, Crown was implicated in a major bribery scandal in the state of Illinois which led to the imprisonment of some state legislators. In the 1980s, the firm was fined over $650,000 for paying bribes to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Director of Naval Submarine programs, over a 16-year period.

  25. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 37, 38.

  26. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20, 21.

  27. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 36, 37.

  28. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20; Bryan Schatz, “The Obama years Have Been Very Good to America’s Weapons Makers,” Mother Jones, March/April 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/obama-international-arms-weapons-deals/.