Obama first gained public prominence as the chairman of the board of the "liberal" Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). However strong links between CAC and Chicago's business elite, as well as their successful attacks against teachers' unions (by empowering Local School Councils to fire hundreds of teachers and principals), raise serious questions about CAC's "liberal" credentials. This becomes especially significant in light of Obama's appointment of former Chicago school district CEO and school privatization champion Arne Duncan as director of the Department of Education (see blog).
As Webster Tarpley points out in Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography, one of the strongest supporters of CAC was Chicago corporate mogul Thomas Ayers. By an amazing coincidence, Ayers was the father of the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Nevertheless Tom Ayers has impeccable corporate credentials, which include heading Commonwealth Edison for seven years in the seventies, and serving on the board of General Dynamics, Searle, Chicago Pacific, Zenith, Northwest Industries, First National Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Tribune.
Bill Ayers, the Ex-Weatherman Terrorist
Stranger still Bill Ayers, the ex-Weatherman terrorist, wrote the grant to secure Annenberg funding for the CAC and credits himself as one of its co-founders. He was also influential in getting his friend Barack Obama, a 34 year old with no education credentials, appointed as CAC's first chairman. Obama's annual salary as board chairman was $70,000 (in addition to his substantial income from his law practice).
All this raises the tricky question of how Bill Ayers transformed himself from a bomb making terrorist facing the death penalty to a tenured Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and pre-eminent education reformer. Many former Students for a Democratic Society (from which the Weathermen formed their splinter group) believe the Weather Underground was actually created by US intelligence, with the objective of discrediting, fragmenting and/or shutting down SDS. This view is substantiated by FBI documents that came to light in 1973, revealing the role of agent provocateurs in instigating much of the violence attributed to the Weathermen. Ayers successfully used this evidence to get his weapons and bomb making charges dismissed.
Obama's Fictional Autobiography
For me, Madsen's most interesting and credible findings concern Obama's family, rather than the President himself. I think they establish quite clearly that Obama's parents, maternal grandparents and stepfather -- like the Bush family -- all had intelligence links. And that Obama has fabricated many details about his past to conceal this.
The scenario Obama lays out in Dreams from My Father about his
parents' background differs markedly from limited information available from
school and other public school records. He indicates his parents first met in a
Russian class at the University of Hawaii in [1960] ( In Dreams from My Father ,
Obama says 1959, when her yearbook indicates she was still in Seattle attending
Mercer Island High school). However Wayne Madsen points out that Stanley Armour
Dunham, Ann's father, already knew Obama senior. He has a 1959 photo of Dunham
officially welcoming Obama senior with a traditional lei ceremony. This
suggests that Stanley Armour probably relocated to Hawaii
in 1959, with his family following a year later. Moreover the photo raises the
interesting question of why an alleged furniture salesman, with no prior
connections to the Honolulu
business community or the University
of Hawaii is welcoming the first Kenya
student to enroll there.
Madsen believes that rather than being a simple goat herder, as Obama claims, his father was one of 280 students from British eastern and southern African colonies sponsored to study in the US under the CIA-inspired Airlift Africa project. http://www.voltairenet.org/article166741.html The goal of the project was to counter the influence of Soviet and Chinese backed rebels and leaders as these colonies gained independence.
It's also Madsen's belief that furniture sales was merely a cover, that Stanley Armour Dunham had a CIA role in overseeing Airlift Africa and other foreign students at the University of Hawaii. Even more mysterious is Madsen's photo of the family in Beirut, Lebanon in the early fifties (http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/08/special-report-the-story-of-obama-all-in-the-company-part-iii/). Madsen also notes the existence of an FBI file on Armour Dunham (J Edgar Hoover commonly kept files on covert CIA agents) which was allegedly destroyed in 1997.
Who Was the Real Ann Dunham?
Obama also likes to portray his mother as a struggling single parent and a free spirit and "sixties child." However Madsen has compiled considerable evidence suggesting she was actually a career employee (and possibly a NOC -- an agent under non-official cover like Valerie Plame) for a series of known CIA fronts (the USAID-funded Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen, Development Alternatives Inc., the Ministry of Industry Provincial Development Program, the Ford Foundation Southeast Asia regional office, and the Asian Development Bank). Among her other duties in Indonesia in the 1970s, was "anthropological" field work. Madsen believes this was actually intelligence gathering to consolidate the CIA-sponsored coup (1965-67) that overthrew Indonesian president Sukarno. (see http://www.t-room.us/2011/03/by-wayne-madsen-obamas-cia-mommy-dearest-%E2%80%94-identifying-indonesians-for-assassination/).
Among other evidence, Madsen cites a resolution passed by the American Anthropological Association in the mid-sixties condemning "intelligence meddling" of the CIA and Defense Department in anthropological field work. He also quotes the 1966 Beals Report (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/154/3756/1525.citation), which states that "several anthropologists, especially younger ones who had difficulty in securing research funds, were approached by "obscure' foundations or were offered support from such organizations only to discover later that they were expected to provide intelligence information to the CIA."
Colonel Lolo Soetoro
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