Who Pulls Obama's Strings?

In 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama to the presidency as an antiwar progressive change maker despite having virtually no knowledge of his life prior to 2004. In the 18 months since the election, our new president seems to have undergone a 180 reversal in his politics. As well as reneging on nearly all his campaign promises, he has continued and expanded the pro-war, pro-torture, pro-covert assassination and anti-civil liberties policies of his predecessor George W. Bush. Eighteen months into Bush's presidency, the major corporate players who influenced Bush and Cheney were blatantly obvious. Bush had extensive prior (family) ties with the oil industry and Cheney with both oil companies and defense contractors. While Obama also seems to be at the beck and call of corporate backers, exactly who they are is much less clear. The question has led many analysts on both sides of the political aisle - to take a closer look at his background before he came on the national stage as a US senator from Illinois senator in 2004.

Obama's secrecy and evasiveness about his early life hasn't helped. In fact there are gaping holes in his resume that have led to all kinds of (mainly right wing) conspiracy theories about the authenticity of his birth certificate, his secret adherence to the Muslim religion, a possible stint with the CIA during the years nobody remembers him at Columbia, and his allegiance to a secret international Marxist/socialist conspiracy. I think the birth certificate issue is a red herring to distract people from growing evidence that Obama has a past in intelligence. Likewise a so-called Marxist/socialist conspiracy would require financing - and wealthy elites are very reluctant to fund Marxist-Leninist groups that seek to deprive them of their wealth.

According to Obama's unofficial biographer Webster Tarpley and Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency employee and member of the Association for Intelligence Officers, more and more credible evidence is surfacing that Obama had some type of intelligence career before entering public life. The Russians certainly thought he did when they detained Senators Obama and Lugar in 2004 following a three day fact finding mission related to disarmament talks. In fact they accused Obama of spying for the British (?) and demanded to search his aircraft (as he was leaving, not entering, the country).

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

Other evidence of Obama's intelligence links is either indirect or from off-the-record intelligence sources. However as far back as 1981, when Obama was 20 and made his first trip to Pakistan, he seems to wind up in interesting places with interesting people for reasons that don't quite add up to me. For example, he supposedly traveled from Occidental College in California to stay with Muhammadmian Soomo (who would become acting president of Pakistan in 2008) in Karachi to go partridge hunting. Though Obama also used the opportunity to visit his mother, Ann Dunham, in Lahore. Ann Dunham, who worked for the Ford Foundation and USAID (another notorious CIA front operation) in Indonesia, moved to Lahore in 1981 to work as a "consultant" for the Asian Development Bank. As Madsen points out in the Wayne Madsen Report, this was at a time when the CIA was increasing its presence in Pakistan to build the Afghan mujaheddin to fight the Soviet invasion.

Who Obama Worked for in Chicago

In 1984 Obama left New York to move to Chicago, where he became a civil rights lawyer and involved himself in a number of "progressive" foundations like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Gamaliel and Wood foundations. However Tarpley, Barry Zwicker, Bob Feldman, Lila Rajiva, Michael Barker and others have raised serious questions about the progressive credentials of these and similar "liberal" foundations. They point to increasing evidence that the Ford Foundation (of which Gamaliel is a subsidiary), the Rockefeller, Wood, MacArthur and similar foundations actually play a "gatekeeper" or "counterinsurgency" function to suppress genuine grassroots organizing.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was one of the first to raise the alarm and launched an investigation in 1967 about the CIA's use of these and other foundations as "conduits," "pass-throughs," and "fronts" to disguise CIA funding for domestic operations (it is technically illegal for the CIA to operate on US soil under federal law). The late journalist and judicial reformer, Sherman Skolnick, used to investigate foundation tax returns and traced a lot of "liberal" foundation funding to private right wing elites.

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