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Title: A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA By
Source: [None]
URL Source: https://covertactionmagazine.com/20 ... -history-of-obama-and-the-cia/
Published: Oct 3, 2021
Author: Jeremy Kuzmarov
Post Date: 2021-10-03 10:49:17 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 146

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]

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. More than 2,400 dead as Obama's drone campaign marks five years — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (en-GB) [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] US envoy Chris Stevens speaking to local media in Benghazi in 2011. (photo credit: AP/Ben Curtis) 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] Ukraine crisis: Timeline - BBC News 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.

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]

Another boss, Peter Geithner, was future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s father. Peter Franz GeithnerPeter Geithner [Source: findagrave.com]

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 herded off to public execution. [Source: Unknown] Indonesian leftists being sent to their deaths during mass pogroms supported by the U.S. [Source: timorarchives.wordpress.com] Ann Dunham winning the “hearts and minds” of Javanese villagers. [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. eastwest road66 | EastWest Center Sept. 7, 1966. Honolulu Ad… | Flickr [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.

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

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.

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

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