Obama’s secrecy and evasiveness about his early life has only fueled speculation about his alleged links to the CIA. Sherman Skolnick, the late Chicago based court reformer, journalist and conspiracy buff, first raised the issue when the Russians detained Senator Obama in 2004. Any evidence Skolnick had for his claims has been scrubbed from the Internet (with hard copies discarded by his family after his death). Left-leaning historian and journalist Webster Tarpley revived the controversy in Barack H Obama: the Unauthorized Biography, written in early 2008 and published just prior to Obama’s election. Tarpley’s claims relate mainly to the President’s long time relationship with the ex-Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who Tarpley and others believe was actually a Cointelpro operative, and the “left gatekeeping foundations” Obama worked for in Chicago. I have blogged about this previously at http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2010/07/26/who-did-obama-work-for-in-chicago/

Sherman Skolnick

Reverend Manning’s Mock Treason Trial

Following the inauguration, Harlen pastor Dr James David Manning (who has been featured on Fox News) propelled Obama’s past into public view with a highly publicized mock treason-sedition trial in May 2010. I’ve read the transcript of Dr Manning’s trial. In my opinion, he makes a pretty convincing case that Obama didn’t attend Columbia University in 1982-83, the years he claims to have been there. He’s not listed in the year book or the graduation roster, and no one in the political science department (his major) can remember him. In fact, a number of Columbia professors question how a student with Obama’s 2.5 grade point average (from his two years at Occidental College) would even qualify for admission.

The rest of the case is pretty flimsy. It’s based mainly on hearsay evidence from a phone conversation a Manning witness had with an alleged KGB-CIA double agent named Krezonoski. According to the double agent, Obama was really in Afghanistan in 1982-83, as a Farsi interpreter and the lead agent for the CIA operation training mujaheddin guerrillas to fight the Soviet occupation. In his testimony, the same witness implicates Obama in a vast conspiracy which also involves Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal.

Wayne Madsen’s Investigation Into Obama’s Elusive Past

Wayne Madsen, whose intelligence credentials (see below) make his allegations more plausible than Manning’s witnesses, also claims that Obama was in Afghanistan between 1981 and 1983. However his sources (unnamed intelligence operatives and arms dealers in Kabul) are only slightly more credible that an alleged phone conversation with a supposed KGB/CIA agent.

Obama admits that he was in Pakistan in 1981, visiting his mother, who had been transferred from Indonesia to Lahore. There are some interesting unanswered questions about this trip, such as why Obama was traveling on an Indonesian passport under the name Barry Soetoro, why a 20 year college student would be staying with a high level Pakistani official Muhammadmian Soomo (who would become acting president of Pakistan in 2008) and why the President has sealed his passport records. There is also the unsolved murder of a federal witness, Leiutenant (his name) Quarles Harris Jr, in the attempted 2008 theft of Obama’s passport records by the Analysis Corporation, a CIA-contracted company run by former CIA agent John Brennan (currently Deputy National Security Adviser).

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.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and political and national security commentator for Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers.

To be continued, with an exploration of Obama family links to the CIA