The oval office as a covert op

I had hoped to leave the previous post up throughout the day. People need an alternative to all the 9/11 talk. But a couple of readers have asked for my response to a strange article by David Ignatius, in the Washington Post.

Basically, Ignatius compares Obama to a CIA operative in such a heavy-handed fashion that even the least paranoid among us must wonder: "Is Ignatius indulging in metaphor -- or is he giving us something more than metaphor?"

Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving “mission accomplished” speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in “Dreams From My Father,” you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.

Not exactly subtle, is it? One blogger was pissed off by this column...

David Ignatius is screwing the President in public, serving as a proxy for the covert world that has been intimidating the Presidents and his staff since he entered on duty. All of the above is a a fabrication, and Ignatius, in serving up this blatant misinformation (a covert action in and of itself) is in violation of the law.

This blogger goes by the name of Marcus Aurelius, a name previously unfamiliar to me (unless we're talking about the Roman emperor). He links to earlier posts which, in his view, prove that Obama has had a hostile relationship with spook-world.

This piece deals with  Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., of UC Berkeley, who was part of Obama's transition team. Edley made a startling comment on the oft-debated topic of why Obama did not prosecute Bush or Cheney.

President-Elect Obama’s advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would oust him in a coup and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama’s top transition advisers.

Here's the original Op-Ed news piece featuring Edley. It was published just a few days ago.

Edley responded to my request for additional information by providing a description of the transition team's fears. Edley said that transition officials, not Obama, agreed that he faced the possibility of a "revolt."

Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he'd been party to very high level discussions during Obama's transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they've done anyhow).

Details, please. Is Edley offering opinion or something more substantive? Who told him what, exactly?

Later, we learn this:

I never discussed these matters with the President Elect; the summary offered by one of the senior national security folks was, "We don't want to engage in a witch hunt..."

"We don't want to engage in a witch hunt" is very different from "We're scared of getting whacked." So which is it?

How much of an "insider" could Edley have been, anyways? It's not as though he's in the administration right now. He did not talk to Obama directly on this topic; Obama himself never said anything about fear of a revolt. And did anyone, back in 2009, seriously believe that the Republicans would have reacted to the election of a Democrat (any Democrat) any differently than the way they did act?

As for a military/intelligence revolt -- come on. Seriously, what could they have done? They don't go for the Dallas option these days. Besides, there were plenty of people in the intel community who were pissed off at Bush and Cheney; the Agency got treated like crap under Dubya.

Of course, there is a revolt underway right now. This revolt is led by the Koch brothers, Fox News and all the usual suspects. But that rebellion is not what Edley seems to be talking about.

In sum, I don't think that anything Edley has to say debunks anything that David Ignatius has to say.

You probably already know what I have to say: Obama's whole history -- and his family's history -- is spookier than a gothic novel.

My main earlier posts on this topic are here and here and here and here.

(Since I wrote my earlier pieces on that theme, I've had a chance to glance through Janny Scott's A Singular Woman, a bio of Obama's mother. The book offers explanations for some of the anomalies surrounding the strange life of Stanley Ann Dunham, but hardly all. By all means, read that book -- but read cautiously.)
Here's a summary of the key points from my previous work:

In 1981, Obama was allegedly an ill-to-do student at Occidental University in L.A. Yet he chose to make a covert trip to Pakistan -- his first trip out of the country -- at a time when the place was under martial law; the State Department was advising Americans not to travel to that part of the world. Pakistan was, of course, a key part of the covert resupply effort for the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan.

There, a local "diplomat" at the U.S. embassy (obviously CIA) set up a meeting with one of the most powerful players in Pakistan -- Ahmadmian Soomro. We are given no explanation as to why a poor student would meet with the nation's most powerful banker and deputy speaker of the Assembly.

At Oxy, Obama took classes in politics, and one of his likely professors (whom I have never named) has a "former" CIA background. (With the CIA, you always have to put the "former" in quotes.) This man was also close to Zbigniew Brzezinski -- who later became a key adviser to and influence on Barack Obama.

At the time, young Obama had an Indonesian passport. It's known that the Agency likes to recruit young men with multiple passports, which can aid in plausible deniability. (For example: Obama's passport would not have a Pakistan stamp.)

Obama never seemed to have any trouble paying for his expensive university career. After college, he went to work for a firm which was later exposed as offering cover for CIA personnel oversees. 

His mother, Ann Dunham, had a remarkably spooky background, working for AID and the Ford Foundation, both well-known for offering cover for the CIA. Although an alleged leftist, she married a man who was the key liaison between Mobil oil and the CIA-installed Suharto regime, which came to power on the backs of some 500,000 corpses. I think it is fair to posit that no real leftist would even have lunch with a guy like that. (Ann made her own mystery trip to Pakistan in 1981 -- and was even learning Urdu!)

There's much, much more to be said on this topic, but I will let you discover it for yourself. Just click on the links given above.

The one factor that I find most telling is this: Barack Obama never mentioned the Pakistan trip (which must have been quite an adventure) in the two autobiographies who wrote before the age of 46. This, despite the fact that he was an ambitious fellow trying to establish his foreign policy credentials.

Come on. You gotta admit that that is weird. 

Wayne Madsen has taken my argument much further (without ever crediting me). But, as is always the case with Madsen, one never knows whether his unnamed sources are fictional.

Maybe David Ignatius could tell us whether I am on the right track...?