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Barack Obama’s dreams

Manuel E. Yepe

26/08/2013

Opinión

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In his autobiographical book “Dreams of My Parents”, Barack Obama says that when he was looking for a job after graduating from Columbia University in 1983 he found an employer he describes as “a consulting house of New York multinational corporations”, where he worked as an “assistant researcher” and “financial editor”.

Although Obama does not mention the name of his employer, the latter was identified on October 30, 2007 by The New York Times as Business International Corporation (BIC)

Oddly, the paper did not remind its readers that the NYT itself had revealed in 1977 that said corporation had given coverage to CIA employees in several countries between 1955 and 1960.

A British publication specialized in international intelligence themes has reported that in the decade of 1980 BIC actively participated in the promotion of candidates endorsed by Washington in Australia and the Fiji Islands.

In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Head of State of the Fiji Islands who had come into office eleven months earlier by elections, but insisted in a policy of turning his country into a denuclearized zone, which meant that U.S. nuclear energy- driven boats and cargo vessels transporting nuclear weapons would not be allowed to enter these islands’ ports.

Following that coup d’Etat, power was returned to R.S.K. Mara, who had exerted it favoring Washington’s interests as Fiji’s prime minister or president since 1970, and who, for that reason continued at the head of the country until 2000 with only the above-mentioned 11-month interruption in 1987.

The valuations on Obama’s autobiographical book are contained in an article entitled “Barack Obama, His Mother and the CIA: Why the Omission?” by renowned writer, historian and U.S. foreign policy critic William Blum, published in July 2012 in his popular blog “Boiled Frogs”.

Blum points out that in Barack Obama’s book he not only failed to mention the name of his employer; neither does he say exactly when he worked there or why he quit the job. These omissions could well lack importance, but BIC has a long-existing association with the world of the intelligence, with undercover actions and attempts to penetrate the radical left, including the organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

“It is therefore reasonable to ask oneself if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is hiding something about his own association with this world”, Blum warns.

Added to this is the fact that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, had been associated during the cold war in the 1970’s and 1980’s – as employee, consultant, donor or student – with at least five entities with intimate connections to the CIA: the Ford Foundation, the International Development Agency, the Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives, Inc. and the East-West Center of Hawaii.

During a good part of this time she worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Hawaii, a good position to gather intelligence data on the local communities.

William Blum quotes words by John Gilligan, USAID director during Carter’s Administration (1977-1981), as an example of the CIA’s connections with these organizations: “The assistance agencies were completely infiltrated with people from the CIA”.

The idea was to plant operatives in all kinds of activities we had abroad: government, voluntaries, religious...” And Development Alternatives, Inc. is the organization Alan Gross was working for when he was arrested in Cuba and accused of being part of the U.S. operation underway to destabilize the Cuban government.

William Bum is the author, among many other important books and essays, of the title “The U.S. Armed Forces and the CIA Interventions since World War II”. He has described his mission in life as that of “if not doing away with, at least slowing down the U.S. empire by injuring the beast that is causing so much suffering throughout the world”.

August 2013

https://www.alainet.org/en/active/66762?language=pt