January 14-16, 2011 -- Obama's grandparents and the Freedom Studies Center
publication date: Jan 14, 2011
January 14-16, 2011 -- Obama's grandparents and the Freedom Studies Center
In
1965, the year President Obama's stepfather, Colonel Lolo Soetoro,
henchman for General Suharto's CIA-led coup against the Sukarno
government in Indonesia, left the University of Hawaii's East-West
Center for service for Suharto in helping the CIA with its coup, the CIA
and right-wing Time-Life maven Clare Boothe Luce was putting together
the "Cold War College" to train young men and women to suppress popular
leftist movements in non-aligned Third World nations.
The Cold
War College was to be part of Luce's Freedom Studies Center, an
anti-Communist operative training center established with the assistance
of 63 higher eduction institutions and other organizations in 1966 to
counter what Luce called "various schools run by the Communist Party,
the Black Panthers, and other revolutionary groups."
Luce ran the
Freedom Studies Center from her Longlea Farm estate in Boston,
Virginia. Although the center received no federal funds, its first
seminars attracted such speakers as Army chief of staff General William
Westmoreland, former CIA director Allen Dulles, and Richard Ichord,
chairman of the House Internal Security Committee. The center also
counted among its advisory board members Vice President Spiro Agnew,
Transportation Secretary John Volpe, Housing and Urban Development
Secretary George Romney, Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, as well as
Senators Karl Mundt, Harry F. Byrd, Mark Hatfield, Strom Thurmond,
Thomas Dodd, and Russell Long, Governors John Dempsey of Connecticut,
Warren Knowles of Wisconsin, and Jack Williams of Arizona, and Illinois
Representatives Dan Rostenkowski, Roman Pucinski, and Edward Derwinski.
Three
Illinois education officials were also members of the Freedom Studies
Center board: Ray Page, superintendent of public instruction for the
state of Illinois, and Robert Hanrahan, Superintendent, Cook County
schools, and Benjamin Willis, retired general superintendent of Chicago
schools. CIA archives contain varous documents on the Freedom Studies Center and the proposed "Cold War College."
Had
President Lyndon Johnson not named him the head of the Pentagon's
counter-insurgency effort in Indochina, the "Cold War College," also to
be known as the " United Freedom Academy," would have been run by
General Edward Lansdale, who planned to run the "college" as a
"psycho-political warfare" center.
Lansdale envisaged sending
"freedom teams" of American young men and women Cold War "college"
graduates to "change the course of history in favor of freedom." It was
just the type of work engaged in by Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham,
in post-Sukarno Indonesia, and his grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham,
in laying the groundwork for young Third World nationals to study in
Hawaii during the height of the Cold War.
It is also noteworthy
that one of the Freedom Center's directors was retired General Lawrence
H. Whiting, Vice Chairman of the Board of the American Furniture Mart in
Chicago [Whiting was not a real general but had been a "special
consultant" to the War department in World War II and appears to have
self-adopted the title of "general."]. Another board member for the
center is Frank Vignola, President of Vignola Furniture Company. Obama's
grandfather, Stanley Dunham, claims to have been a furniture salesman,
including for non-existent Pratt Furniture in Honolulu.Obama's
mother's application for U.S. passport renewal, filed in Jakarta,
Indonesia on August 13, 1968, lists her father's place of employment as
the Bank of Hawaii, the same employer as Obama's grandmother,
Madelyn Dunham, who died two days prior to Obama's election in 2008. WMR
previously reported that Madelyn Dunham's vice president position for
the bank entailed handling the escrow accounts for CIA slush payments to
America's favorite dictators in Asia, including Suharto, Park Chung Hee
in South Korea, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Lon Nol in Cambodia, and
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
The Freedom Studies Center
was headed by John Fisher, a former FBI agent under J. Edgar Hoover,
another center supporter, who became head of security for Sears, Roebuck
& Company in Chicago to bust up communist infiltration of Sears'
affiliated labor unions. Fisher later worked for the right-wing American
Security Council, a corporate entity that fought against communist
influence in the United States and abroad.
In a November 18,
1970, appeal for corporate support, Luce states that "the Freedom
Studies Center wants to begin to enroll 40 full-time students in a pilot
leadership training program. Next year we hope to have 100 students and
reach the level of 400 students soon thereafter." Luce added, "as part
of this training, students will work on actual projects underway at the
American Security Council, the Institute for American Strategy, and the
Council on National Security."
Although Luce's college never got
off the ground, the CIA increased its recruitment programs at favored
colleges, including Obama's two almae mater, Occidental in Los Angeles
and Columbia University in New York. Obama's post-Columbia employer,
Business International Corporation, a CIA front, increased its own
presence within leftist student organizations, including Students for
Democratic Society (SDS). In Luce's November 18, 1970, letter, she
warned about leftist infiltration of U.S. urban centers: ". . . of
Castro's 42 training centers in Cuba for exporting revolution to all the
Americas, two are devoted exclusively to training leaders for urban
guerrilla warfare in the United States! Just one of these has already
trained 902 revolutionaries like S.D.S. leader Mark Rudd, and Black
Panther leader Stokely Carmichael."
Although the "Cold War
College" never materialized, the CIA's Cold War college recruitment
programs at the University of Hawaii helped groom CIA
agents-of-influence Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack H. Obama, Sr., and Lolo
Soetoro Mangunharjo. Langley's recruiters at Occidental also nurtured a
young and, according to his classmates, a very effeminate, lazy, and
pot-smoking Barack Obama, Jr. whose only real friends were a handful of
Pakistani students, including his roommate Imad Husain. In 1979, as the
Soviets were consolidating their hold on Afghanistan, someone with
Obama's family CIA connections, as well as Pakistani connections, was a
prime candidate for recruitment. Later, as Black Panthers and El Rukn
gang members began to reach out to countries like Libya in the
mid-1980s, Barack Obama, Jr. came to the rescue, practically parachuting
into south Chicago from BIC's swank offices in Manhattan, to become a
"community organizer," or more precisely, a "snitch."
Obama's personal life style did not deter his usefulness to the CIA.
One
person who was instrumental in cleaning up Indonesian state files and
archives of any information that could be damaging to Obama's family,
including Lolo Soetoro, is American Samoa delegate to the House of
Representatives Eni Faleomavaega. During the first week of July 2007,
while Obama's candidacy for president had, on the surface, as much
chance as that of Dennis Kucinich or Chris Dodd, Faleomavaega visited
Jakarta as part of a congressional delegation for talks with Indonesian
leaders, including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Faleomavaega
was looking for concessions for the plight of his fellow Pacific
islanders, the people of Indonesian-occupied West Papua. However,
Faleomavaega also wanted access to Indonesia's files on the Obama and
Soetoro families -- in what amounted to a "clean-up" operation for his
friend Obama. The official reason given was the files were needed for
the U.S. National Archives. Yet, in July 2007, it was Hillary Clinton
who was considered the "chosen one" for the Democrats. Certainly, no one
paid a visit to Zagreb, Croatia looking for documents for the US
National Archives in the event Kucinich, of Croatian ancestry, was
elected president. However, in July 2007, there appeared to be a
foregone conclusion that Obama would become the next President of the
United States and that Indonesian files had to be picked clean. For
Faleomavaega, he got nothing for his West Papuans or his clean-up
operation on behalf of the CIA and, with the Republican take-over of the
House, he lost his vote in committee, as well.
