November 3, 2008 News Article:
As the presidential election campaign draws to a close, unanswered questions about Barack Obama’s three-week visit to Pakistan 27 years ago continue to cause unease in some quarters, but his campaign has revealed few details.
Last April during a San Francisco fundraiser, Obama referred briefly to a visit he had made to Pakistan during his college years.
Campaign press secretary Bill Burton subsequently gave inquiring journalists a few facts. Obama had visited Pakistan for “about three weeks” in 1981, after visiting his mother in Indonesia. He had traveled with a college friend whose family lived in Karachi.
A few more details of the visit trickled out over the following months.
The 1981 visit took place after Obama left Occidental College in Los Angeles to transfer to Columbia University in New York that same year.
Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Muhammed Hasan Chandoo. Now a financial consultant in Armonk, N.Y., and an Obama fundraiser, Chandoo on Sunday declined to comment. He confirmed he was Obama’s “friend” and former “roommate,” but said, “I decided at the beginning of the campaign that I’d stay out of this whole game.”
According to published reports in Pakistan, Obama in 1981 also stayed at the home of a prominent politician, Ahmad Mian Soomro, in an upscale Karachi suburb, and went on a traditional partridge hunting trip north of Karachi. Soomro’s son, Muhammad Mian Soomro, is a senior politician who served as acting president before the appointment of President Asif Ali Zardari last September.
Ahmad Mian Soomro died in 1999, and attempts to reach his son for comment were unsuccessful.
An Associated Press story in May mentioned several of Obama’s Pakistani college friends, as well as an Indian friend, Vinai Thummalapally from Hyderabad, India.
The following month the Times of India, citing Thummalapally, said Obama’s staff got it wrong – Obama had not visited Hyderabad in India but Hyderabad in Pakistan.
(Hyderabad in Pakistan is a three-hour drive from Karachi. A city of about 1.5 million people – around 750,000 in 1981 – it boasts a famous bazaar. Hyderabad in India is about 900 miles from Karachi. Capital of Andhra Pradash state, it has a mostly Hindu population of about six million and is renowned for visitor attractions including forts and temples.)
Obama may have visited Pakistan again later, when his mother, Ann Dunham, held a microfinance job there in the mid-1980s.
The year Obama visited was also a particularly dangerous one for Americans. During a hijacking that March of a Pakistan passenger liner, three Americans onboard were singled out and threatened with death. (Interestingly, two of the three turned out to be wanted in the U.S. and Canada, respectively, for drug-related offenses. Pakistan at the time was a major source of heroin distributed in the U.S., along with fellow “golden crescent” states Iran and Afghanistan.)
Pakistan in 1981 also was awash with Afghan refugees who had fled their homeland after the Soviet invasion – two million by the end of that year. In Karachi Afghan arrivals added to simmering sectarian and inter-ethnic tensions that was to blight Pakistan’s largest city during the 1980s and 1990s.
The U.S. in 1981 stepped up funding, via Pakistan, to Afghans fighting the Soviet forces. Thousands of Arab and other foreign mujahideen flocked to Pakistan and Afghanistan to join the war.
In the early 1980s, a Palestinian ideologue named Abdullah Azzam was coordinating the jihad from Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Azzam, who also taught at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, visited America numerous times during the 1980s, urging support for the war in Afghanistan.
Azzam’s Peshawar center was known as the Afghan Bureau. His deputy and financier was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam is regarded by many scholars as having laid the ideological groundwork for modern-day jihad. After his assassination in a 1989 bomb blast, bin Laden took over the bureau and developed what would become al-Qaeda.
How much – if anything – the 19- or 20-year-old Obama knew about the Afghanistan jihad during that 1981 visit is unclear.
But it’s precisely the shortage of details that worries some, like veteran security analyst Bahukutumbi Raman, a former Indian counterterrorism chief.
Mulling how a President Obama would deal with each of South Asia’s historical foes, Raman said that as an Indian, he naturally felt troubled that Obama had not disclosed the Pakistan visit earlier.
“Why did he keep mum on his visit to Pakistan till this question was raised?” asked Raman, who is the director of India’s Institute for Topical Studies. “Has he disclosed all the details regarding his Pakistan visit? Was it as innocuous as made out by him – to respond to the invitation of a Pakistani friend or was there something more to it?”
Raman continued, “As I read about Obama’s visit to Pakistan in the 1980s, I could not help thinking of dozens of things. Of the Afghan jihad against communism. Of the fascination of many Afro-Americans for the jihad. Of the visits of a stream of Afro-Americans to Pakistan to feel the greatness of the jihad. Of their fascination for Abdullah Azzam …”
The Obama campaign did not respond to an invitation to comment on some of the speculation surrounding the visit to Pakistan or to provide further details about the trip.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/few-details-known-about-obama-s-three-weeks-pakistan
This might help understand Obama’s Pakistan connection, his time at Columbia University where other students do not remember him attending classes........ And why at the Chantilly VA Marriott meeting during the 2008 Dem primary, Obama was selected for president rather than Hillary.
The CIA deep state fighting Trump is much deeper than most realize....
Conspiracy Alert... Please Read with a Grain of Salt
(The following very interesting article is referenced below)
Title: The Ford Foundation is not what you think
San Francisco attorney and investment banker Horace Rowan Gaither sculpted the foundation charter, and he also created the CIA-connected Rand Corporation, Hollywood’s answer to the England’s Tavistock Institute. Gaither put John J. McCloy in charge of the foundation, and McCloy handed the job to Richard Bissell, who passed it off to Bonesman McGeorge Bundy. Before the arrival of Cheney and Rumsfeld, McCloy and Bundy were Washington’s most dynamic duo. Funny story about Bissell: he attended Yale but rejected the offer to become a Bonesman. It was Bissell who came up with the idea of hiring the Sicilian Men-of-Honor to assassinate Fidel Castro, a hit team that later diverted to kill JFK, and he and Dulles initiated this plan by holding a private meeting with Chicago Godfather Sam Giancana.
You’ll find the dirtiest players in the world of intel circling around Bissell, a list that included W.A. Harriman, Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Tracy Barnes, Cord Meyer, E. Howard Hunt, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler, David Atlee Philips. From the Bay of Pigs to the coup in Guatemala, you’ll find Bissell and his go-to team in charge.
Gaither also put his relative Peter in charge of the Asian accounts. Peter’s son had the most amazing trajectory, from Dartmouth, to Kissinger Associates, to Council on Foreign Relations, to President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by age 42.
A Congressional investigation in 1976 revealed half the Foundation’s international grants were actually being funded by the CIA as the foundation very quickly morphed into the primary propaganda tool of the CIA, and its staff peppered with spooks, especially staff posted overseas.
Ann Dunham (Barack Obama’s mother) worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and also received funding from the World Bank. In 1965, her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, assisted the CIA coup against President Sukarno that resulted in the savage massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians suspected of being communist sympathizers. Rockefeller feared his oil operations in Indonesia might be nationalized, so a holocaust was arranged to prevent it.
Peter Gaither supervised Ann Dunham’s Ford Foundation microfinance programs. Isn’t it somewhat odd that their offspring would rise to the tippy-top of the pyramid and at such young ages?
Allen Hulton, a retired postal worker, gave a sworn affidavit to Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio concerning Thomas and Mary Ayers, whose home in Glen Ellyn, IL, was on his daily postal route. Hulton had many conversations with Mary over the years and learned the couple was helping sponsor a foreign student from Indonesia into Harvard. A few days later, Hulton met the young lad.
“He was very polite, dressed nicely, but informally, slacks and a dress shirt, and spoke with no accent. Immediately this young black man entered into conversation with me. He told me he had taken the train out from Chicago and had come to thank the Ayers family personally for having helped him with his education.”
Hulton asked the man about future plans and he “told me he was going to be president of the United States. There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it. He sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way. It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already prearranged.”
Imagine Hulton’s surprise when the young man, who he identifies as Barack Obama, fulfilled his dream.
Maybe you’re wondering what happened to the Ayers’ offspring, and if their child had such a remarkable trajectory as well. Yes, he did. Their son Bill became the FBI’s most wanted terrorist after founding the Weather Underground and instigating several deadly bombings. Ayers and his compatriot Bernadette Dohrn were responsible for destroying the student youth movement by driving it off a cliff, something the CIA was certainly interested in having happen. And afterwards, these two terrorists would be rehabilitated as “anti-war activists” and given cushy professorships in Chicago. The rank and file of their tatty organization suffered great privation during their years of operation, but Ayers and Dohrn were known to have always eaten well and slept between sheets, while sipping expensive wines.
Maybe you can put the rest of the pieces of this puzzle together? Maybe you know now why Obama’s resume is so closed from public scrutiny. I think it’s great we have a president of color, but don’t kid yourself: our elections are completely rigged by big business and the CIA and they always will be until the entire system is given an overhaul.
Thanks for posting this scary data re the longtime relationship of Obama and his criminal buddies, the Pakis!