Secrets of Obama family unlocked

WHEN Barack Obama, America’s newest presidential hopeful, was hit by allegations that he had attended a radical Islamic madrasah school as a boy in Indonesia, the claims spread like a virus through the media and internet.

It was a lie — the school was barely more religious than British church schools — but it was also a sign that Obama’s chances of winning the presidency depend to an unusual degree on his life story and character.

The race is on to define the gifted but little-known senator for Illinois and The Sunday Times can reveal that his heritage is far more diverse and astonishing than anything American voters have heard so far.

Obama, 45, has two half- sisters, one living in Britain, and five surviving half-brothers, the eldest of whom converted to Islam, and whose stories span the globe.

Nobody was more surprised to hear that Obama had reportedly been educated in a madrasah than Julia Suryakusuma, a close friend of his mother until her death from ovarian cancer in 1995.

Suryakusuma, 53, one of Indonesia’s most outspoken feminist writers, has fearlessly taken on extremist Muslim clerics in print. Last week she described Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, “as a liberal and a humanist”, who learnt to speak fluent Indonesian and adored the culture.

“She was interested in religions but didn’t follow one. She was a free-thinker,” Suryakusuma said. “She was a pioneer and when she came to Indonesia she was ensnared and enchanted.”

On the coffee table in her cool modern house in Jakarta, full of the beautiful Indonesian fabrics and carvings which captivated her friend, lies an album of photographs which record the happy times.

There is Dunham, pale-skinned, jolly and frizzy-haired, celebrating with her friends at an art gallery opening or a drinks party, wearing the baggy, free-flowing clothes often favoured by bohemian western women in Asia. She always seemed to be laughing.

“You know Ann was really, really white,” smiled Suryakusuma, looking through the album, “even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I think she just loved people of a different skin colour, brown people.”

Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas, but her parents moved to Hawaii in search of a better life. According to Obama, a distant ancestor was a “full-blooded Cherokee”.

Dunham’s first marriage was to a Kenyan student, also called Barack Obama, but he left the family to study at Harvard and returned to Africa.

She went on to marry Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student, and moved to his native Indonesia with six-year-old Barack in 1967, after the new dictator Suharto summoned the country’s citizens home.

Soetoro became a government relations consultant with a big US oil company. “He changed when he came back to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma recalled. “Men can be a certain way when they are in the West and when they come back they are sucked into their own culture.”

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, first published in 1995, Obama does not conceal the estrangement between his mother and stepfather as Soetoro made compromises with Indonesia’s power elite. They divorced and he died decades later of a liver complaint.

At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite private school. His mother went back to Indonesia with Obama’s half-sister Maya, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, and became an expert on the “feminine crafts”, such as weaving and basket-making, practised by the women of Java.

Suryakusuma recalled that Dunham called her son “Berry” — Barry with an Indonesian lilt. “We were both mothers and we talked about how difficult it was for a mother to separate herself and send her child away, but she was really concerned about Barry’s education.”

She first met Obama when he came to visit his mother as a young adult. “She was so proud of him. I remember she was glowing with pride when he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

“You know, having a white mother and a black father and coming to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma reflected, “I could see he had the same kind of empathy with people that his mother had.”

Obama’s multi-hued heritage has put a distance between him and the African-American community, which has been reluctant to claim him as a “brother”.

America’s white community, in contrast, has embraced Obama as a hopeful affirmation that the fabled melting pot can transcend race. With his middle name Hussein (like Saddam) and surname Obama (like Osama), he is a rare and exotic figure in American politics.

“I believe the American electorate is ready to support leaders who embody the American dream despite their differences. In doing so, we affirm ourselves as a tolerant people,” said William Galston, a senior fellow in public policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Yet there are details in Obama’s life that have yet to be subjected to full scrutiny. It may not be the information itself that matters, according to Galston, but “how Obama talks about the facts as they emerge and handles questions and controversies”.

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet was the first to spot in 2004, when Obama burst on the national stage at the Democratic party convention, that his memoir, Dreams from My Father, contained “composite” characters and changed names.

“Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not,” she pointed out.

Obama admitted as much in his introduction, saying he had altered characters “for the sake of their privacy”. As with the revelation that he took cocaine in his youth, he appears to have been candid about potential areas of controversy.

Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.

They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.

His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.

After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.

“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.

After his parents split up, Obama saw his father only once before learning that he had died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.

Obama, in contrast, became a committed Christian while he was working as a community activist in Chicago. Last week he denounced the reports that he was educated in a madrasah as a “ludicrous” smear.

Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, believes Obama’s richly textured African and Indonesian background will attract voters, no matter how controversial it is.

“America loves a success story — the new generation that rises from the sins and misfortunes of the older generation,” Sabato said.

In Indonesia, Suryakusuma said she could still feel the “warm” presence of Obama’s mother Ann. “She would be so proud if she knew about Barry, so proud to think that her little boy would be running for president of the United States.”

But what happened to the 'story' he told in front of millions on TV at the RAT's 2004 Convention about his father being only a poor lowly sheep-herder?

There's a lot of history in Barack Hussein Obamba's background he doesn't want to get out if one cares to do some research.

Put aside the fact he has Soros backing him and him being mixed up with Rezko, the real story lies in his deals in Hawaii by the same crooks that paved the way to the WH for klinton.

[snip]
Obama’s corrupt backers in Illinois’ seamy and fetid political swamps are matched only by the unsavory gaggle of politically-connected supporters assembling to back his candidacy in Hawaii. Obama’s Hawaii support comes from a group of Democrat politicos around former Governor John Waihee—considered by some the dirtiest figure in Hawaii’s very dirty politics. This is significant because Waihee and his cronies were also early money backers of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 bid for the White House.

The little-known story of Clinton’s Waihee ‘early money’ Hawaii connection is told in the 1997 PBS Frontline special “The Fixers”, a story which begins with poor Hawaii farmers being driven off their land by Honolulu police and even an SWAT team in a mid-1980s deal to build Maunawili Valley Oahu golf course deal with Japanese investors flush from the Japanese market and real estate bubble. “Fixers” (and Waihee associates) Gene and Nora Lum go from buying the entire Hawaii State legislature in order to pass a bill allowing golf courses on agricultural land to becoming ‘early money’ Clinton financial backers. They engage in a series of transactions mixing Oklahoma gas leases, Democrat connections with Asian money and the sale of political influence to facilitate other Hawaii land deals. LINK: “The Fixers” transcripts.

The story continues into the Clintons’ better-known mid-1990s Asian money scandals involving John Huang, Charlie Trieh, Johnny Chung, the Lippo Bank of Indonesia, Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Hillary Clinton, and 938 documented visits to the Lincoln Bedroom by hundreds of people who paid thousands for the privilege. Finally the story told in “The Fixers” ends with then-President Clinton, ten days after winning his second Presidential term, on his way to Asia stopping in Honolulu and playing golf with Waihee in the pouring rain on the Maunawili Valley Oahu course where it all started.

The ‘early money’ backing of Clinton paid off handsomely for Waihee and his cronies. Clinton in 1993 signed the so-called “Apology Resolution” in essence apologizing for the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and 1898 US annexation of Hawaii and implicitly placing Hawaii Statehood in question.

The Apology Resolution quickly became a politically correct ‘guilt’ justification for corrupt Hawaii political operators to rake in millions operating lucrative state and federally funded programs and even private companies purportedly benefiting Native Hawaiians. One deal alone, Sandwich Isles Communications, has raked in $500 million in federal funds to provide useless fiber optic connections to Hawaiian Homelands residential lots--most of which are undeveloped.

Today Hawaii’s political class is focused on passage of the so-called “Akaka Bill” a descendant of the “Apology Resolution” which would create a sovereign native Hawaiian “tribal” government—a potential source of billions for Hawaii’s venal elites. Obama has been such a strong Senatorial advocate for the Akaka Bill, he is often called “Hawaii’s third Senator.”

In addition to the Hawaii Democrat dirty money machine Obama is tied in with Goldman Sachs, investment houses specializing in highly regulated industries and many Clinton administration figures as described in the December 6 Harper’s Magazine article, “Barack Obama, Inc.”:

“He (Obama) quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation’s manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama’s top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a “leadership PAC,” a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians’ campaigns—and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.”

Goldman Sachs had substantial dealings with ex-Governor Waihee and the corrupt trustees of Hawaii’s $6 billion Bishop Estate exposed finally in the late 1990s and documented in the current Hawaii best-selling book, “Broken Trust”.

Is “Broken Trust” a thing of the past? Obama’s Hawaii steering committee taps into both Bishop Estate and the Waihee administration. As the December 13 Honolulu Advertiser explains, “Chuck Freedman, a retired vice president of corporate relations for Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) and former communications director for former Gov. John Waihee, said the committee has contacted Obama's aides and has received a positive response.” Currently three of the five Bishop Estate trustees are also board members of Hawaiian Electric. HECO monopolizes power generation and distribution in Hawaii and through a double-taxation scheme known as the General Excise Tax, supplies a large part of the State General Fund. HECO also provides many thousands of dollars of political ‘donations’ to legislative incumbents. Bishop Estate is the state’s largest private landowner. Three of the five Bishop Estate trustees are board members of HEI the parent company of HECO.

Voters rarely got the truth from Bill Clinton; will they get the straight story from Obama? Not judging by his comments to Harper’s: “Progressive candidates generally have a harder time raising money, he said, and at times some of them will ‘trim their sails’ on behalf of the people who are financing them.”

Hawaii may not amount to much in the Electoral College, but to the National Democrat Party money machine, it is a fountainhead of cash. If Waihee and his cronies could parlay their dirty land deals into the Presidency for their selected candidate in 1992, they could do it again. Barack Hussein Obama will keep his Islamic past under wraps and his radical secularist sails trimmed. He will say whatever it takes to bring in the cash and win election. His candidacy, record and corrupt connections deserve close scrutiny now, before it is too late. "
[snip]

http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_15480.shtml

IMO the plan is for hitlery to be the President for 8 years and Barack Hussein Obama as her VP, in-waiting to take over the WH for the following eight years.

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