Obama worked for CIA front BIC - Spooky indeed! Obama, Colombia, Afghanistan, drugs and more...
Johnny Asia
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2010/01/spooky-indeed-obama-colombia.html
Spooky indeed! Obama, Colombia, Afghanistan, drugs and more...
Obama and the CIA: According to Wayne Madsen, the White House press
office has made it clear that they do not want any journalists asking
about Obama's post-graduate employment with "Business International
Corporation (BIC), a global financial and political information
company that WMR previously reported was a front for the CIA."
A lot of people don't trust Madsen. I treat him warily. To be fair,
though, Madsen does seem to have gotten there first on the BIC story.
Here's what he wrote in February of 2009:
After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama
went to work for a firm called Business International Corporation
(BIC), a firm that was linked to economic intelligence gathering for
the CIA. For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC's financial
services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing
Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly
newsletter. An informed source has told WMR that Obama's tuition debt
at Columbia was paid off by BIC.
I printed much the same thing in August, based on reporting by John
Pilger and William Blum. Having fallen out of the habit of reading
Madsen, I did not know that he had gotten there first.
I'm fascinated by the claim involving Obama's tuition debt. After
school, Obama seems never to have cared much about paying back student
loans. He pinballed his way through three very expensive institutions
of higher learning without fretting about how he was going to pay for
it all.
When I was making the high-school-to-college transition, I had some
friends from affluent families, and they never seriously contemplated
Occidental: It was too pricey. So how did Obama do it?
That said, please recall that we're dealing with a claim, not a fact.
Madsen's source is unnamed. That's a common problem in Madsen-land.
Colombia: Madsen offers an even more intriguing claim, also based (I'm
sorry to say) on info from anonymous tipsters:
WMR has learned from informed sources in Kabul that Obama has been
extremely friendly, through personal correspondence on White House
letterhead, with a private military company that counts among its
senior personnel a number of Afghan mujaheddin-Soviet war veterans who
fought alongside the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah
Masood. The firm is also involved in counter-insurgency operations in
Colombia, where Obama is building seven new military bases, and Iraq.
Seven new bases in Colombia? Yes. Madsen is not the only one with this
story.
The odd thing is, Obama has denied the reported military project:
"There have been those in the region who have been trying to play
this up as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric. This is not
accurate," Obama told Hispanic media reporters.
"We have had a security agreement with Colombia for many years
now. We have updated that agreement. We have no intent in establishing
a U.S. military base in Colombia," Obama said.
Yet later in the same Reuters story, we learn:
The new security arrangement would allow the Pentagon to lease
access to seven Colombian military bases for U.S. support in fighting
drug traffickers and guerrillas involved in the cocaine trade.
The agreement would also increase the number of American troops in
Colombia above the current total of less than 300 but not more than
800, the maximum permitted under the existing pact.
Okay, so we are leasing bases, not building them. And we are adding
more troops. But Obama says that we are not establishing a U.S.
military base in Colombia.
Of course, Obama said that he would also renegotiate NAFTA. Speaking
of which, here's a disconcerting sub-head in the WSJ:
Obama to Colombia: Military base now, free trade later.
I vote for neither.
A lot of Obots thought they were voting for neither. Now they're in
the rationalization business -- which I, thank Jeebus, do not have be
in.
If you don't mind reading SocialistWorker.org (odd, isn't it, how all
real socialists can't stand Obama?), chew on this:
The current conflict centers around the October 30 signing of a
military pact between Colombia and the U.S. that gives the American
armed forces the use of seven military bases in Colombia, and grants
immunity to U.S. soldiers operating in there.
Colombian President �lvaro Uribe and President Barack Obama claim
that the U.S. military presence in Colombia will serve only to combat
narco-traffickers and leftist guerillas, not threaten Colombia's
neighbors. Yet as the Venezuelanalysis.com Web site reports, this
claim "is contradicted by the 2010 fiscal year budget of the U.S. Air
Force Military Construction Program, which states that...the pact
'provides a unique opportunity for full-spectrum operations in a
critical sub-region of our hemisphere' and 'supports mobility missions
by providing access to the entire continent.'"
Sounds like Obama is trying to double-talk us into war. Just like
Dubya. And anyone who thinks that American covert operatives are in
the business of stopping the drug trade must be high. The only guys
who get stopped are competitors.
So who or what is the private military contractor involved with these
bases? Here is a bit from a handy-dandy Wikipedia article on such
contractors:
In 2006, a U.S. congressional report listed a number of PMCs and
other enterprises that have signed contracts to carry out
anti-narcotics operations and related activities as part of Plan
Colombia. DynCorp was among those contracted by the State Department,
while others signed contracts with the Defense Department. Other
companies from different countries, including Israel, have also signed
contracts with the Colombian Defense Ministry to carry out security or
military activities.
So, could Madsen have been referring to DynCorp? Possibly. Here's a
cute little DynCorp fact you may not know:
According to whistleblower Ben Johnston, a former aircraft
mechanic who worked for the company in Bosnia, Dyncorp employees and
supervisors engaged in sex with 12 to 15 year old children, and sold
them to each other as slaves.
Lovely. Johnston was, of course, fired, and his charges did not lead
to an official investigation. DynCorp continues to receive billions of
taxpayer dollars. And just to add to the cynicism quotient, we learn
that DynCorp has also been accused of trafficking in narcotics out of
Colombia:
According to a monthly DEA intelligence report from last year,
officers of Colombia's National Police force intercepted and opened,
on May 12, 2000, a US-bound Federal Express package at Bogota's El
Dorado International Airport. The parcel "contained two (2) small
bottles of a thick liquid" that "had the same consistency as motor
oil." The communiqu� goes on to report that the liquid substance
"tested positive for heroin" and that the "alleged heroin laced liquid
weighed approximately 250 grams."...the package belonged [to] an
unnamed employee of DynCorp, who was sending the parcel to the
company's Andean operations headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base,
Florida.
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky wants to ban the use of
private military contractors. Fat chance, but I appreciate the fact
that Schakowsky gets it.
"Reports that DynCorp employees have been implicated in drug
trafficking, the very thing they are paid to help prevent, only
strengthens my conviction that outsourcing is the wrong policy...."
Well, it's the right policy if you're out to make some money as a dope
peddler.
DynCorp is also involved in a big way in -- you guessed it --
Afghanistan. Among many other tasks, DynCorp trains the Afghan police
forces, which are universally despised:
"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them
and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of
Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three
days after flying in by helicopter.
He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children
had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of
"bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.
"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and
rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see
these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then
let the child go."
Small wonder the Taliban has enjoyed a renewed popularity.
Remember all those stories about KBR and Haliburton getting no-bid
contracts in Iraq? Same shit, different day.
Last year DynCorp and Fluor, together with KBR, became part of the
Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, a huge contract once
awarded exclusively to KBR.
In July the Pentagon announced that it planned on having DynCorp
and Fluor take over KBR's work in Afghanistan under Logcap, doing
everything from providing laundry to food and fuel. The decision came
as President Obama sent 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan
to go after the Taliban in an expanding war.
I'm beginning to wonder: Is Obama Bush III -- or is he Cheney II?
DynCorp brags about its anti-narcotics activities. But last year, we
saw a couple of stories that make one wonder.
In April, a DynCorp employee in Afghanistan -- a security team leader
involved with training those wonderful Afghan cops -- was found dead
of a drug overdose:
Investigators are looking into a number of allegations, including
that the employee procured drugs on monthly trips to Thailand, and
that his superiors were aware of his conduct and failed to take
action...
Thailand? Why would a DynCorp guy training cops in Afghanistan be
going to Thailand on a routine basis? Apparently, the company knew
about these trips...
The probe also involves allegations that the employee was arrested
by Thai police in March for stealing a $14,000 watch; that employees
who spoke about the issue to State Department officials were
threatened with retaliation by supervisors; and that company drug
testing following the man's death resulted in four other employees
testing positive, the sources said.
So wrote the WP; if there were follow-up reports, I have not seen
them.
Pretty much the exact same thing occurred to another DynCorp employee
in September:
A U.S. contractor helping to train Afghanistan's national police
was found dead of a possible drug overdose last week in Kabul, just
months after the State Department reprimanded his company for another
worker's drug-related death.
The Afghan cops are widely thought to be involved in the drug trade.
Maybe their trainers are getting a cut?
DynCorp receives massive U.S. government contracts to combat narcotics
in Afghanistan, yet -- surprise, surprise! -- the trade has exploded
there. Your tax dollars built a $37 million bridge (outsourced to an
Italian firm!) between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and that bridge has
now proven to be an enormous boon to heroin traffickers.
"You can give your bag of heroin to one of the guards, and he will
carry it across for you."
Remember, DynCorp trains security personnel in Afghanistan. To be
fair, I don't know if they have ever trained any H-toting guards who
work on that bridge.
The U.S.-financed bridge has made drug trafficking even easier,
truck driver Mohammed said with a toothy smile: "You load the truck
with drugs."
The ferry that used to operate at Nizhny Panj carried about 40
trucks a day. The bridge can carry 1,000 vehicles daily.
Every day last year - extrapolating from United Nations estimates
- an average of more than 4 metric tons of opium, which can be made
into some 1,320 pounds of heroin, moved on the northern route. Put
another way, the equivalent of nearly 6 million doses of pure heroin -
at 100 milligrams each - is carried across the northern Afghan border
each day.
Maybe that's why Obama escalated. He is putting in enough troops to
protect the profitable status quo -- but not enough to transform
Afghanistan into a modern, civilized nation.
Why do you think they call it Hopium?