Mushroom Mayhem

There's no point trying to conceal my man crush for Terence McKenna. I like a polymath who isn't frightened to say odd things like 'the mushroom said to me' as it often did during his ethnobotanic experiments of hallucinogen plants and mushrooms.

That's how he talks about the Logos while sharing a couple of ideas he pursued over a long period of time in and out of that post hypnogogic yet pre-sentient state of mind. Hypnogogia being the first stage of hallucinating, and well documented within its sleep/awakening related contribution to creativity.

Recently I came across another Gigabyte or so of his recorded talks on the internet through peer to peer file sharing. He died in the year 2000 of a brain tumour, which when he was informed it was mushroom shaped provoked an 'of course it is' response out of him. He had a sense of humour. I think his second most provocative theory is the one regarding the alien nature of some mushrooms (I think it's the ones with Dimethyltyptamine) . Since reading that I've come across evidence that supports the suggestion that mushroom spores can indeed travel unharmed (by space X rays mainly) and thus might not be indigenous to our planet.

Yesterday I was having a conversation on twitter with a medical and health importer to Thailand. I suddenly realised I'd probably missed a rendezvous with a friend of mine who is setting up hospitals in Cambodia, so one email/phone call later I was sitting in their serviced apartment overlooking an horizon of empty office/accommodation space in  Bangkok. His room mate/travelling companion and I chatted a while, and we got talking about TED talks where he reminded me of the Paul Stamets talk on mushrooms that I had yet to see.

Well, here it is below, and if it kindles your interest in mushrooms then that's a good start because the next step is (if you don't mind) a bit of tie-dyed hippy post production (as many are) in your podcasting content, then get stuck into the bard McKenna. 

I've listened to over a hundred hours of his talks (and more including his trialogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abrahams) and so probably unlike you I really enjoy his candid 'the mushroom said to me' moments but just as rewarding are the indiscriminate and wide range of topics he covered, with in my mind the most eloquent and unscripted vocabulary I've ever come across (Though I imagine that other Irishman Oscar Wilde was a compelling  voice too). I'd say McKenna was the most interesting generalist in the world at one point and that doesn't mean he isn't a specialist either. Watch this TED there's nothing in it which diminishes the credibility of the wilder stuff that Terrence talked about and so the mushroom journey (for me) continues.

The Ugly American - Marlon Brando's Thai Allegory

Brando's relationship with women wasn't the most beautiful of stories, but other than that he was a rare breed of beautiful American. Beautiful physically and beautiful of heart. I accidently completed his biography just days before he died, yet it is only with this movie that I start to pick up on what really separated Brando from his contemporaries.

The Ugly American is easily a 10 000 word essay begging for a PhD thesis. It's themes and characters are so much the leitmotifs of imperial history that I'm not sure I can do it justice here. Right from the opening credits it's brutally obvious that it's ALL about Thailand, Indochina and the Ugly American way of spreading like a post war global virus of capitalism through the healthy bodies of indigenous peoples not yet acquainted with the way of greed is good, greedier is better, greediest is best.

Let's dispense with the cliches. The Ugly American adumbrates Asian stereotypes with Hollywood naffness as good as The Wonderful World of Suzy Wong and Bridge Over The River Kwai. It's sprinkled with 'fucky sucky' dialogue and cultural faux pas like Brando wai-ing a child. Yet it overcomes these time and again. It's as contemporary and fresh as a post Fallujah Pentagonal rape still dripping with non menstruated blood.

This could just as easily be about the Romans or the Visigoths. I'm unclear how the script ever slipped through the Hollywood propaganda massage machine in such a raw form and with such prescient quality. Whoever wrote it knew the ritual bloodbath of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was around the corner or was acquainted with the roll out of history's relationship with power.

Put simply I've no idea how an anti-imperial film was made during the era of quintessential crew cut, patriarchal and military global killing spree that was post war United States long before Iraq or El Salvador or Panama or Libya or or or, it just goes on and fucking on doesn't it?

Unusually and somewhat sophisticatedly the movie opens on Brando's senate committee hearing approval for ambassador of a thinly disguised Thailand. Most American's can't point towards Karachi on a map and so this opening scene is a closer look at the political machinations of a process where initially Brando is portrayed as being too intimate with a local hero to perform. The message is there are plenty of better psychopaths out there willing to administrate slaughter with telephone calls and U.S. Embassy rubber stamps.

Because of the opposition to Brando we're pitched emotionally into rooting for the protagonist  complete with early warning signs of hairline mustache and pipe smoking truculence. Brando is every bit the polished and seasoned typical U.S. ambassador psychopath confident of his ability to know what's good for others.

And yet Brando is too young and too good looking and too close to revolutionary figures to sail through the hearing. Somehow he does and is quickly whizzing past a dangerous protest crowd at Don Muang airport protesting the latest real estate encroachment of U.S. hegemony before heading on to a welcome reception with none other than the King of Thailand.

Despite much of the cookie cutter dialogue that comes with the role, Brando delivers time and again by transforming the implausible into an alchemical inevitable . What makes Brando stand out for me here is his ability to squeeze some normality into the artifice of late 50's early 60's Hollywood production.

Punctuating this turmoil and fromage fondue stereotypes is a performance of greater importance than  Yul Brynner in The King and I.  Kukrit Pramoj playing the Prime Minister of Thailand above went on to be the real P.M. but delivers here possibly the finest Asian performance in English I've ever seen. It's witty, intelligent, temporally accurate and delivered with conviction and authenticity. Not only was Kukrit Pramoj dealing behind the scenes to protect Thailand but it seems he was writing the script and acting out the scenes in movies too. I urge you to steal this movie from the internet just for this confrontation. I don't have much sympathy for the ultra Royalist privy councillors or indeed the Internationalists these days but Kukrit Pramoj is outstanding here. Unless I'm mistaken his homosexuality too might explain this fascinating General who evidently could deliver with aplomb as a politician, soldier and thespian too. Remarkable.

Towards the end of the movie we're positioned betwixt a repentant Brando and stoical Siamese people's leader with Brando seeking reconciliation with quintessential 20th century lines such as 'maybe we paid too much attention to the headlines'.

It's a damming indictment of corporately controlled profit driven media's crusade against an ecologically kinder wealth creation model other than capitalism. The movie ends with Brando cornered by a hostile U.S press only ever seen in movies yet never in real life. Brando's humiliated and defeated face is beamed into U.S. TV screens with a message that is as fresh today as it was then. The caution is against indifference. I'd add ignorance to that charge leveled by Brando with most Americans completely oblivious of who pays for how fast that food is delivered.

This is how the beautiful American tried to warn the U.S.

By playing an ugly American.

Timeless Marketing Classics - Charles Frith

I wrote this for Graeme Harrison's post about planners favourite books and it was not only a little late for submission to his blog post when the inspiration finally struck me but it was also written about 3.30 am underneath that nightclub (pictured above and taken on the worlds first 5 Mgp camera "i-mobile" by Samart in Thailand) and hastily bashed out on the Apple Macbook Air that was stolen by taxi 1878 because I can only write from the heart as I need to believe what I'm sharing, and so this took a long time to reach the conclusion I've lightheartedly but with complete sincerity given. 

I thought and thought and thought about it and finally concluded I couldn't recommend most business related books as I've learned more from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy then any papyrus dry Peter Drucker or soundbite drenched Seth Godin. 

Anyway here is Timeless Marketing Classics - Charles Frith 

This is probably going to upset a few people, and I guess it is a shocker of a confession to make, but I've been thinking about what I"m going to write for a couple of weeks since Graeme asked me to share which books have been most influential on my thinking. I'm currently reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin about Lincoln. I bought it because on the back it says that when the Whitehouse Press Corp (the toothless gravy train riders of the last eight years) asked POTUS about what book he'd be taking to the Whitehouse, Barry Obama answered without hesitation that it would be the Lincoln account of how he pitched all his enemies into some sort of forward moving equilibrium that earned him a near deity place in history. The time its taking to conclude on those books is eating me alive because two weeks later and I still cant think of more than one book to recommend.

Well let me tell you folks. I USED to be a prolific reader. I read and I read and I read for consecutive decades of my life. I think I even did the whole bottle-of-rum a day while page turning and inhaling rather thick American political history for a year or so on a tropical beach nearly a decade ago now.

In any case, I urge you if the chance avails itself to carve your way through Kissinger's political autobiographies with the trilogy best captured by the middle tome, YEARS OF UPHEAVAL. It's possible to come away from that book and think bombing ones way to defeat in the Mekong Delta along The Ho Chi Minh Trail, and Laos and Cambodia without a thought for the millions of South East Asians who suffered and died in this political ideology war fought in a proxy country.

Doesn't America always fight it's wars in proxy countries? Did we get stuffed on the Marshall plan with France and Germany accelerating ahead before the 50's had ended?

And you may know I never do capitals so pay attention and bookend that one with say a little Ayn (pronounced Ein people just like Ein, Zwei, Dreis. Jawohl?) Rand's Atlas Shrugged, before maybe dancing around the ballroom with a few odds and sods of Kennedy (does Camelot ever not stop dancing?). 

Also. Don't understimate Caro on LBJ (Master of the Senate is good and part of another tour de force trilogy) and for random arcane stocking filler one upmanship, say, a history of British postwar Prime Ministers - Nobody ever remembers Sir Alec Douglas Home do they? It's the curse of being so popular at Eton with his peers despite as they observed, never really having done anything to earn it. That's the British for you.

You've probably clocked me by now as bullshitting wildly on political literature while failing (and flailing) markedly to put forward a single seminal marketing book. And that's my problem. I've been thinking for a couple of weeks about the books that influenced my work the most and the embarrassing conclusion is that I only have one measly offering because if there is one genre of the printed word that is invariably padded to the max, faffs on about irrelevant stuff or convincingly puts forward a good point and then goes on to spend the rest of the book in short gasping breaths excitedly explaining why it's so right. And boy it really does feel right. It's the genre called Business books which include most marketing books. So here goes:

Advertising and marketing books are pants. 

I've read a fair amount although nowhere near as much as nerdy pants Rob Campbell in Hong Kong. If you want a big hung like a zebra bibliography of any and every marketing book ever written check out Rob's blog because not only is it impressive. It's so extensive it's bloody funny if you ask me. Trainspotters rule. Aye.

So it's just my opinion but I'd have no hesitation in recommending not placing too much faith in the latest biz book pulp pot boiler of the day. They might seem on the money but they age a little too quickly for my liking and let's face it business is just business so it's not like it changes fundamentally from decade to decade although it is just about to. Mark my words.

However there is one that has shaped pretty much everything I have done and everything I have thought about since commencing the oddysey of pretty much never thinking about anything else ever again without contextualising it within the trade of creative planning - and which I'm not particularly brilliant at but nevertheless love doing 24/7.

So.... some years back, but this side of the millenium while working at BBDO Dusseldorf, the planning library had a copy of Robert Heath's seminal: The hidden power of advertising. How low involvement processing influences the way we choose brands. and which others can't get their head round and I doubt ever will (apropos point three)

This book is like business poetry for me, because what it does is take the most tedious, stupor inducing "last-reason-why-anyone-would-get-into advertising", spittle smeared end of the short straw and lays out methodically how information commutes and computes and thus works. It's only one end of the spectrum because I'm assuming we're all wannabe artists or creative groupies of one sort or another and understand that side perfectly well.

L.I.P. applies to so much of life, from Derren Brown to Information Warfare that if it looks a bit pants on first skim then you might not be ready for it just yet. It's only when stuck for words, in the shit holes of the global advertising parachute-planning gigs that I've taken the odd cheque for, that the same questions keep coming back again and again. I've asked myself repeatedly:

"How does this pants advertising work when ostensibly its patronising dribble, chock-full of superlative people with superlative white teeth and superlative family and friend dynamics?"

Robert Heath's book shed's much needed light on how frequency and repetition in the low involvement spectrum makes it all work. It's not pretty but I didn't make the rules up for that propaganda/fear marketing end of the spectrum (more over here) although I'd love to implement them to change peoples behaviour towards sustainable wealth creation. Easily the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century as "the" John Grant I think would endorse.

So anyway, the other book I recommend?

Ha Ha. I don't. Well I just think marketing books blow chunks as a rule, and I can't champion enough, how valuable it is to be interested in as much as possible. Try everything if you can, and as my politcal mentor memorably said. "Try it twice because maybe you got it wrong the first time round". I've been known to try things I'm not sure about more than that so I know whereof I speak as Ludwig might have put it.

But I work in advertising so don't listen to me in the slightest. I'm sure all the books listed in Graeme's posts are fucking ace. I mean that too because I'll be sniffing over them like the planner afficcianado I evidently hanker to be now that I've quietly dropped the Enfant Terrible of planning USP, that I was gunning for a few years back.

Be careful what you wish for they say.

In any case I will throw a couple of amuse-gule books to be sporting. Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people" is a gem and not only for business either. It's where I learned the cardinal rule of listening not speaking and which if I don't know you I'll give you first chance to exhaust your vocabularly.

There is a reluctant second choice though. A book called: "Postmodern Marketing" back in the late nineties when I worked for HHCL which eloquently put forward the case for leaving things to the very last possible moment because *drum roll* we are then aquainted with the maximum amount of information to make better decisions with. Brilliant huh? And so that whole book was a thumbs up with me for that one liner despite the hyper realism, the irony and the humour that signify Postmodernism and indeed pepper this post if we think about the self referential aspect of PoMo which applies to handing this text in so late for Graeme's posts that I've had to post it myself ;)

Update: I'm reading as you know Great Apes by Will Self and unlike when this article was posted POTUS is now Obama and The Lincoln Book was in the suitcase which was in the back of cab 1878 never to return.

Impress Your Friends & Astound Your Enemies With Western Genocide Expertise

In my experience there are genocides and there are genocides. Everyone knows the typical ones from WWII and Rwanda or Cambodia even if they can't quote particular details like how Obama's foreign policy advisor (and founder of the Taliban) Zbigniew Brzezinski supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. So if you're going to quote a genocide the one documentary to watch is John Pilger's Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy. It's the handiest one because nobody knew about it, the media didn't report it, journalists died reporting it and Australia, UK, US and Canada all had a hand in helping the Indonesians slaughter there way through Timor. It's just one of the more exotic genocides the imperial powers have assisted and turned a blind eye to. Nobody comes out of the East Timor episode looking good. It's like the Swiss Army knife of genocides at dinner parties or human rights discussions. You look good pulling it out and even more an expert as you extract the right tool for whatever country needs as a good clobbering.

 On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly – but with the complicity of the Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia – invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered.

In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese – 1/3 of the population – had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The C.I.A. has described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century.

Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats.

PSFK Conference - Niku Banaie

Niku Banaie, Managing Partner of Naked Communications did a heartwarming presentation that explored some of the more pressing humanist dimensions of digital life today. Niku's grandfather was one of the early entrepreneurs of arcade and pinball games in the UK and the lesson learned by him that a fundamental human characteristic of playfulness is a key driver of all activity was not lost. Niku outlined a guideline of five universal needs for successful understanding on interaction that apply not just to life but cascade down into winning people over in general social intercourse.

• Need for love
• Need to learn
• Need to give back
• Need for simplicity
• Need for play

Niku talked about the sense of loneliness on the net and how face to face interplay is still a hard wired necessity. He talked about how The Guardian, the worlds leading liberal voice, makes most of its revenue from Guardian soulmates by putting like minded individuals together. The irony of this massively connected world is the absence of love and how so many people are facing increasing levels of loneliness. Its remarkable how important it is for science to put a tactile face on its output and yet so often the results are engineered for efficacy rather than satisfaction. On learning Niku discussed the availability of MIT open course ware, a revolutionary sharing approach to putting the best lectures and learning materials in the world on the net. Self education with the aid of an internet connection really does open up the potential for people to explore and fulfill our learning instinct. When quality content and flat distribution are coupled, the potential for unlikely people to enable themselves is nothing short of magic.

The need to give back was best exemplified by an example of the Patagonia company I talked about in an earlier post and which if you listen to the podcast gives a number of heart lifting examples on how giving back supports a virtuous circle other than just profit. Niku talked about how the founder allows all his staff to get involved with environmental activism with the company paying for a get out of jail free card that will honour any amount of bail that is set for for related civil disobedience. Yep, Patagonia encourage their employees to break the law and put their money where their mouth is. Yvon Chouinard also discusses in that podcast how the company provides day care facilities for mothers and has a retention rate for his employees that exceeds anywhere else, thus limiting the expense of having to replace valuable human resources that other companies factor-in massive amounts of dollars to keep. Patagonia's problem he jests is letting people go even after they hit retirement age. Stability is a wonderful foundation block if companies begin the process by giving back to their employees.

Kiva was the next great example of giving back. They are a web interface that allows people to sponsor entrepreneurs in developing companies with loans that save lives. By putting people in touch with specific entrepreneurs a direct connection is made, cutting through the bureaucratic and less rewarding transaction of just giving to charity. If you take a look at the link you can see how Meas Sokheang of Phnom Penh is only $150 dollars short of raising the $1000 dollars needed to buy a motorbike and pigs to take to the market. We can chip in with a minimum of 25 bucks but its a loan and not just a donation. Its repaid back with interest but the satisfaction of knowing that a real vetted loan candidate is going to be given a fishing rod with which to fish and not just the food to see her through the day. When I first went to Cambodia many years ago nobody can be unshaken by the genocide that took place there and the barbaric torture that took place in Tuol Sleng. But one thing that lifts the soul each time I return is the kids who increasingly look less grubby and frankly don't have any recollection of the Khmer Rouge years that wiped out a generation and left a stain on a par with Nazism or the Hutu Tutsi conflict of Rwanda. Here's a chance to change and observe the process by giving back and you can also meet a bunch of other people (all from the U.S.) who are putting Meas Sokheang back on her feet with a loan that she will pay back over 21 months. This site is awesome and puts facebook social networking to shame. The world really is flat in this instance. As I write this post I see that Meas has raised the money needed but that Victoria Terko from Ghana is just 25 Bucks short of her crafts business she dreams of.

On simplicity Niku Banaie highlighted how massively successful interfaces such as Google and Craigslist have become by streamlining the information we are exposed to and the number of linked options they can provide. He talked about the Sugar graphical user interface for the 100 dollar laptop that is set to launch in developing economies and how it is built around real life groups and communities, around the projects they work on the interaction between those groups. An intuitive dramatisation of first life communications on a screen if you like. The uncomfortable truth is as Asi has pointed out that our lives have become unmanageably full and we have too much to deal with. Niku talked about John Maeda's laws of simplicity: Shrink, Hide and Embody. A great example was the Wi Fi connected umbrella that alerts us to potential rain before leaving the house although the umbrella that can wail out when I've left it again would suit me. My record for losing one is five minutes after buying it. I hadn't even used it.

Niku finished up with the human need for play and gave us a bunch of examples that highlighted this important ability for positive reciprocity that all humans have and can leverage. Examples given were the climbing centre in Japan that 'reframed' the idea of simulacra rock environments and used old household objects such as picture frames and bric-a-brac to enable climbers to scale walls and a Danish school environment that had been designed around the understanding that different modes of learning included play, activity, reflection and collaboration but crucially in a manner conducive to knowledge absorption unlike that from didactic monologue.

I need also at this point, to highlight that while looking for some photos for these posts on the PSFK conference I came into contact with Lynette Webb who is also a user of Google docs & spreadsheets which allows us to share and edit in an open source manner on the PSFK conference for example. You can find the link to her notes here and I hope to be doing a post about online collaborative working with Lynette using the tools that are available to everyone. Check out Lynettes blog interesting snippets in the mean time.

Russell Davies - Newspapers 101

I've been meaning to do a write up on one of Russell Davies signature posts recently about small pocketable items. Stuff we like to carry round in our pockets with memento or souvenir value and which may also have a utility of some sort. It's a lovely post because it touches on some thoughts I'd been having about minimalist lives which in principle amounts to humans, the clothes we wear and a thing. The thing would be the artificial extension of man. The thing that separates us most from other species in that we utilize tools (and more complexly social objects). It would be a smart device and we're already seeing the emergence of such a device with increasingly powerful iPhones that have the ability to process augmented reality and do quality fry ups. OK I"m kidding on that last point but the collision of Smart Phone and Netbook design is a hint at the future and I suspect that some collision of recombinant-culture-technological-forces, with ever increasing miniaturisation points towards the likely utility of that, and which we will likely carry around in our pockets. I'm guessing hand bags will probably be extraneous accessories which females are unlikely to dispense with and frankly I'm quite fond of bags myself but in principle the clothes aren't so necessary in a hot climate. Or at least less of them.

In any case go and read Russells excellent blog and some of his seminal posts such as this recent candid and very funny post on dancing which is quintessential Russell, as well as 'more ideas, less stuff' or brand polyphony which back in the day (some four years or so years ago) was a real challenge to the traditional received wisdom of how marketing communications worked and when the reliance on USP or proposition testing was ubiquitously held as the most effective and valid methodology.

In any case the reason for this post is that Russell has unearthed a gem of a book for young people on the newspaper industry, by Ladybird and which chimes just nicely with todays business model for a business in transition (to put it mildly).

Brilliant isn't it? I know I shouldn't but this Ladybird parody arrived in my email via Cambodia of all places not so long back and I think it echoes quite nicely with what that whole straightforward and clear renaissance in language theme which is the signature of progressive marketing communications in London. I love it very much, but which of course in this instance is meant to be (and is) hugely funny. I'm very fond of progressive London's aversion to business bullshit, and which of course I was most certainly guilty of at one stage in my career although I never repeated that grubby little number 'heads up' because it's just annoys the hell out of me as if someone is doing me a favour sharing information that they otherwise wouldn't. Anyway, this is more charming I think.

Toxic Prurience

Freer & Blue in Cambodia

It's been a few years now so I don't mind publishing these private emails as the lesson still applies today for those with ears to hear, and eyes to see.

My good friend Peter Doran in Bangkok was a self-made multi-millionaire. He was striking to look at, tough as hell and stricken with the most aggressive bouts of violent depression.

He was a dangerous man to be around, but he was also one of the most generous, funny and clever people I ever met. I considered him to be an older brother, but from time to time it came at great expense.

I recall once he was pissed off with his brother Johnnie who had left for New York and decided to stitch him up by finding out some hotel details of a client/friend who was staying at The Conrad in Bangkok. Earlier that day he had tried to overdose and I was starting my new job as Planning Director at Dentsu Bangkok. It was literally my first day and so I could only help by calling another friend (Frank Duvi) to go check up on Pete or Blue as we called him. 

As there was no answer from his bedroom, I instructed Frank to break down the door, a job he was capable of as a former French foreign legionnaire and Muay Thai boxer.

Anyway, after work, I headed over to Blue's and that's when he decided to take me for a drink down The Conrad in the Diplomat bar, a place I frequented regularly, he pulled out a scrap of paper with the room number of his brother's friend, and proceeded to order a 1500 pounds sterling bottle of champagne on that rooms tab.

I was frozen with fear, as it was clear Blue was in a mess from his earlier suicide attempt, and he didn't look particularly credible with a scrap of paper reading the room number out to the barwoman. Anyway, she took the order and delivered the champagne in an ice bucket wrapped in immaculate white napkins. We drank it and then we left to head over to Patpong GoGo bars. I only breathed a sigh of relief when we got in the cab. My next visit to that bar was very uncomfortable, as the kindly barwoman recognised me, but didn't say anything. It was not my order but I was complicit.

In any case the reason I am bringing up Blue is that he had access to a mutual friend's email account and he had made a habit of reading all his private emails on a regular basis for a couple of years. That is until, as you can see above, he forwarded me an email one day, thinking I'd understand it was not him but being forwarded, but instead I blew his cover by responding to our mutual friend as if the email was meant for me.

Blue was very angry with me, our friend Tim Ramos the owner of the email account who was a multi-millionaire sex-addict retiree from Hawaii was mad at me, thinking I'd colluded with Blue although I had done nothing but respond to that forwarded email which was quite insulting and so my reply was caustic, to say the least.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to share that when the dust had settled, Blue admitted that having access to Tim's email had been corrosive and had fed an obsession that had become toxic to him in the end, as any addicted snooper and peeping tom will reveal when asking how and why their prurience had affected them.

I live a fairly open life and try not to have any secrets, because I know that it's your secrets that kill you in the end. 

I eat, shit, fuck, smoke, fart and wank like the old bachelor I am who prefers not to copulate with ladies just for the sex, as I feel it's damaging to be in a fake relationship, (although I'm always on the lookout for someone special). Lady luck is always a possibility.

I have found that those who obsess over me, are always the same, and have recurring observable traits. 

Insanely jealous, insecure and inveterate liars who have no grasp that some of us don't lie for convenience. 

Snoopers are the meconium of the universe, and that applies to Pete's email 'hacking' and to anyone else who lives vicariously.

Get a life. 

Mine is already taken.

Laos And The Pentagon™

Newly uploaded documentary on yet another peaceful Buddhist country bombed (the most bombed country in the history of the planet) into the stone age by the demonics inside the Pentagon™. I tend to mention Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma on this blog because of my time in these countries but I don't mind going down the shopping list of South American countries that the military industrial spy complex has sodomised economically and spiritually to keep the American dream going. Well the illusion is falling apart and the final act is being played out on the U.S. by its own. It's called Karma.

Barack Obama's Family CIA Links

A little background first. The writer of this report is Wayne Madsen who is former Office of Naval Intelligence and then National Security Agency, and now a Washington 'reporter'. All the details here will be accurate but the turf war between the CIA and DIA continues so it's fair to say Madsen AKA The military industrial complex is shilling to see Romney in power against the CIA who want their man Obama in power. I'm not sure it makes much difference in the long run but facts are facts and Russia Today has long asked if Obama is running on programmed multiple personalities. Meanwhile most of the population struggles to deal with the uncontested information (included in his Wikipedia entry) that Barack Obama was legally known as Barry Soetoro in Indonesia. The US deserves everything it has coming to it if negligence has any repercussions  Most people have no idea what I'm writing about and are unable to process it even if they can.

Wayne Madsen Report has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965.

Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960 Reuters report from London.

The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii.

Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.

KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties.

The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.

Reuters also reported that Muliro charged that Africans were “disturbed and embittered” by the airlift of the selected students. Muliro “stated that “preferences were shown to two major tribes [Kikuyu and Luo] and many U.S.-bound students had failed preliminary and common entrance examinations, while some of those left behind held first-class certificates.”

Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.

Original CIA Staff Notes

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm.

Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA “Current Intelligence Weekly Summary,” dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis.

The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame NNkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively (emphasis added) last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.”

The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother.

An earlier CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, Secret, and dated April 3, 1958, states that Mboya “still appears to be the most promising of the African leaders.” Another CIA weekly summary, Secret and dated December 18, 1958, calls Mboya the Kenyan nationalist an “able and dynamic young chairman” of the People’s Convention party who was viewed as an opponent of “extremists” like Nkrumah, supported by “Sino-Soviet representatives.”

In a formerly Secret CIA report on the All-Africa Peoples Conference in 1961, dated November 1, 1961, Mboya’s conservatism, along with that of Taleb Slim of Tunisia, are contrasted to the leftist policies of Nkrumah and others. Pro-communists who were elected to the AAPC’s steering committee at the March 1961 Cairo conference, attended by Mboya, are identified in the report as Abdoulaye Diallo, AAPC Secretary General, of Senegal; Ahmed Bourmendjel of Algeria; Mario de Andrade of Angola; Ntau Mokhele of Basutoland; Kingue Abel of Cameroun; Antoine Kiwewa of Congo (Leopoldville); Kojo Botsio of Ghana; Ismail Toure of Guinea; T. O. Dosomu Johnson of Liberia; Modibo Diallo of Mali; Mahjoub Ben Seddik of Morocco; Djibo Bakari of Niger; Tunji Otegbeya of Nigeria; Kanyama Chiume of Nyasaland; Ali Abdullahi of Somalia; Tennyson Makiwane of South Africa, and Mohamed Fouad Galal of the United Arab Republic.

The only attendees in Cairo who were given a clean bill of health by the CIA were Mboya, who appears to have been a snitch for the agency, and Joshua Nkomo of Southern Rhodesia, B. Munanka of Tanganyika, Abdel Magid Shaker of Tunisia, and John Kakonge of Uganda.

Nkrumah would eventually be overthrown in a 1966 CIA-backed coup while he was on a state visit to China and North Vietnam. The CIA overthrow of Nkrumah followed by one year the agency’s overthrow of Sukarno, another coup that was connected to President Obama’s family on his mother’s side.

There are suspicions that Mboya was assassinated in 1969 by Chinese agents working with anti-Mboya factions in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta in order to eliminate a pro-U.S. leading political leader in Africa. Upon Mboya’s death, every embassy in Nairobi flew its flag at half-mast except for one, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

Mboya’s influence in the Kenyatta government would continue long after his death and while Obama, Sr. was still alive. In 1975, after the assassination of KANU politician Josiah Kariuki, a socialist who helped start KANU, along with Mboya and Obama, Sr., Kenyatta dismissed three rebellious cabinet ministers who “all had personal ties to either Kariuki or Tom Mboya.”

This information is contained in CIA Staff Notes on the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, formerly Top Secret Umbra, Handle via COMINT Channels, dated June 24, 1975.

The intelligence in the report, based on its classification, indicate the information was derived from National Security Agency intercepts in Kenya. No one was ever charged in the assassination of Kariuki.

The intercepts of Mboya’s and Kariuki’s associates are an indication that the NSA and CIA also maintain intercepts on Barack Obama, Sr., who, as a non-U.S. person, would have been lawfully subject at the time to intercepts carried out by NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Special Report: The Story of Obama, All in The Company [Part II]

In Part I of this WMR special report, we revealed the connections between Barack Obama, Sr. and the CIA-affiliated Airlift Africa project to provide college degrees to and gain influence over a group of 280 eastern and southern African students from soon-to-be independent African nations to counter similar programs established by the Soviet Union and China.

Barack Obama Sr. was the first African student to attend the University of Hawaii. Obama Sr. and Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham met in a Russian language class in 1959 and they married in 1961.

The African airlift program was administered by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya, a fellow Luo tribe mentor and friend of the senior Obama. According to CIA documents described in Part I, Mboya also served the CIA in ensuring that pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese African nationalists were stymied in their attempt to dominate pan-African nationalist political, student, and labor movements.

One of Mboya’s chief opponents was Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who was ousted in a CIA-inspired coup in 1966, one year before to Obama Sr’s son, Barack Obama, Jr. and his mother joined Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian who Obama’s mother met at the University of Hawaii in 1965, when President Obama was four years old.

In 1967, Obama and his mother joined her husband in Jakarta. In 1965, Lolo Soetoro had been called back from Hawaii by General Suharto to serve as an officer in the Indonesian military to help launch a bloody CIA-backed genocide of Indonesian Communists and Indonesian Chinese throughout the expansive country.

Suharto consolidated his power in 1966, the same year that Barack Obama, Sr.’s friend, Mboya, had helped to rally pro-U.S. pan-African support for the CIA’s overthrow of Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966.

East-West Center, University of Hawaii, and CIA coup against Sukarno CIA Links

Ann Dunham met Soetoro at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. The center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1965, the year that Dunham met and married Soetoro, the center saw a new chancellor take over. He was Howard P. Jones who served a record seven years, from 1958 to 1965, as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia.

Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as allies of China.

When Jones was chancellor of the East-West Center, he wrote an article for the Washington Post, dated October 10, 1965, in which he defended Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno. Jones was “invited” by the Post to comment on the Suharto coup, described as a “counter-coup” against the Communists.

Jones charged that Suharto was merely responding to an earlier attempted Communist-led coup against Sukarno launched by Lt. Col. Untung, “a relatively unknown battalion commander in the palace guard.”

Jones’s article, which mirrored CIA situation reports from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, continued by stating that the alleged leftist coup on September 30 ”came within an inch of succeeding through the assassination of six of the top military command.

It might well have succeeded had not Defense Minister Nasution and a number of other senior generals also masked for assassination acted fast in a dramatic counter-coup.” Of course, what Jones did not inform the Post’s readers was that the Suharto “counter-coup” had been assisted with the strong help of the CIA.

Sukarno never blamed the Communists for the assassination of the army generals nor did the Indonesian Cabinet, where the second= and third-ranking leaders of the PKI were present.

The possibility that the assassination of the generals was a CIA/Suharto “false flag” operation to affix blame on the PKI cannot be ruled out. Two days after Suharto’s coup, a CIA “rent-a-mob” burned down the PKI headquarters in Jakarta.

As they marched past the U.S. Embassy, which was also the site of the CIA station, they yelled out, “Long live America!”

Untung later said that when he became aware that Suharto and the CIA were planning a coup on October 5, 1965 – Indonesian Armed Forces Day – forces loyal to him and Sukarno moved first. Jones described this as “typical Communist propaganda.” Suharto moved against Sukarno on October 1. Jones iterated that “there was not an iota of truth . . . in the accusation that the CIA was working against Sukarno.”

History has proven otherwise. Jones accused the Communists of taking advantage of Sukarno’s failing health to beat out the other candidates to succeed him. The goal, according to Jones, was to have PKI boss D.N. Aidit succeed Sukarno. Sukarno did not die until 1970, while under house arrest. Jones left as East-West Center chancellor in 1968.

A CIA paper, formerly classified Secret and undated, states “Sukarno would like to return to the status quo ante-coup. He has refused to condemn the PKI or the 30th September Movement [of Lt. Col. Untung]; instead, he calls for unity of Indonesia and asks that no vengeance be taken by one group against the other.

But, he has not succeeded in forcing the Army to abandon its anti-PKI activities and, on the other hand, he has bowed to their demand by appointing its single candidate General Suharto as head of the Army.”

Suharto and Barry Obama Soetoro’s step-father Lolo Soetoro would ignore Sukarno’s call for no vengeance, as hundreds of thousands of Indonesians would soon discover.

The mass murder by Suharto of Indonesian Chinese is seen in the CIA paper’s description of the Baperki Party: “the leftist Baperki Party, with its major strength in rural areas, is largely Chinese-Indonesian in membership.”

A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, dated October 6, 1966 and formerly classified Secret, shows the extent of the CIA’s monitoring of the anti-Sukarno coup from various CIA agents assigned as liaisons to Suharto’s army units surrounding the Presidential Palace in Bogor and at various diplomatic posts around the country, including the U.S. Consulate in Medan, which was keeping track of leftists in that Sumatran city and, which, in an October 2, 1965, Intelligence Memo, reported to the CIA that the “Soviet consul-general in Medan has a plane standing by that could be used for evacuation of Soviet citizens from Sumatra.” The October 6 memo also warns against allowing Untung from developing a following in Central Java.

A CIA formerly Secret “Weekly Summary Special Report” on Indonesia, dated August 11, 1967, and titled “The New Order in Indonesia,” reports that in 1966, Indonesia re-aligned its economy in order to receive International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance.

The CIA reports it’s happy with the new triumvirate ruling Indonesia in 1967: Suharto, Foreign Minister Adam Malik, and the Sultan of Jogjakarta, who served as minister for economics and finance.

The report also rejoices in the outlawing of the PKI, but states it “retains a significant following in East and Central Java,” where Ann Dunham Soetoro would largely concentrate her later efforts on behalf of USAID, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation, all front activities for the CIA to “win the hearts and minds” of the Javanese farmers and artisans.

A CIA Intelligence Memorandum, formerly Secret and dated July 23, 1966, clearly sees the Muslim Nahdatul Ulama party {NU), the largest party in Indonesia and Muslim, as a natural ally of the United States and the Suharto regime.

The report states that helped Suharto put down the Communists in the post-coup time frame, especially where the NU was strongest: East Java, where Obama’s mother would concentrate her activities, and North Sumatra and parts of Borneo.

An April 29, 1966, formerly Secret CIA Intelligence Memorandum on the PKI states: “Moslem extremists in many instances outdid the army in hunting down and murdering members of the party [PKI] and its front groups.”

Dunham and Barry Soetoro in Jakarta and USAID front activities

Dunham dropped out of the University of Hawaii in 1960 while pregnant with Barack Obama. Barack Obama Sr. left Hawaii in 1962 to study at Harvard. Dunham and Obama divorced in 1964. In the fall of 1961, Dunham enrolled at the University of Washington while caring for her infant son.

Dunham was re-enrolled at the University of Hawaii from 1963 to 1966. Lolo Soetoro, who Dunham married in March 1965, departed Hawaii for Indonesia on July 20, 1965, some three months prior to the CIA’s coup against Sukarno.

Soetoro, who served Suharto as an Army colonel, was clearly called back from the CIA-connected East-West Center to assist in the coup against Sukarno, one that would eventually cost the lives of some one million Indonesian citizens.

It is a history that President Obama would like the press to ignore, which it certainly did during the 2008 primary and general election.

In 1967, after arriving in Indonesia with Obama, Jr., Dunham began teaching English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra.

In fact, Obama’s mother was teaching English for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. The USAID program was known as Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen.

Obama’s mother, painted as a free spirit and a “sixties child” by President Obama and people who claimed they knew her in Hawaii and Indonesia, had a curriculum vitae in Indonesia that contradicts the perception that Ann Dunham Soetoro was a “hippy.”

Dunham Soetoro’s Russian language training at the University of Hawaii may have been useful to the CIA in Indonesia.

An August 2, 1966, formerly Secret memorandum from the National Security Council’s Executive Secretary Bromley Smith states that, in addition to Japan, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Suharto coup was welcomed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies because its created a non-aligned Indonesia that “represents an Asian counterweight to Communist China.”

Records indicate that a number of CIA agents posted in Jakarta before and after the 1965 coup were, like Dunham Soetoro, conversant in Russian.

Dunham Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan.

USAID was involved in a number of CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia. The February 9, 1971, Washington Star reported that USAID officials in Laos were aware that rice supplied to the Laotian Army by USAID was being re-sold to North Vietnamese army divisions in the country.

The report stated that the U.S. tolerated the USAID rice sales to the North Vietnamese since the Laotian Army units that sold the rice found themselves protected from Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese attack.

USAID and the CIA also used the supply of rice to force Laotian Meo tribesmen to support the United States in the war against the Communists.

USAID funds programmed for civilians injured in the war in Laos and public health care were actually diverted for military purposes.

In 1971, the USAID-funded Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was accused of being a CIA front.

USAID-funded projects through the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA) — comprising the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Michigan State — were accused of being CIA front projects, including those for “agricultural education” in Indonesia, as well as other “projects” in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Vietnam.

The charge was made in 1971, the same year that Ann Dunham was working for USAID in the country.

In a July 10, 1971, New York Times report, USAID and the CIA were accused of “losing” $1.7 billion appropriated for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in South Vietnam.

CORDS was part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program, which involved CIA assassination and torture of South Vietnamese village elders and Buddhist clerics.

USAID money was also directed to the CIA’s proprietary airline in Southeast Asia, Air America.

In Thailand, USAID funds for the Accelerated Rural Development Program in Thailand were actually masking a CIA anti-Communist counter-insurgency operation.

USAID funds programmed for public works projects in East Pakistan in 1971 were used for East Pakistan’s military fortifications on its border with India, in the months before the outbreak of war with India, in contravention of U.S. law that prohibited USAID money for military purposes.

In 1972, USAID administrator Dr. John Hannah admitted to Metromedia News that USAID was being used as a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos. Hannah only admitted to Laos as a USAID cover for the CIA.

However, it was also reported that USAID was being used by the CIA in Indonesia, Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea.

USAID projects in Southeast Asia had to be approved by the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an Asia Society group that was, in fact, answerable to the CIA.

The U.S. Food for Peace program, jointly administered by USAID and the Department of Agriculture, was found in 1972 to be used for military purposes in Cambodia, South Korea, Turkey, South Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, and Greece.

In 1972, USAID funneled aid money only to the southern part of North Yemen, in order to aid North Yemeni forces against the government of South Yemen, then ruled by a socialist government opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region.

One of the entities affiliated with the USAID work in Indonesia was the Asia Foundation, a 1950s creation formed with the help of the CIA to oppose the expansion of communism in Asia.

The East-West Center guest house in Hawaii was funded by the Asia Foundation. The guest house is also where Barack Obama Sr. first stayed after his airlift from Kenya to Hawaii, arranged by the one of the CIA’s major agents of influence in Africa, Mboya.

Dunham would also travel to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand working on micro-financing projects. In 1965, Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard, with another American wife. The senior Obama linked up with his old friend and the CIA’s “golden boy” Mboya and other fellow Luo politicians.

The CIA station chief in Nairobi from 1964 to 1967 was Philip Cherry. In 1975, Cherry was the CIA station chief in Dacca, Bangladesh. Cherry was linked by the then-U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Booster, to the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family.

The hit on “Sheikh Mujib” and his family was reportedly ordered by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Bangladesh was also on the micro- and macro-financing travel itinerary of CIA-linked Ann Dunham.

CIA banking and Hawaii

Meanwhile, Dunham Soetoro’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised young Obama when he returned to Hawaii in 1971 while his mother stayed in Indonesia, was the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Various CIA front entities used the bank. Madelyn Dunham handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments to U.S.-supported Asian dictators like Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia.

In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to covertly prop up its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.

One of the CIA’s major money laundering fronts in Honolulu was the firm of Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong (BBRDW).

After the CIA allowed the firm to collapse in 1983 amid charges that BBRDW was merely a Ponzi scheme, Senator Daniel Inouye of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said the CIA’s role in the firm “wasn’t significant.”

It would later be revealed that Inouye, who was one of the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate, was lying.

In fact, BBRDW was involved heavily in funding covert CIA programs throughout Asia, including economic espionage against Japan, providing arms for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas in their war against the Soviets and covertly supplying weapons to Taiwan.

One of BBRDW’s principals was John C. “Jack” Kindschi, who, before he retired in 1981, was the CIA station chief in Honolulu. BBRDW’s chairman Ron Rewald had a counterfeit college degree certificate provided for the wall of his office by the CIA’s forgery experts and his name was inserted in university records as an alumnus.

A false history for BBRDW was concocted by the CIA claiming the firm had operated in Hawaii since it was a territory.

President Obama is currently plagued by allegations that he has fake college and university transcripts, a phony social security number issued in Connecticut, and other padded resume items.

Did Hawaii’s fake BBRDW documents portend today’s questions about Obama’s past?

BBRDW conducted its business in the heart of Honolulu’s business district, where the Bank of Hawaii was located and where Obama grandmother Madelyn Dunham ran the escrow accounts. The bank would handle much of BBRDW’s covert financial transactions.

Manchurian Candidate?

Obama/Soetoro and the “years of living dangerously” in Jakarta

It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama’s step-father, were closely involved in the CIA’s operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit during the “years of living dangerously” after the overthrow of Sukarno.

WMR has discovered that some of the CIA’s top case officers were assigned to various official and non-official covert assignments in Indonesia during this time frame, including under the cover of USAID, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).

One of the closest CIA contacts for Suharto was former CIA Jakarta embassy officer Kent B. Crane. Crane was so close to Suharto after “retiring” from the CIA, he was reportedly one of the only “private” businessmen given an Indonesian diplomatic passport by Suharto’s government.

Crane’s company, the Crane Group, was involved in supplying small arms to the military forces of the United States, Indonesia, and other nations.

A foreign policy adviser to Vice President Spiro Agnew, Crane was later nominated as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia by President Ronald Reagan but the nomination was dead-on-arrival because of Crane’s dubious links to Suharto.

The ambassadorship would instead go to John Holdridge, a close colleague of Kissinger. Holdridge was succeeded in Jakarta by Paul Wolfowitz.

Suharto’s cronies, who included Mochtar and James Riady of the Lippo Group, would later stand accused of funneling over $1 million of illegal foreign contributions to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

President Obama has twice postponed official state visits to Indonesia, perhaps fearful of the attention such a trip would bring to the CIA connections of his mother and Indonesian step-father.

In the 1970s and 80s, Dunham was active in micro-loan projects for the Ford Foundation, the CIA-linked East-West Center, and USAID in Indonesia.

One of the individuals assigned to the U.S. embassy and helped barricade the compound during a violent anti-U.S. student demonstration during the 1965 Suharto coup against Sukarno was Dr. Gordon Donald, Jr.

Assigned to the embassy’s Economic Section, Donald was responsible for USAID micro-financing for Indonesian farmers, the same project that Dunham Soetoro would work on for USAID in the 1970s, after her USAID job of teaching English in Indonesia.

In a 1968 book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” published in West Berlin, Donald is identified as a CIA officer who was also assigned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Dunham would eventually live for five years in the Hilton International Hotel while working on microfinancing for the Asian Development Bank.

Another “Who’s Who in the CIA” Jakarta alumnus is Robert F. Grealy, who later became the director for international relations for the Asia-Pacific for J P Morgan Chase and a director for the American-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce.

J P Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is being mentioned as a potential replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose father, Peter Geithner, was the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-selector who funneled the money to Ann Dunham’s Indonesian projects.

CIA Black Projects and Hawaii

While in Pakistan, Dunham’s son Barack visited her in 1980 and 1981. Obama visited Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad, India during his south Asia visits. It was during the time period that the CIA was beefing up its anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan from Pakistan.

A January 31, 1958, heavily-redacted formerly Secret NOFORN [no foreign dissemination] memorandum for CIA Director Allen Dulles from the Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Research and Reports [name redacted] reports on a fact-finding mission to the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East from November 17 through December 21, 1957.

The CIA Office of Research and Reports (ORR) chief reports a meeting with the staff of retired Army General Jesmond Balmer, a senior CIA official in Hawaii, about requests by the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) for “a number of detailed, time-consuming research studies.” The ORR chief then reports about a CIA “survey of students at the University of Hawaii who have both Chinese language and research ability.”

The ORR chief also reports that at a South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Counter Subversion Seminar at Baguio, Philippines held from November 26-29, 1957, the Economic Subcommittee discussed an “economic development fund” to combat “Sino-Soviet Bloc subversive activities in the area and a consideration of possible counter-measures which might be employed.”

The Thailand and Philippines delegations were pushing hard for U.S. funding for an economic development fund, which may have provided the impetus for later USAID projects in the region, including those with which Peter Geithner and Obama’s mother were intimately involved.

Although CIA geo-political covert operations at the University of Hawaii are well-documented, the agency’s darker side of research and MK-UKTRA type operations has not generally been associated with the University of Hawaii.

A series of formerly Confidential CIA memoranda, dated May 15, 1972, points to the involvement of both the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the CIA, and the University of Hawaii in the CIA’s behavioral science program. The memos are signed by then-Deputy Director of the CIA Bronson Tweedy, the chief of the Intelligence Community’s Program Review Group (PRG) [name redacted], and CIA Director Richard Helms.

The subject of the memos is “ARPA Supported Research Relating to Intelligence Product,” The memo from the PRG chief discusses a conference held on May 11, 1972, attended by Lt. Col. Austin Kibler, ARPA’s Director of Behavioral Research. Kibler was the chief for ARPA research into behavior modification and remote viewing. Others mentioned in the PRG chief’s memo include CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor, the CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology Carl Duckett, and Director of the Office of National Estimates John Huizenga.

In 1973, after CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered a review of all CIA programs, the CIA developed a set of documents on various CIA programs collectively called the “Family Jewels.” Most of these documents were released in 2007 but it was also revealed that Dr.Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s director of MKULTRA, the agency’s behavior modification, brainwashing, and drug testing component, had been ordered by Helms, before he resigned as CIA director, to be destroyed.

Duckett, in one memo from Ben Evans of the CIA to CIA Director William Colby, dated May 8, 1973, conveys that he “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program,” meaning Gottlieb’s drug testing program under MKULKTRA.

Senior Gerald Ford administration officials, including Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ensured that after the production of the “Family Jewels” documents, no CIA revelations were made about CIA psychological behavior-altering programs, including MKULTRA and Project ARTICHOKE.

The May 15, 1972, set of memos appears to be related to the CIA’s initial research, code named SCANATE, in 1972 into psychic warfare, including the use of psychics for purposes of remote viewing espionage and mind control. The memo discussed Kibler from ARPA and “his contractor,” which was later discovered to be Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California.

In a memo from CIA Director Helms to, among others, Duckett, Huizenga, Proctor, and the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which later inherited reote viewing from the CIA under the code name GRILL FLAME, Helms insists that ARPA had been supporting research into behavioral science and its potential for intelligence production ”for a number of years” at “M.I.T., Yale, the University of Michigan, U.C.L.A., and University of Hawaii and other institutions as well as in corporate research facilities.”

The role of the University of Hawaii in CIA psych-war operations continues to this day.

The chief of research for DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) Behavioral Sciences Program, Dr. Susan Brandon, who was reportedly involved in a covert program run by the American Psychological Association (APA), Rand Corporation, and the CIA to employ “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including sleep and sensory deprivation, intense pain, and extreme isolation on prisoners held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and other “black prisons,” received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Hawaii.

Brandon also served as assistant director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences for the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the George W. Bush White House.

The CIA’s close connections to the University of Hawaii continued to the late 1970s, when the former President of the University of Hawaii from 1969 to 1974, Harlan Cleveland, was a special invited speaker at CIA headquarters on May 10, 1977.

Cleveland served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1961 to 1965 and Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to NATO from 1965 to 1969 before taking up his position at the University of Hawaii.

A CIA Director of Training memo dated May 21, 1971, reports on the active recruitment of a U.S. Marine officer who was entering graduate school at the University of Hawaii.

The Family of Obama and the CIA

There are volumes of written material on the CIA backgrounds of George H. W. Bush and CIA-related activities by his father and children, including former President George W. Bush.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, cleverly masked his own CIA connections as well as those of his mother, father, step-father, and grandmother (there is very little known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who was supposedly in the furniture business in Hawaii after serving in Europe during World War II).

Presidents and vice presidents do not require security background checks, unlike other members of the federal government, to hold office. That job is left up to the press. In 2008, the press failed miserably in its duty to vet the man who would win the White House.

With the ties of Obama’s parents to the University of Hawaii and its links to MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE, a nagging question remains: Is Barack Obama a real-life “Manchurian Candidate?”