In the seventy years since World War II America has risen to be a mighty empire, the so-called indispensible nation towering over all nations in the world.  Eat you heart out, Rome.  As such, it has long had the strongest military in the world, devoting far more than other nations in terms of the percent of the economy or just plain outright in money.  So it comes as no surprise that presidential candidates from above average per capita military spending states won all eleven elections of the Cold War and since then the only two presidents from below average military spending states each had worked with the CIA in their college days and since.  This is poorly understood by most Americans, as secrecy even from one's spouse is asked of agents.

The Press and the CIA

            The Church Committee investigation of the CIA in the seventies exposed the deep connection between the agency and the press.  Many of the most prominent journalists in America started their careers in the CIA, and one CIA head boasted he had had close ties to 400 of the top journalists when he was in office.  There is no evidence that things have changed since then.  CIA recruitment features the same 1% type ivy leaguers that go on to dominate politics, business, and the press.  These elites know each other.  Bob Woodward and Ted Koppel were once Naval Intelligence, Walter Cronkite was OSS during the war, and Phil Graham and Ben Bradley, editors of the Washington Post, were CIA.  Stories come more easily to those with connections to the most secretive agency in the country, so these people easily rise to the top.  That Bush the father, Clinton, and Obama used the CIA to propel their careers is really nothing new under the sun.  Ford reported proceedings back to J. Edgar Hoover while on the Warren Commission, and the CIA kept Carter and his CIA head Admiral Turner out of the loop according to one Bob Woodward book.  Funny how he knew that, see what I mean?

Obama and the CIA

            When Carter was elected president, Hamilton Jordan, his campaign manager, said in his book that the election would be futile if Zbigniew Brzezinski was appointed national security advisor.  Sorry about that Hamilton.  When Brzezinski retired to teach at Columbia, he soon chose this student Barack Obama as a young protégé.  The article shown below suggests Obama visited Pakistan twice in the eighties, once as a student, once working for CIA front company Business International for three years just out of college, most probably as a CIA agent. At the time Pakistan was the staging ground for mujahideen warriors against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.  No wonder Barack Obama tripled troop strength in Afghanistan in his first year as president.  He was a good disciple of Brzezinski who went on to write The Grand Chessboard about that part of the world.  So when Saturday Night Live made fun of the press fawning over Obama in 2008, they were probably criticizing members of the same intelligence fraternity:  Obama and the press.  As the famous quote in the movie "JFK" states, "once CIA, always CIA."

Clinton and the CIA

            When the CIA was looking for a place to manufacture guns for the contra war in Nicaragua, they picked a backwards state not on the border to minimize interference with other government agencies like Customs or Firearms (ATF). The $100 million annual revenue from this activity created Clinton's claim that Arkansas had the strongest economy of any state under his leadership during that period of time, a big boost to his presidential campaign.  Terry Reed witnessed an unhappy Clinton being assured by Bob Barr that he was "number one on the list" for the position he really wanted.  That evidently meant the CIA would help him get the presidency.  By the way, the $100 million a year came from crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles as explained in Gary Webb's 1998 book Dark Alliance and the 2015 movie "Kill the Messenger."

For more information about the military presidency and politics:

https://www.academia.edu/20604100/POLITICAL_Military_Presidency

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word "read" in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

ADDENDA:

Here is the Progressive Review story on Obama:

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2009/Obama-Strange-Rise3jan09.htm

The Strange Rise of Obama

Progressive Review 3jan2009

As we have noted, one of the unanswered questions about Barack Obama is how a young politician of such little achievement got so far so fast — from state senator to president in four years. Bill Blum provides new light on the subject. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to recognize that if a young Obama was vetted or otherwise used by the CIA, it was not all that unusual. From the 1950s on, the agency repeatedly interfered in the education of the talented young by recruiting or co-opting them for its own purposes. Yale's Skull & Bones Club, for example, was a classic case of a recruitment camp for future intelligence types. The purpose — for the short run — is more information, and — for the long run — a supply of US future government officials whom the agency trusts and can use. And it often begins with a bright college student an insider thinks might fill the bill. . . .

Bill Blum, Anti-Empire Report — The question that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama? In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Fathers", Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting house to multinational corporations" in New York City, and his functions as a "research assistant" and "financial writer." The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer.

However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation [1]. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960. [2]

The British journal, Lobster Magazine — which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters — has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji. [3]  In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls. [4] After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington's nuclear desires, was reinstated to power.

In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) [5] — it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

[1] New York Times, October 30, 2007

[2] New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40

[3] Lobster Magazine, Hull, UK, #14, November 1987

[4] William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower", pp.199-200

[5] Carl Oglesby, "Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement" (2008), passim 

  William Blum - Homepage: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer65.html  

Colony Net, 2008 — In an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials during the primary campaign, the junior senator from Illinois — then in a tight primary contest with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania — bragged about the time he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton's foreign policy "experience" consisted only of quick photo ops, while he had spent "quality time" with "real people." Not only that, he had actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip near the Pakistan city of Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently impressed the gun owners of Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch as Clinton won that primary by 10 per cent.

Eager to impress the Pennsylvania crowd with his "foreign policy experience" and knowledge of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact that he'd been to Pakistan. (It is believed that he made two trips to Pakistan.) There must have been more to that trip than meets the eye, however, because the candidate has said virtually nothing about it since. You won't find anything on the Obama campaign site. . .

Astute readers may have begun to wonder how a struggling young college student with a divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip to Pakistan. . . But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges in Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio. Chandio's family owned a substantial amount of land in the region, and Obama apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio is currently a financial consultant in New York, and a donor to the Obama campaign.). . .

Another of Obama's hosts in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama's senior by about 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician, who became interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that "someone" personally requested that he "watch over" Barack Obama, but will not name that individual . . .

A trip to Pakistan is no doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans would consider traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous place. In 1981, when one of Obama's possible two trips there occurred, it was less safe. Because of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan, which was under martial law. The Afghan "mujahedeen" fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back and forth to fight the Soviets. . .

In the early 1980s, Pakistan was one of the destinations Americans were prohibited from visiting — it was on the State Department's list of banned countries. Non-Muslims were not welcome, unless they were on official business, formalized through the embassy of the country of origin. The simple truth is that no young American would have a reason to or be able to visit Pakistan in 1981, unless he was on official government business of which the State Department was aware. . .

Adding to the mix is the fact that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, had visited at least 13 countries in her lifetime, and had worked for companies that required travel to Pakistan. Her employers appear to have included the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women's World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Note that USAID and the Ford Foundation have (allegedly) been used as covers for CIA agents. . . .

The story of Business International also includes its 1960s joint meetings with members of SDS at the prodding of Carl Oglesby. Not everyone was happy at the idea — including Bernadette Dorn — and probably for good cause.

Obama also was one of eight students selected to study sovietology by Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski who, if he wasn't a CIA official, was as close as you can otherwise get. Brzesinski is now a member of Obama's inner circle.

If the Obama Pakistan story sounds somewhat familiar, it may because the Review was one of the few places that reported one of Bill Clinton's similarly interesting trips:

"1960s: Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government is using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft. According to former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich Clinton is told by Oxford officials that he is no longer welcome there."      source: 6jan2008

Here is the text from the Amazon listing of the 1994 book Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA by Terry Reed and John Cummings:

http://www.amazon.com/Compromised-Clinton-Bush-Terry-Reed/dp/1561712493

Compromised is the true story of Bill Clinton's political sell-out to the CIA.

Clinton's unbridled political ambitions and his campaign pledge to create "jobs for Arkansans" led him to compromise his ideals in exchange for CIA support in his bid for the Presidency.

He permitted the "Agency" to use Arkansas factories to make untraceable weapons and he allowed CIA contract agents to train Contra pilots on rural airstrips in support of the war in Nicaragua – effectively evading the Congressional ban on military aid to the Contras.

This expose unfolds through the eyewitness account of Terry Reed, a former CIA asset whose patriotism transformed him into a liability when he refused to turn a blind eye to the Agency's drug trafficking. While helping the CIA set up its secret "black" operations, he unwittingly compromised his family's safety, ultimately forcing them to become fugitives. Realizing that Reed witnessed the making of a counterfeit President and knew too much about its drug operations, the Agency set out to destroy him and his family.

This Arkansas-CIA connection became Clinton's darkest secret – a secret he shared by then Vice-President Bush, who himself was compromised by his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Their shared guilt kept them silent and tied their hands as they faced off in the 1992 Presidential election with neither mentioning Iran-Contra.

The Justice Departments of Reagan, Bush – and now Clinton – have orchestrated an ongoing cover-up of the Arkansas-CIA connection, which has gone undetected for eight years with Bill Clinton its major beneficiary. Clinton's reward for this Faustian pact? The White House.

Reed puts Clinton directly in the "Iran-Contra loop". Both attended a secret meeting where CIA arms arrangements, illegal Contra training and money laundering were discussed. Involved with Clinton in this cabal were Colonel Oliver North, William Barr (George Bush's attorney general), Felix Rodriguez (Bay of Pigs veteran and George Bush's CIA contact) and CIA contract agent Barry Seal, who used the cover of a high-profile drug trafficker to carry out his missions.

"Compromised" reveals the details and names of all who were involved, including these faceless power brokers now in positions of public prominence in Washington, D.C.

When the CIA learned Reed had more patriotism than they bargained for, forces within President Bush's Justice Department, the CIA and the State of Arkansas decided he had to be neutralized. People close to Clinton conspired to set Reed up on false federal criminal charges, forcing him and his family into hiding. But Reed was acquitted, and now wages a one-man legal war to bring those who framed him to justice.

Found innocent by a court of law, Reed was then convicted by TIME Magazine, which aligned itself with a Clinton campaign consumed with protecting its candidate from scandals.

Why did Terry Reed, who performed intelligence services for the US Air Force, FBI, and CIA, come forward with these revelations now? – to set the record straight and to clear his name.

"Compromised" reveals one of the most clandestine operations in recent U.S. history. It also offers behind-the-scenes insights into the sordid world of intelligence, where things are seldom what they seem and powerful people disguise greed and ambition behind the convenient mask of national security.