Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Beware, See Who Barack Obama Really is

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With more than six years in the White House, it is time to look once again at who Barack Obama really is. There are a handful of months left to his administration and the additional damage waged by his regime will likely be epic. To forecast what is to come, a review of his history must have a second look.
The Betrayal Papers: Part V – Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

Introduction

The Betrayal Papers have thus far investigated and explained the Obama administration and their alliance with the international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The articles analyzed several aspects of White House policy, foreign and domestic, and compared them to the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Parts V and VI will explore the personal ties that bind Obama, as well as the progressive American left, to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a portrait of a conspiracy that has reached unprecedented heights of global control.

“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”

Has there ever been a president whose personal history is so murky, so questionable, and so baffling? All one must do is recall the allegations, still open for debate and research, that checker Obama’s background. Laid out below are some of these allegations, not to be proved or disproved, but to remind the reader that Obama’s personal history is replete with question marks.

• A 1991 promotional literary pamphlet featured a short biographical sketch of Obama, and claimed he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

• What is his actual name? The only publicly available school record for Obama lists him as an Indonesian citizen named Barry Soetoro.

• Moreover, on an immigration document from 1965, Obama’s mother included the name “Soebarkah” under Barack Hussein Obama. This is likely a name given to him by the Islamic cult of Subud, to which his mother proudly and openly belonged.

• For a reason yet to be explained, Obama’s Social Security number begins with the prefix 042, which corresponds to Connecticut, a state in which Obama has never lived.

• Regarding his academic records, recall that Obama attended three universities: Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard University (his admission to which coincides with a $25 million dollar donation from the Saudi’s to the Harvard Law School). His academic records with these three institutions have never been revealed, despite efforts by investigative reporters. The student body president at Columbia University during Obama’s time there, Wayne Allen Root (once the Libertarian Party Vice Presidential candidate), has stated publicly that he never met or even heard of Obama while at Columbia, and cannot find any classmates of his who remember him either. Root, like Obama, was a political science major.

• While campaigning for President, candidate Obama presented himself as a “Professor” of Constitutional Law while at the University of Chicago. Yet this turned out to be untrue. In fact, he was a “Senior Lecturer,” a title and position significantly less prestigious than Professor.

• Finally, the best known and most researched of these allegations is the issue of Obama’s birth certificate. From his days as a candidate in the Democrat primary, the place of Obama’s birth has been in contention. While Obama has insisted he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, there are others who claim he was born in Mombasa, Kenya; there’s even a copy of his purported Kenyan birth certificate. Moreover, apparently trustworthy sources swear that the Long Form Birth Certificate is a forgery.

All these questions leave the investigator with only one choice: to define Obama not by his inconsistent biographical details, but by his associations and actions.

The Communist Prelude: Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s Mentor

As documented extensively in Paul Kengor’s book The Communist, Davis ranks high among Obama’s early life influences. A literal card carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Davis was considered by the FBI an enemy of the state.

• Frank Marshall Davis, a known Soviet Communist and admirer of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, was a friend of Obama’s mother’s father, Stanley Dunham.
• The Communist Davis lived in both Hawaii and in Chicago. He was Barack Obama’s mentor through the 1970s, until his departure for Occidental College in 1979.
• Davis was also a pornographer. In his book Sex Rebel, he wrote excitedly about having sex with minors. Pedophilia was unusual for Communists of the era: Harry Hay, another Communist and associate of Davis, was reportedly an advocate of NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association.
• In 1995, in a broadcast on Cambridge Municipal Television, Barack Obama described Davis as “a close friend of my maternal grandfather, a close friend of gramps” and “fairly a well-known poet.”

Irrespective of the publicly accepted, sanitized biography of young Obama, the historical facts establish that his primary political mentor was a Soviet Communist sex offender, introduced to him by his mother’s family.

Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are

George Soros

George Soros, aka György Schwartz, is the Hungarian-born billionaire investor and financier behind a tangled constellation of progressive front organizations. Among these front organizations are: The Open Society Foundation/Institute, ACORN, Think Progress, the Center for American Progress, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, National Council of La Raza, the Tides Foundation, MoveOn.org, the New America Foundation, and the International Crisis Group. As one writer wrote succinctly in 2011, “Essentially, the entire leftist wing of the Democrat party, including the President can be tied to George Soros in some way.”

• Soros was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish family. He grew up in wartime Hungary and was an admitted Nazi collaborator who turned other Jews over to the Nazi authorities. To this day, he has stated that he has no remorse for his actions of turning in Jews to the Nazis and having their property confiscated. As Soros said to 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft it was “the happiest time of my life.”
• Soros is a financial manipulator and breaker of currencies. In 1992, Soros crashed the British pound when he made a bet it would correct against the Deutschemark.
• Soros has a history of using government influence for personal gain. In 1999, (Bill Clinton’s) Secretary of State Madeline Albright blocked a $500 million loan by the U.S. Import-Export Bank to the Russian oil company Tyumen. Tyumen planned to use this money to acquire one of Soros’ companies and a Siberian oil field, and apparently Soros felt his deal wasn’t sweet enough. A few months later, Albright did indeed approve the loan, but only after Soros was guaranteed additional protections for his interests at the expense of Tyumen.
• This pattern repeated in 2009, when the U.S. Import-Export Bank announced a “preliminary commitment” to loan $2 billion to the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras. This caused the shares in the company to rise 27.9% from April 2009-August 2009 (the time of the announcement). Soros, a major shareholder in the company, profited handsomely.
• In 2002, French authorities prosecuted Soros for insider trading. In 2012, the government of Russia issued an arrest warrant for Soros for violating Basel II financial regulations.
• Obama’s foreign policy and the Arab Spring are intertwined with Soros interests. In 2008 the International Crisis Group (aka ICG, a Soros front), issued a paper that urged the Egyptian government to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to form a political party. Anyone with knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Egypt from the 1940s onward, which include assassinations and terrorism, understands the necessity of the Egyptian government’s hard line on the terror group.
• Interestingly, ICG is also home to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the Obama administration’s lead investigator for Benghazi, as well as Robert Malley, who was recently appointed by Obama to a prominent position to lead Middle East policy, despite a history of connections to Hamas.
• In a 2011 op-ed for the Washington Post, Soros himself referred to Israel – not Hamas – as the “stumbling block” in Middle East peace. In the same piece, Soros encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood to be given a seat at the table in Egyptian political life, and urged Obama to support the Arab Spring overthrow of ally Mubarak.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn

Of all the nefarious personal relationships of Barack Hussein Obama, the bloodthirsty couple of Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dorhn are the most unsettling. In the 1960s, Ayers and Dohrn were notorious radicals, anarchists, and terrorists – declared enemies of American society.

Ayers and Dorhn hosted a meet-and-greet and fundraiser for candidate Obama when he first ran for public office. Indeed, Obama’s political career was launched from the couple’s living room in Hyde Park.

• Bill Ayers’ father was Tom Ayers, President of Commonwealth Edison (the power company of Chicago) from 1964-1980, and Chairman from 1973-1980. The Ayers family was close to the corrupt Daley political machine and involved in various philanthropic causes, and Bill was a son of considerable privilege. The Ayers family connection to power production is important to note in connection with the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will be detailed in Part VI.
• Despite his mainstream upbringing, Ayers gravitated to terrorism and revolution. In 1969, he, Dorhn, and other radicals founded the Weather Underground. From its inception until the early 1980s, this group of nihilist anarchists would claim responsibility for targets that included police, an R.O.T.C building, the home of a judge, New York City Police Headquarters, and The Pentagon.
• Dorhn and Ayers lived for a time as fugitives together, and eventually married. But due to legal technicalities neither Ayers nor Dorhn ever served time for their crimes.
• The couple has two sons. Both were, curiously, given Islamic names: Zayd and Malik.
• Ayers has admitted not once, but twice that he is author of the Obama’s memoir, Dreams of my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995.
• On September 11, 2001, a review of an upcoming book by Bill Ayers appeared in the New York Times. In the memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounted his time on the lam. Wrote Ayers in the book, the lines which were reprinted in the Times the morning of September 11: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
• A few hours after that edition of New York Times hit newsstands on 9/11/2001, four planes were hijacked by Al Qaeda. Two of them brought down the World Trade Center. Another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the other slammed into the Pentagon, once a target of Bill Ayers, scarring the symbol of American military might and killing 125 people.
• Consider the psyche of Dohrn (from 1991-2013 a professor at Northwestern Law School) who, upon hearing of the horrific murder of actress Sharon Tate (where a fork was stuck into her nine-month pregnant belly) by psychopath Charles Manson’s gang, stated: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!” Dohrn then adopted the “fork salute” for the Weatherman.
• Years after 9/11/2001, Dohrn and Ayers would openly associate with Islamic terrorists. First, in connection with the 2010 “Peace Flotilla,” a terrorist smuggling operation originating from Turkey that sought to arm Hamas in Gaza. The rabid couple’s attraction to terrorism was enabled by the Soros front group, Code Pink.
• In 2011, Ayers and Dohrn teamed up with Code Pink once again when they crashed the revolution in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to help oust American and Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak. Reliving their youth, they pulled a page from their old playbook, teaching the protestors how to organize their very own “day of rage.”

Valerie Jarrett

No figure in the administration holds more sway over Barack Obama than his Senior Advisor, Valerie Jarrett. Officially in charge of the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, her Twitter handle – vj44, as in “Valerie Jarrett, 44th President” – conveys a truer sense of her power. Yet not even one American voted for President Jarret.

• Valerie June Bowman Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1956 to James and Barbara Taylor Bowman. An examination of Jarrett’s family is the key to understanding her influence in Chicago.
• Jarrett’s father James, a Howard University graduate, was, at the time of her birth, working as a physician and geneticist in Iran. Her mother Barbara’s family is deeply connected to Chicago politics. Jarret’s maternal grandfather was Robert Taylor, who was on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, a municipal corporation. To this day the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project, bear his name.
• A political appointment, Jarrett was not subjected to confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Yet according to every published account, it is she who is the true center of gravity in the administration. Ranging from healthcare “reform” to negotiating with terrorist Iran, the Senior Advisor, not the President, calls the shots at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
• The few murmurings which have come out regarding Jarrett’s omnipresence in the White House have not been flattering. According to one former administration official, “It’s pretty toxic… She went to whatever meeting she wanted to go to—basically all of them—and then would go and whisper to the president. Or at least everyone believed she did. … People don’t trust the process. They think she’s a spy.”
• Even Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, according to author Jonathan Alter, was “tired of being undermined by Valerie Jarrett” when he resigned from his position.
• Given Jarrett’s political force in the capital, the media’s curiosity about Jarrett’s background, governing principles, ideological beliefs, and business dealings has been conspicuously lacking.
• One of Robert Taylor’s (Jarret’s grandfather) business partners was Rufus Cook. Rufus’s ex-wife, Ann, is a cousin of Jarrett’s. Cook is also a legal counsel for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, based out of Chicago. In 2007, the country was shocked when a video emerged that showed the pastor of Obama’s church, Reverend Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, saying of September 11, 2001, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” This was a borrowed line, originally spoken by the Nation of Islam’s silver-tongued spokesman, Malcolm X, referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
• Indeed, TUCC’s Reverend Wright and NOI’s Louis Farrakhan are thick as thieves. In 1984, Wright and Farrakhan traveled together to Libya to meet the “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” Muammar Gaddafi.
• Another Jarrett cousin is Antoinette “Toni” Cook Bush, daughter of Rufus and Ann. In 2013, Toni, a Chicago lawyer, was hired as the head lobbyist for News Corp, owner of Fox News. This is perhaps why Jarrett has been spotted dining with News Corp CEO, Australian Rupert Murdoch.
• Jarrett’s family has direct connections to Obama’s Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Jarrett’s father in law, Vernon Jarrett, was a journalist who worked with Frank Marshall Davis Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers. In his younger years, explains Kengor, Vernon Jarrett “had been elected to the Illinois Council of American Youth for Democracy, the CPUSA youth wing.” Finally, Robert Taylor (mentioned above) was on the board of Chicago Civil Liberties Union with Frank Marshall Davis.

Jarrett, who met Obama in 1991 and introduced him to Michelle, is a part of their family. Given her connections and power, is it any surprise that she recently said to The New York Times Magazine, “I intend to stay [in the White House] until the lights go off.”

Tony Rezko

Antoin “Tony” Rezko is the Chicago-based Syrian-American slumlord who arranged a corrupt deal for the Obama’s home. Rezko, who is currently serving a 10 ½ year prison sentence and was known for influence peddling through bribery, crafted a special deal in which he loaned money to the Obamas and donated to their campaign organization … all while setting them up in a mansion in Hyde Park.

• Obama’s relationship with the corrupt Rezko goes back decades. Rezko tried to hire Obama to work for his real estate company Rezmar when he graduated from Harvard Law School. In 2008, Obama stated that Rezko was a “friend” whom he had “known for 20 years.”
• The Chicago Sun-Times estimated that Obama had received “$168,308 from Rezko and his circle.”
• In 2005, Rezko arranged the purchase of the Obamas’ home in Chicago. Because the Obama’s were not in the financial position to purchase the house at the time, Rezko made a deal with the owner to purchase the adjoining empty lot next to the home at above market price to compensate for the Obamas’ below market offer on the home ($1.65 million versus the $1.95 asking price).
• The Rezko case unfolded before the nation as Barack Obama was ascending to the presidency. It embroiled Patrick Fitzgerald (who was previously known for prosecuting Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby), Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich (who is serving a 14 year jail sentence), Obama, and Rezko.
• The convicted felon Rezko is an associate of international criminal and former Saddam Hussein agent, Iraqi Nadhmi Auchi.

Nadhmi Auchi

The Iraqi operator Nadhmi Auchi is the sort of rarefied sort of gentlemen you would normally come across in a spy novel. On the surface, Nadhmi Auchi is a business magnate, a dynamo philanthropist, and an honored citizen of many countries. As was explained by a former senior official of the Defense, State, and Commerce departments, John A. Shaw, Mr. Auchi made a name for himself as the international financier and arms dealer extraordinaire of Saddam Hussein. By 1980, Auchi was an asset of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6. (So multi-faceted is this billionaire mystery man that he has his own dedicated Wikileaks page.) Auchi and Tony Rezko were partners in real estate and pizza.

• Contemporary to the timeline of Obama’s political rise in Chicago, Auchi was building an influence operation one brick at a time in the very same city. His ties from the Middle East to America’s Midwest made his enterprise a conduit of Middle Eastern money into the United States of America.
• Shaw writes, “Nadhmi Auchi, despite his purchased respectability in England, was the financial eminence behind the Chicago-Arab combine, and the man who, with Rezko, helped invent Barack Obama as a political star.” Through Tony Rezko, his local bagman, Auchi financed and guided Obama (and Jarrett) into the Oval Office.
• While a large shareholder in BNP Paribas, Auchi was involved with the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which was based on the sale of Iraqi oil.
• In 2004, Auchi was banned from entering the U.S. for scamming the Pentagon on an Iraqi cellular deal he helped broker. After securing rights to Iraq’s cellular services, Auchi went on to corner the market on power contracts for the post-war transition, as well.
• If Soros personifies the Progressive wing of Obama’s politics, it is Auchi that personifies the wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Auchi’s stances on litmus test issues tell who he is, politically speaking, in the Middle East. Auchi is anti-Semitic, and led support for the Turkish terror flotilla (an operation which ties him to Ayers, Dorhn, and Soros).
• It may seem an odd dichotomy that two people in low cost housing, Valerie Jarrett and Toni Rezko, and two artful and sophisticated investors, Auchi and Soros (both of whom are convicted of financial crimes in France), ushered Obama to the presidency. Yet each one of these individuals shares one lethal trait: they are masters at using government for their personal gain.
• Auchi has a history of suing his critics, and silencing those who cause too much trouble. His reputation as an aggressive litigator and someone who won’t hesitate to kill may have convinced journalist David Ignatius to think twice about disclosing his knowledge of Auchi’s activities. For instead of a nonfiction book, Ignatius did indeed pen a spy novel, The Bank of Fear, based on Auchi’s career.

Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said

Rashid Khalidi is an anti-Semitic professor and historian of Palestine. Khalidi is currently the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. During their Chicago years, the Obamas were close friends with Khalidi and his wife, Mona. They were also friends with Edward Said, Khalidi’s mentor.

• Throughout the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at the University of Beirut, he routinely spoke on behalf of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization.
• The Obamas and Khalidis have been friends for decades. When in Chicago, the Obamas regularly dined with the Khalidis.
• In 1998, the Obamas attended a banquet which featured Edward Said as the keynote speaker. Said, a Palestinian-American (now deceased), had long been a critic of the State of Israel, which he referred to as being in “illegal military occupation since 1967.”
• In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama when he was running for Congress. The following year, the Woods Foundation (where Obama served as a Board member) donated $40,000 to Mona Khalidi’s charity.
• As one pro-Palestinian activist phrased it in 2008, when Obama’s views on Israel and Palestine were a subject of controversy: “I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates.”

With the benefit of more than six years of hindsight, it is clear that Barack Hussein Obama (with the eager cooperation of Secretary of State John Kerry) has been the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian president in United States history.

Conclusion

A man does not become President of the United States without very high powered connections. Usually these connections are accumulated through a long career of public service, whether in the U.S. Congress, Executive, or on the state level. Obama rose to the Presidency after serving a scant four years in the U.S. Senate, two of which were spent running for President. Prior to that, he served an unremarkable seven years in the Illinois State Senate.

Before launching his political career in the living room of American anarchists, Obama was a community-organizing lawyer for progressive groups. Among them was ACORN, which was instrumental in creating the housing bubble.

With such little authentic biography available, we are forced to define Obama by his friends. They include financial and political manipulators and fixers, corrupt businessmen and international criminals, card-carrying Communists and FBI-identified enemies of the state, terrorists foreign and domestic, and their academic apologists.

Part VI will conclude The Betrayal Papers with a look at the various interconnected schemes of the above-named Obama associates.

 

 

 

Grover, Grover, Grover, You’re Busted Dude

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The internet is an interesting tool. It is especially fascinating that some crafty people can go backwards in the internet cache and capture evidence.

What say you Grover this time? To all the Republicans, to the Democrats, to the Conservative Union, to Congress and to the NRA….take notice. To the IRS, to policy makers, to the lobby groups, the terrorists are among us due to you. It should be noted, this was during the Clinton administration.

A PARTICULAR HAT TIP TO GLENN BECK, THANK YOU SIR. Great work to Tom Trento for his stick-t0-it’ned-ness.

NEWLY DISCOVERED DOCUMENT EXPOSES NORQUIST’S LIES
A newly discovered document proves that Grover Norquist, top GOP moneyman, sponsored in October 23rd 2000 an anti-Israel pro-HAMAS and pro-Hezbollah rally in front of the White House in Lafayette Park. The rally was run and led by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi who pleaded guilty to financing terrorism and conspiracy to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.  Al-Amoudi is currently serving a 23 year sentence in federal prison. Al-Amoudi who is co-founder of the Islamic Institute with Grover Norquist is seen on video in the Oct 23 rally screaming his support for al-Qaeda and Hezbollah both of which are specially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

The newly discovered document found on the Islamic Institutes website in their weekly Friday brief demonstrably proves that Norquist’s organization was the organizational and contact body for the event dubbed: “March and Rally in Washington Against Israeli Aggression,” and states:

On October 23, 2000, there will be a march and rally in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., to protest Israel’s aggression against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its escalating use of violence toward the Palestinian people. The march and rally are being organized by the National Task Force for the Crisis in Jerusalem (NTFCJ), a coalition of national American Muslim organizations of which the Islamic Institute is a part. The march begins at 11:00am at Freedom Plaza, and will move to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where a rally will begin at 12:00pm.

It is highly important that the Muslim community in the U.S. demonstrates a show of solidarity by attending this event. A strong presence will emphasize the call of American Muslims for peace and justice in Jerusalem and Palestine. Buses are being chartered nationwide to bring supporters to Washington. For further information, contact the Islamic Institute via phone or e-mail, or the American Muslim Council at (202) 789-2262(202) 789-2262.
Members of the NTFCJ are: the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, American Muslims for Jerusalem, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Institute, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim Student Association.

When asked by Glenn Beck if he (Grover Norquist) sponsored the event Norquist replied that it was a mistake by and intern and that his organization, the Islamic Institute, had no direct involvement or planning of the rally – a direct contradiction of the Organizations weekly brief.

Clearly the Islamic Institute was the primary sponsor, primary planner, primary organizer and primary leader of the anti-Israel in October of 2000 and in possible violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – Providing material support to terrorists.

Friday’s 4pm Show:

HEY, US CONGRESS – “THROW THE TERRORISTS OUT!”

4.13.15

On Monday April 13 and Tuesday 14 Muslim Terrorists walking around the United States Congress will demand that our elected Representatives change federal law thereby making it harder to investigate Muslim terrorists. I know, crazy stuff, but it is happening right in broad daylight! Thank Allah that we at The United West are experts at investigating Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and exposing their influence operations for all Americans to understand and properly respond. To accomplish this we are launching a five-part investigative series entitled: “Muslim Terrorists Lobby 114th Congress.” Our show today focuses on what the Members of the 114th Congress should do when the terrorists enter their offices. And what is that? THROW THEM OUT THE DOOR! Why in the world should an elected Member of Congress give any time to KNOWN terrorists who have a written agenda that includes destroying the essence of the Capitol building in which they are meeting! Watch this show as it is FULL of critically important information to help all Americans properly, professionally and legally DEFEAT this Muslim Brotherhood political influence operation.

 

When the U.S. Strategy is to no Longer Lead

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Symptomatic of when a country is war weary, the rules of engagement are re-tooled, removing hostilities and the will to win fades away, the wake of destruction becomes worse. How many times has this occurred? Korea, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and more. If it is not up to the United States of America, then who?

Korea

Sudan

Cambodia

Sinjar Mountain, Iraq

Libya

Dafur

Syria

 

Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to the ‘butcher’ 40 years ago

American envoy, a German-born Jew, recalls horrors of Pol Pot’s regime, regrets Washington’s ‘abandonment’ of allies

PARIS (AP) — Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.

Forty years later and 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 kilometers) away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”

Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history — the first of several US interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.

“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”

Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.

Many foreigners present during the final months — diplomats, aid workers, journalists — remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh’s death throes, by the heartbreaking loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls Washington’s “indecent act.”

I count myself among those foreigners, a reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third-country nationals. I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die.

For the general public, the pullout is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the mass, hysteric flight from Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War three weeks later. But for historians and political analysts, the withdrawal from Cambodia signifies the first of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger termed “bug-outs.”

“It was the first time Americans came anywhere close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there is that we are still seeing it happen,” says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA officer in Saigon and author of “Decent Interval,” which depicts the final years of the Vietnam War. After Cambodia and Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.

Today, at 89, Dean, a German-born Jew, and his French wife reside in a patrician quarter of Paris, in an elegant apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the same one that he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.

In the apartment’s vestibule hangs a framed letter signed by President Gerald R. Ford and dated Aug. 14, 1975. It highlights that Dean was “given one of the most difficult assignments in the history of the Foreign Service and carried it out with distinction.”

But Dean says: “I failed.”

“I tried so hard,” he adds. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”

The former ambassador to four other countries expresses more than guilt. He is highly critical of America’s violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early 1970s which killed thousands of civilians and radicalized, he believes, the Khmer Rouge. Once-peaceful Cambodia, he says, was drawn into war for America’s interests, a “sideshow” to Vietnam.

The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia propped up as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.

“The US wasn’t that concerned about what happened one way or the other in Cambodia but only concerned about it to the extent that it impacted positively or negatively on their situation in Vietnam,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Opinion on what went wrong in Cambodia remains split to this day. One view is that the country was destabilized by the American incursions and bombings; another is that Washington failed to provide the US-propped Lon Nol government with adequate military and other support.

In his memoirs, Kissinger says the US had no choice but to expand its efforts into the neighboring country, which the North Vietnamese were using as a staging area and armory for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam. And as Cambodia crumbled, he writes, anti-war elements, the media and Congress combined to tie the administration’s hands, preventing further assistance.

Dean is bitter that Kissinger and other power brokers in Washington did not support his quest to persuade ousted Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. It was Dean’s “controlled solution.”

“We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting, ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected,’” Dean said in earlier oral testimony. But Washington seemed unmoved.

“Ambassador Dean never had (President Richard) Nixon’s or Kissinger’s support because both of them wanted out of Indochina,” Snepp says.

By early 1975, the embassy’s cables, most of them declassified in 2006, were becoming increasingly frantic.

Meeting me one day, a haggard Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: “Isn’t there any sense of human decency left in us?”

“Phnom Penh was surrounded by explosions and a night sky of blossoming flares and streaks of tracer bullets,” I wrote in one of my stories at that time. “Children were dying of hunger, the hospitals looked more like abattoirs and the Cambodian army lost as many men in three months as the US did in a decade of war in South Vietnam.”

The Khmer Rouge were tightening their stranglehold on the capital, shutting down the airport from which the embassy had flown out several hundred Cambodians. An April 6 cable from Dean said the Cambodian government and army “seem to be expecting us to produce some miracle to save them. You and I know there will be no such miracle.”

Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh. The American public had had enough of the war.

Among Cambodians in the know, some anti-American feeling was growing.

“The Americans give temporary aid but ultimately they think only of themselves. We in Cambodia have been seduced and abandoned,” Chhang Song, a former information minister, said one night in early 1975.

But among Phnom Penh residents I found only smiles — “Americans are our fathers,” one vegetable vendor told me — along with a never-never-land mindset that things would turn out to be all right. Somehow.

“I honestly believe we did not do enough. There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people,” Dean says, explaining in part why he, a Jew, felt so strongly. “Now you must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”

Dean’s abiding emotions are shared by others of his former staff.

Alan Armstrong, the assistant defense attache, is still trying to complete a novel to exorcise what he went through. It is called “La Chute,” “The Fall.”

“I was paid by my government to smile, break bread (with Cambodians) and then betray my friends and colleagues. That’s a heavy burden to bear no matter how many years roll by,” says the retired US Army colonel. “The downfall of the Khmer Republic not only resulted in the deaths of countless Cambodians, it has also crept into our souls.”

Historians, distant from the passions of the actors, differ over Dean’s efforts and American culpability.

Benedict Kiernan, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Cambodia, says that given rifts within the Khmer Rouge leadership a political compromise earlier in the war might have been possible, resulting in a left-wing dominated coalition and not a fanatical revolution.

“Anything was worth trying to stop the Khmer Rouge before they got to Phnom Penh,” says Heder, the academic, who reported in Cambodia during the war and was among those evacuated from the capital.

Milton Osborne, an Australian historian and diplomat who served in Cambodia, describes Dean’s “controlled solution” as a “forlorn hope,” with the Khmer Rouge determined to win totally and execute Phnom Penh’s leaders. “By 1974, it was not a question of if, but when,” he says.

Snepp believes that Dean, desperately grasping at straws, was “living in fantasy land.”

Washington may have abandoned its ally, but the Cambodian elite also bears responsibility for its own demise. Snepp views President Lon Nol — corrupt, inept, superstitious and half-paralyzed — as one in a long line of similar leaders the United States would back in the following decades.

“What we have seen in all cases is that unless the US has a politically viable domestic partner, neither limited nor massive military intervention is going to succeed,” says Heder.

Timothy Carney, the embassy’s political officer, drawing on his record as ambassador to several countries, says that “tolerating corruption saps the legitimacy and support for whatever authority we are trying to prop up in a country.”

In the final days, Carney’s task was to persuade, unsuccessfully, Cambodian leaders to flee the country.

The night before the evacuation, Dean and his deputy drank some of the ambassador’s fine French wine so it wouldn’t fall into Khmer Rouge hands. The next morning, sitting in his office for the last time, he read a letter from Prince Sirik Matak in which the respected former deputy prime minister declined evacuation and thus sealed his own death. It read: “I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans.”

Dean today describes it as the “greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative.”

His embassy closed down at 9:45 a.m., the evacuees driven 10 blocks to a soccer field shielded by a row of apartment buildings from Khmer Rouge gunners about a mile away. The Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters were setting down. The Marines fanned out to form a security cordon around the landing zone.

But fears of possible reprisals by Cambodians proved unfounded.

Children and mothers scrambled over fences to watch. They cheered, clapped and waved to the 360 beefy, armed Marines. A Cambodian military policeman saluted Armstrong smartly. Disgusted and ashamed, he dropped his helmet and rifle, leaving them behind.

I tried to avoid looking into faces of the crowd. Always with me will be the children’s little hands aflutter and their singsong “OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye.”

By 12:15 the last helicopters landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa waiting off the Cambodian coast. Tactically, the 2 1/2-hour operation had been flawless.

In Phnom Penh, Douglas Sapper, an ex-Green Beret who stayed behind to save his company’s employees, recalled the reaction of Cambodians who realized what had happened: “It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead.”

Five days later we received a cable from Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety. Instead he wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender and gunpoint evacuation. “I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling,” he messaged. “Do not know how to file our stories now … maybe last cable today and forever.”

Barry Broman, then a young diplomat, remembers a Cambodian woman who worked upcountry monitoring the war for the embassy who had also refused evacuation.

“One day she said, ‘They are in the city,’ and her contact said ‘OK, time to go.’ She refused. Later she reported, ‘They are in the building,’ and again refused to leave her post. Her last transmission was, ‘They are in the room. Good-bye.’ The line went dead.”

 

Did you get Fired and Replaced by a Foreigner?

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H1B Visa Cap is Suitable For:

Foreign students on F-1 OPT, F-1 CPT or STEM extension

Foreign professionals in specialty occupations, such as programmer analysts, physical therapists, accountants, database administrators, market research analysts, engineers, management analysts, graphic designers, pharmacists, financial analysts, and others with Bachelor’s or equivalent degree

Foreign nationals who have spent at least one year outside United States after reaching the 6-years limit on H1B, to come back and work in a specialty occupation

U.S. companies to employ qualified foreign nationals in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree and specialized skills

So this begs the question, just how deep is the collusion and are there recourses for people that were fired as you read on….

Senators seek probe of claims US workers fired, forced to train foreign replacement

A popular visa program allegedly is being misused by U.S. companies to lay off thousands of American workers and replace them with foreign labor.

And, adding insult to injury, many of the laid-off workers allegedly have been forced to train their replacements, in what one anonymous whistleblower called a “humiliating” experience.

The allegations have caught the attention of a bipartisan group of senators — including immigration hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, Illinois’ Dick Durbin — who are calling for a federal probe. A letter sent by 10 senators urging an investigation specifically cited reports of the firing and hiring practices at Southern California Edison, California’s second-largest utility. The incidents are concentrated in the IT field, and involve American workers being replaced by H-1B visa holders.

“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known, publicly-traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders,” the senators wrote.

In the letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the senators urged the departments to “investigate the unacceptable replacement of American workers” to see whether laws were broken.

The H-1B program is supposed to be used to bring in, on a temporary basis, skilled workers with highly specialized skills not readily available in the U.S. They are often used in the technology sector to bring in engineers and computer programmers.

Further, U.S. employers can hire foreign workers for up to six years and must pay them the same rate they would pay other workers with similar qualifications, or the prevailing wage for that job and location, whichever is higher. This is done to prevent foreign workers from depressing U.S. wages and from being exploited.

But reports have surfaced that the replacements are happening at an alarming rate. And former Southern California Edison workers have complained to lawmakers that they were replaced by less-skilled workers at lower costs.

Anonymous workers who were displaced by the visa holders also submitted written testimonials to lawmakers detailing their firings. Several claimed they were forced to train their replacements, and threatened with losing their severance if they did not.

“We had no choice in this,” one anonymous worker who claimed to have been one of those let go from Southern California Edison, said in a letter. The worker described how when the two vendors were picked – Infosys and TCS, both major Indian companies – SCE employees were told to “sit with, video chat or do whatever was needed to teach them our systems.”

If they did not cooperate, according to the testimonial, “we would be fired and not receive a severance package.”

Another worker described this process as “humiliating.”

In a statement, Southern California Edison said it abides by the law and will cooperate with any investigation that concerns the issues mentioned in the senators’ letter.

The company explained that it’s reducing its information technology department from 1,400 to 860. Of those left, 97 percent are permanent California residents and 3 percent are on H-1B visas.

Southern California Edison said it’s contracting with IT vendors to fulfill certain contracts and that most of those workers are permanent U.S. residents and aren’t working under H-1B visas.

“By transitioning some IT operations to external vendors, along with SCE eliminating some customized functions it will no longer provide, the company will focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers,” Southern California Edison’s emailed statement read.

But the senators, in their letter, raised several questions about how the replacements were being done. They said it appears the workers are often not employees of the U.S. company laying off workers – but are contractors working for foreign-owned IT consultants.

The H-1B program stipulates that applicants must have a valid “employer-employee relationship” – and the senators questioned whether that was the case here.

They also asked whether the companies “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination” (against American citizens); and whether the visa petitions showed “any evidence of misrepresentation or fraud.”

Sessions said in a statement that the SCE allegations “ought to be the tipping point that finally compels Washington to take needed actions to protect American workers.”

The letter from senators follows a hearing last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which invited Southern California Edison to testify, though the company declined.

Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University, said at the hearing that the utility outsourced work to two companies, and those companies employed H-1B staffers who were then trained by the employees they were replacing. “There could not be a clearer case of the H-1B program being used to harm American workers’ wages and working conditions,” Hira said.

Republican senators seeking the investigation are Sessions, Charles Grassley of Iowa, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Bill Cassidy and David Vitter of Louisiana.

Democratic senators seeking the investigation are Durbin, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, also signed the letter.

Purple Hearts and the Failed VA

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Victims of Fort Hood shooting receive Purple Hearts

WASHINGTON — Nearly six years after they were attacked by one of their own, the victims of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting have received the Purple Hearts that the Army previously deemed were not owed to them.

At a Friday ceremony at Fort Hood, Texas, base commander Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland presented the medals to those who were wounded and the families of those who were killed when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting rampage at the installation on Nov. 5, 2009.

“It is our sincere hope that today we will in some small way help to heal the wounds that you have suffered,” said MacFarland, the commander of Army III Corps, which is based at Fort Hood.

Thirteen people were killed and 31 were wounded during the attack before Hasan was subdued. Of those killed, 12 were soldiers and one was a civilian contractor.

MacFarland noted that the carnage could have been much worse had it not been for the bravery of those who responded to the incident.

“We also remember the acts of courage and selflessness of soldiers and civilians which prevented an even greater calamity from occurring that day,” he said. “When shots rang out on Fort Hood, our soldiers and first responders ran toward the sound of gunfire” to “take down the shooter.”

In the wake of the attack, the Army said the Fort Hood casualties were not eligible for the Purple Heart or its civilian equivalent, the Defense of Freedom Medal, because they were not killed or wounded in combat or in an attack by a foreign terrorist organization.

Families of the victims lobbied Congress to change the wording of the law to make their loved ones eligible for the Purple Heart and the recognition of sacrifice that goes along with it.

In the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers loosened the criteria by redefining what should be considered an attack by a “foreign terrorist organization” for purposes of determining award eligibility.

The legislation dictated that an act of violence should now be considered an attack by a foreign terrorist organization if the perpetrator of the attack “was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack” and the attack was “inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.”

In a review of the incident and the new provisions of law, the Army determined both these criteria had been met.

“Now that Congress has changed the criteria, we believe there is sufficient reason to allow these men and women to be awarded and recognized with either the Purple Heart or, in the case of civilians, the Defense of Freedom medal. It’s an appropriate recognition of their service and sacrifice,” Army Secretary John McHugh said in a statement in February when the decision to award the medals was announced.

John Bircher, a spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, a veterans service organization, said he’s glad to see that the soldiers who were killed and wounded were finally given the medal.

“I think it’s something that we all felt was due to them but the [old] criteria of the award just didn’t allow for it,” he said. “For the families of those who were killed in the incident, I think this is a nice closure for them.”

The change in the criteria for the medals has implications beyond the Fort Hood shooting. As the ability of overseas terrorist organizations to conduct attacks against the homeland has been diminished by American military action and other measures, U.S. officials have become increasingly worried about the threat of “lone wolf” attacks that could be conducted by individuals who are inspired to commit violence by overseas extremist groups but are not members of those organizations.

In 2013, after being court-martialed, Hasan was found guilty on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He is on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while post-trial and appellate processes continue.

*** Are the Purple Hearts merely a gesture? Has there been any significant improvement in treatment, waiting times or quality of care? Not so much. Even with complaints, investigations or whistleblowers, veterans see no measured advancement. A change in leadership, more Congressional hearings and an additional $11 billion dollars, there has been no successful breakthroughs.

Agency Says VA Whistleblower Cases Have Surged

U.S. Office of Special Counsel has settled 45 claims, examining another 110 since start of fiscal year

A federal agency charged with protecting the rights of government workers said Thursday it has seen a surge in claims from Department of Veterans Affairs whistleblowers over the past year.

Claims began to increase after details emerged in April last year of long delays in treatment throughout the VA system, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said. The national scandal led to the resignation of then-Secretary Eric Shinseki in May.

The agency said that since October 2013, when the 2014 fiscal year started, it has settled claims or secured temporary relief for 45 VA employees who say they were punished for reporting problems in both administration and medical care. The agency said it is examining another 110 similar claims.

“Right now, about 40% of our casework is VA-related. In prior years it provided about 20% of casework,” said Nick Schwellenbach a spokesman for the agency. The agency handled 5,200 total cases last year, including whistleblower retaliation claims and other forms of employment discrimination.

In the 2014 fiscal year, VA employees submitted more claims to the Office of Special Counsel than any federal department, including the Department of Defense, which has roughly twice the employees as the VA and had the most claims in 2013.

Mr. Schwellenbach said claims increased, in part, because the VA has done a better job of informing employees of worker protections. The department has also streamlined the process for investigating whistleblower claims.

A VA spokeswoman said the department doesn’t tolerate retaliation against whistleblowers and disciplines employees when claims are substantiated.