Category Archives: Terror

Iranian Hackers Eye U.S. Grid

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iranhack4Cyber-savvy agents are stepping up their efforts to ID critical infrastructure that may compromise national security.

Iranian hackers are trying to identify computer systems that control infrastructure in the United States, such as the electrical grid, presumably with an eye towards damaging those systems, according to a new report from a cyber security firm and a think tank in Washington, D.C.

The researchers from Norse, a cyber security company, and the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has been skeptical of the Iranian nuclear agreement, found that Iranian hacking against the U.S. is increasing and that the lifting of economic sanctions as part of an international agreement over Iran’s nuclear program “will dramatically increase the resources Iran can put toward expanding its cyberattack infrastructure.”

What’s more, the current sanctions regime, which has helped to depress Iran’s economy, has not blunted the expansion of its cyber spying and warfare capabilities, the researchers conclude.

The technical data underlying the report’s conclusions, while voluminous, aren’t definitive, and they don’t answer a central question of whether Iran intends to attack the U.S. Using data collected from a network of Norse “sensors” around the world made to look like vulnerable computers, the researchers tracked what they say is a dramatic escalation in spying and attacks on the U.S. from hackers in Iran, including within the Iranian military. The researchers also traced hacking back to a technical university in Iran, as well as other institutions either run or heavily influenced by the Iranian regime.

“Iran is emerging as a significant cyber threat to the U.S. and its allies,” the report’s authors say. “The size and sophistication of the nation’s hacking capabilities have grown markedly over the last few years, and Iran has already penetrated well-defended networks in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and seized and destroyed sensitive data.”

That assessment tracks with the view of U.S. intelligence officials, who’ve been alarmed by how quickly Iran has developed the capability to wreak havoc in cyberspace. In 2012, officials say that Iranian hackers were responsible for erasing information from 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil and gas production facility, as well as a denial-of-service attack that forced the websites of major U.S. banks to shut down under a deluge of electronic traffic. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that Iran was responsible for an attack on the Sands casino company in 2014, in which intruders stole and destroyed data from the company’s computers.

The Norse and AEI researchers found that Iran’s cyber capabilities, which U.S. officials and experts say have been growing rapidly since around 2009, have accelerated in the past year. Attacks launched from Iranian Internet addresses rose 128 percent between January 2013 and mid-March 2015, the researchers found. And the number of individual Norse sensors “hit” by Iranian Internet addresses increased 229 percent. All told, the researchers conclude that hackers using Iranian Internet addresses have “expended their attack infrastructure more than fivefold over the course of just 13 months.”

There’s little debate about among U.S. officials and experts that Iran poses a credible and growing danger online. But the technical data underlying Norse and AEI’s conclusions came into question when the report was released on Thursday.

The researchers relied on “scans” of Norse sensors that may indicate some interest by an Iranian hacker, but don’t prove his intent or that he was planning to damage a particular computer.

 

“They talk about ‘attacks,’ but what they really mean are ‘scans,” which is more ambiguous, Robert M. Lee, a PhD candidate at King’s College London who is researching industrial control systems, told The Daily Beast. Industrial control systems are the computers that help run critical infrastructure.

Essentially, Iranian hackers are casing a neighborhood, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to rob houses. Lee, who is also an active duty Air Force cyber warfare operations officer, said he agreed with the report’s assessment that Iran is building up its cyber forces and poses a threat. But the underlying technical data in the report doesn’t directly support that claim, he said. “They reached the right conclusions but for the wrong reasons,” Lee said.

The researchers didn’t find that Iran had successfully penetrated any industrial control systems and caused machinery to break down.

While the report concludes that Iran will use the sanctions relief to fuel its growing cyber warfare program, other researchers have suggested that Iran is likely to back off its most aggressive operations—like those against the Saudi oil company and U.S. banks—and will instead focus on cyber espionage that doesn’t cause physical damage.

“They’ll be far more targeted and careful,” Stuart McClure, the CEO and president of cybersecurity company Cylance, told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. Since the U.S. and its international partners reached a tentative agreement with Iran on its nuclear program earlier this month, Cylance hasn’t tracked any attacks by an Iranian hacker group that it has been monitoring and documented in an earlier report (PDF).

But Norse’s conclusions are generally supported by Cylance’s research, which found that Iran had actually penetrated systems controlling a range of critical infrastructure in the U.S., including oil and gas, energy and utilities, transportation, airlines, airports, hospitals, telecommunications, and aerospace companies. The company’s report on those intrusions, which it said was based on two years of research, also didn’t attribute any failures of critical infrastructure to those Iranian intrusions.

“A lot of the work [the Iranians] were doing was quite sloppy, almost to the point that they wanted to get caught,” McClure said. He speculated that the Iranians may have been trying to send a signal to the U.S. and their partners in the nuclear negotiations that they were capable of inflicting harm if they didn’t get a favorable deal. “Coming to the table and knowing your adversary is in your house influences the negotiation.”

Iran still has a way to go to join the ranks of the cyber superpowers. Its “cyberwarfare capabilities do not yet seem to rival those of Russia in skill, or ofChina in scale,” the Norse and AEI report finds. There is still a relatively small community of high-end hackers in the country, and the regime hasn’t been able to build as robust a tech infrastructure for launching attacks as other nations whose capabilities are more advanced, the researchers found.

The report identifies the Iranian government as responsible for the malicious activity, concluding that the traffic originated from organizations “controlled or influenced by the government” or moved over equipment that is known to be monitored and manipulated by Iran’s security services.

That claim is also likely to raise objection from technical experts, who generally demand more precise evidence to attribute a cyber operation to a specific actor.

“We are emphatically not suggesting that all malicious traffic emanating from Iran is government initiated or government-approved,” the researchers said. However, they argue “that the typical standards of proof for attributing malicious traffic to a specific source are unnecessarily high” in this case, given that so much of the traffic they observed traversed systems either owned, controlled, or spied on by the Iranian government.

That’s ironic: Earlier this year, when Obama administration officials declared publicly that North Korea was responsible for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norse was one of the most prominent skeptics, arguing that the government was relying on imprecise technical data and leaping to conclusions.

Norse said its own research suggested that a group of six individuals, including at least one disgruntled ex-Sony employee, was behind the assault, which humiliated Sony executives and led to threats of terrorist attacks over the release of The Interview.

But that theory was undermined in January when FBI Director James Comey took the unusual step of publicly declassifying information that, he said, definitively linked North Korea to the attack. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials also told The Daily Beast that they’d been tracking the hackers behind the Sony operation long before it was ever launched.

On College Campuses…Really?

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Islamic jihad comes to campus
Anti-Semitism under the guise of social justice is seeping into the college scene

By David Horowitz – – Thursday, April 16, 2015

The world is witnessing a resurgence of global anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s and the “Final Solution.” In the Middle East, Hitler-admiring regimes like Iran, and Hitler-admiring parties like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, are openly planning to finish the job the Nazis started. Even in America, until now the most hospitable place outside of Israel for Jews, the atmosphere is more hostile than at any time in the last 70 years.

According to the FBI, three-fifths of all religious hate crimes in America are now committed against Jews, while a recent Pew poll revealed that 54 percent of Jewish students have either been the subject of an anti-Semitic attack or witnessed one. The frequency of these attacks among college-aged students, moreover, is five times that of any other age group. The reason for this is obvious: Across the United States student groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, specifically Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association, are engaged in a vitriolic campaign against Israel and those students who support its right to exist. These organizations promote the propaganda of the terrorist organization Hamas, and call for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Students for Justice in Palestine, the more active of the two groups, claims to support a left-wing agenda of “social justice,” and “universal human rights.” Like the left itself, though, Students for Justice in Palestine doesn’t stand for the rights of Palestinians in the territories controlled by Palestinians, including the rights of Palestinians to disagree with each other without being targeted by their terrorist rulers. Instead, SJP’s sole agenda is the destruction of the Jewish state.

While SJP’s self-professed purpose is “to promote self-determination for the Palestinian people,” the organization defines the boundaries of this liberation as extending “from the river to the sea,” i.e., from the Jordan River on Israel’s eastern border to its western border on the Mediterranean. To advance this genocidal agenda, SJP endorses the lie that Israel was created on territory stolen from the Palestinians and, therefore, Jews illegally occupy Arab lands from which they must be purged.

In fact, Israel was created on land that had belonged to the Turks, who are not Arabs, for 400 years previously. In 1948 when Israel was created, there was no Palestinian political entity, no movement for a Palestinian state, and no people calling itself Palestinian. These core genocidal lies make up the primary agenda of SJP and its anti-Jewish allies, and are crowned by the ludicrous claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” with policies worthy of the “Nazis.” In fact, Israel is the only democratic and ethnically tolerant state in the Middle East, the only place where gays, Christians and women are safe. The real Nazis in the Middle East are the Arabs who openly call for the extermination of the Jews.

Despite its anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agendas, SJP is funded by university fees. University administrations officially recognize the organization and grant it the privilege of erecting walls of hate, and conducting “die-ins” and other propaganda stunts in campus centers where other students can’t avoid being assaulted by their noxious accusations.

University administrators who refuse to rein in this hatred operate under pressure from faculty and student activists of the anti-Israel “social justice” left. These include the self-hating Jews of J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, who join hands with their mortal enemies to condemn anyone who confronts SJP and the malignant forces it represents as “Islamophobes.”

As it happens, “Islamophobe” is a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood to demonize its opponents, and the center of a campaign seeking a universal ban on critics as religious blasphemers. The campaign’s success can be seen in President Obama’s refusal to call the terrorist Islamic State “Islamic,” or to describe the war waged by the Islamic State, al Qaeda and other Islamic terror organizations as a religious crusade.

Thanks to the savageries of the Islamic State, however, Americans have begun to wake up and to see Jews as canaries in the mine, and to understand that what is happening to Jews is also happening to Christians and others in the way of Islamic Nazis. Nonetheless, the continuing successes of front organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine are ominous indicators of the dangers that confront us, and should be a wake-up call, too.

 

Insurgency Season at U.S. Southern Border

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Shocking images from cameras on Texas-Mexico border capture steady stream of illegal immigrants sneaking into the United States with packages of drugs and guns

  • Network of more than 1,000 cameras are installed on farms and ranches 
  • Have been strategically placed in areas that have not been secured 
  • ‘Sophisticated‘ system led to the apprehension of nearly 30,000 suspects
  • Has also slowed down cartel operations and drug smuggling 

 
See the video here. And for still images from the cameras, click here.

Cameras placed along Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico have captured the stream of illegal immigrants sneaking into the country on a daily basis.

The network of more than 1,000 motion detectors, similar to those used to film wildlife, have been placed strategically in areas that have not been secured – where Mexican citizens can cross and evade capture with ease.

They helped border guards apprehend nearly 30,000 suspects and led to 88,400 pounds of drugs being seized in 2014 as part of Operation Drawbridge.

The system has also had a significant impact on Mexican cartels and their ability to smuggle narcotics, people and stolen vehicles between the two countries. The startling images have been revealed as President Obama continues to fight to push through an executive order to shield illegal immigrants from deportation.

Earlier this month a federal judge in Texas refused to lift a temporary block on a White House immigration plan.

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the ‘sophisticated’ cameras are stationed on ranches and farms on the border.

The turn on when movement is detected and are monitored in real-time, around-the-clock by a number of agencies.

If they think suspicious activity is taking place, they alert law enforcement in a bid to get them to cut them off.

Steven McCraw, the director of the agency, said: ‘Every day, sheriff’s deputies, police officers, Border Patrol agents and state law enforcement officers in the Texas border region risk their lives to protect Texas and the entire nation from Mexican cartels and transnational crime.

‘This innovative use of technology has proven to be a force multiplier in detecting the smuggling attempts along the border, which is critical to interdicting criminal activity occurring between the ports of entry.

‘Any time law enforcement interdicts a smuggling attempt, we consider it a significant gain in the fight against the cartels and their operatives.

‘The collaborative law enforcement efforts of Operation Drawbridge have bolstered our ability to combat the exploitation of our border by these ruthless criminals.’

In March it was revealed more immigrants are choosing more remote and dangerous crossing points to make it to the United States.

The Border Patrol has responded by expanding its search-and-rescue teams to monitor the area, as a growing number of bodies of suspected illegal immigrants are being found.

Many of the bodies are being discovered just southwest of Mission, Texas, where the fire department’s dive-and-rescue team has had a busy winter. In January and February alone, it recovered at least six bodies in the murky canals.

In February, governor Greg Abbot claimed that had 20,000 illegal immigrants had already entered the country since the start of the year.

Cant Make More Land? China can…

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China has been aggressive in the region of the South China sea over island disputes and territory ownership. This was part in parcel the cause of the Obama administration Asia pivot. In recent years, China has become much more assertive in their military investments and power in that region. But building new islands is making the West very nervous as well as S. Korea, Vietnam, Philippines and Japan. No one is really speaking to this build-up.

Beijing Shocks US With Unbelievable Progress of Airstrip in South China Sea

New satellite imagery shows the extent of China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea. Fiery Cross Reef could soon serve as a military-grade runway in the middle of the ocean. And despite its own military presence in the region, US officials are in panic.

Dredging sand from the seafloor, the Chinese government has been steadily building artificial landmasses atop sunken reefs in the Spratly Islands archipelago. In part, the islands will be used to bolster emergency response in the region. But Beijing also says the islands will be used as military defense posts, which worries officials in Washington, already concerned about a growing Chinese influence.

Images obtained by IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly from Airbus Defence and Space show just how rapid the island growth has been. With construction beginning only last year, Fiery Cross Reef is now home to China’s first airstrip in the South China Sea. With 503 metered already paved, the runway could be as long as 3,000 meters once completed. That’s long enough to support heavy military transport planes and fighter jets, according to Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Progress of construction on Fiery Cross Reef
Progress of construction on Fiery Cross Reef

Existing People’s Liberation Army Air Force runways on the mainland range in length from 2,700 meters to 4,000 meters.

Satellite imagery also shows that a second 3,000 meter airstrip could be in the works on Subu Reef, another island being built in the archipelago.

Fiery Cross will also host a large seaport on the island’s southwest end. Imagery shows floating crane fortifying sea walls with concrete.

For US officials already concerned about the island construction, the existence of runways has reinvigorated those fears.

“The United States has a strong interest in preservation of peace and security in the South China Sea,” a spokesman for the US State Department said, according to Reuters. “We do not believe that large-scale land reclamation with the intent to militarize outposts on disputed land features is consistent with the region’s desire for peace and stability.”

A destroyer of the South China Sea Fleet of the Chinese Navy fires a missile during a training exercise.
Senate Demands Formal US Strategy to Stop China in South China Sea

But despite this supposed interested in “peace,” the US military has steadily increased its own presence in the region. In February, the US Navy admitted that it was flying its most advanced spy plane – the P-8A Poseidon – out of the Philippines to monitor the region.

Washington has also organized a series of war exercises with allied nations in the South China Sea. Earlier this month, the US and Indonesia participated in joint military exercises, in a move which was seen by some as a warning against Chinese expansion. Another series of war games conducted between the US and the Philippines will begin next week. Known as the Balikatan, the drills are “designed to increase our capability to defend our country from external aggression,” military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Cabunoc told Reuters.

While publicly decrying China’s island construction as “aggressive,” US Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called on the Obama administration to move more military resources into the Pacific.

Nearly 12,000 soldiers will take part in this year’s Balikatan military exercises.
Hint to Beijing? US Organizes Massive War Games With Philippines in South China Sea

Speaking before a seminar in Washington on Thursday, Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, defended Beijing’s right to install military defenses in its own territory. He said there “should be no illusion that anyone could impose on China unilateral status quo” or “repeatedly violate China’s sovereignty without consequences.”

He also noted that the UN’s Convention on Law of the Sea forbids the United States from conducting “intensive and close-range reconnaissance in other countries’ exclusive economic zone.”

The South China Sea is a hotly debated stretch of water through which nearly $5 trillion in trade passes each year. While China argues that most of the area is its own territory, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brunei also make overlapping claims.

 

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.