Obama's spring break in Pakistan

As any red-blooded American male can tell you, spring break for college students means Florida beaches and wet T-shirt contests. If what I’ve seen on the E! Network is any indication, things have gotten a lot looser than when I went to school. Still, even in the 1970s and 1980s a good time could probably be had by all. Heck, even a learned bookworm like Barack Obama might have had a little fun once in a while, right? Or did the boy-wonder spend all his waking hours studying the U. S. Constitution, looking for Presidential qualifications loopholes?

The professional work-avoider’s college days ran a full six years, between 1979 and 1885, starting at Occidental College in Los Angeles and ending at Columbia University in New York. (Those six years were then followed by Harvard Law School.) If Obama hit the Florida beaches during those years he’s not saying, but it turns out that he did have one or two interesting trips – to Pakistan, the long time enemy of India, occasional lukewarm friend of the United States, and possibly the current hangout of one Osama bin Laden. Obama has gone to great lengths to not mention his Pakistan trips, but on at least one occasion a little bit of the truth slipped out.

In an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials during the primary campaign (before his “America sucks” speech to a gathering of leftover rock concert fans who pretty much didn’t understand a word of what he said, either because of a language barrier or a beer barrier), the junior senator from Illinois - then in a tight primary contest with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania - bragged about the time he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton’s foreign policy “experience” consisted only of quick photo ops, while he had spent “quality time” with “real people.” Not only that, he had actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip near the Pakistan city of Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently impressed the gun owners of Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch as Clinton won that primary by 10 per cent.

Eager to impress the Pennsylvania crowd with his “foreign policy experience” and knowledge of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact that he’d been to Pakistan. (It is believed that he made two trips to Pakistan.) There must have been more to that trip than meets the eye, however, because the candidate has said virtually nothing about it since. You won’t find anything on the Obama campaign site. For a guy who wrote two books about himself, he’s certainly nothing like an open book.

By now, astute readers may have begun to wonder how a struggling young college student with a divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip to Pakistan. Many, if not most, who go to college struggle to make ends meet, and a trip to Florida means four or five people crowded into one old car, taking turns and driving non-stop to avoid motels on the way. But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges in Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio. Chandio’s family owned a substantial amount of land in the region, and Obama apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio is currently a financial consultant in New York, and a donor to the Obama campaign.)

Obama’s Muslim friends from Columbia have done a substantial amount of fundraising for him. They include Chandio, Wahid Hamid (currently a Pepsico executive), and Vinai Thummalapally. All three have donated personally to the Obama campaign and have acted as “bundlers” in collecting contributions for him from others.

The curious might want to look through Columbia University yearbooks from 1981, 1982, or 1983, to see what information there may be on a young Barack Obama (or Barry Soetoro, the name he used until switching back to Barack Obama). Internet rumors abound (“Obama had a rich, white girl friend while at Columbia”), and will likely continue if official documents are never released. So far, Obama has refused to authorize release of transcripts or his senior essay or anything else of importance. (Should he be elected President, the Obama Presidential Library may consist of nothing more than photographs of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.)

While American college students were seeking the company of co-eds on Florida beaches, Obama was enjoying the company of wealthy Pakistanis. Another of Obama’s hosts in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama’s senior by about 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician, who became interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that “someone” personally requested that he “watch over” Barack Obama, but will not name that individual (who today allegedly lives in South America).

Somewhere along the line (not while in Pakistan), Obama also became acquainted with Khalid Al-Mansour, senior advisor to Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. In addition to being a financial advisor to the Saudi royal family, Al-Mansour represents OPEC – which certainly has a vested interest in a continuance of prohibitions against drilling in Alaska’s ANWR preserves and off America’s continental shelf.

One has to assume the young Obama’s trip to Pakistan may have been funded by one or more of these wealthy acquaintances, inasmuch as there seems never to have been any mention of actual jobs held by Obama. (After leaving Los Angeles, he says he arrived in New York almost penniless, spending his first night sleeping on the street.) And if he did dishes in the school cafeteria, it is unlikely such a job paid enough to cover the cost of a three week stay half-way around the world. One question that begs an answer is, “What did Obama offer his benefactors in exchange for their financial support?”

It should also be noted that Al-Mansour contacted civil rights activist (and attorney for Malcolm X) Percy Sutton, asking Sutton to write a letter of recommendation to help get Obama into Harvard Law School. Clearly wheels were spinning, but how and why is unclear. Well-connected Muslims certainly had something in mind for Barack Obama.

A trip to Pakistan is no doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans would consider traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous place. In 1981, when one of Obama’s possible two trips there occurred, it was less safe. Because of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan, which was under martial law. The Afghan “mujahedeen” fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back and forth to fight the Soviets. One of the Afghan fighters, whose operations originated in Quetta, Pakistan, was none other than Sheik Osama bin Laden. At that time he was working with Ayman Al-Zawahiri to develop the jihad structure that would lead to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

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

A Muslim non-American, however, would have had an easier time getting into Pakistan. That supports the theory that Obama traveled as a Muslim on an Indonesian passport. He had probably been adopted by Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, he attended school in Jakarta, and his school records list his religion as Muslim. Barack Obama was likely a citizen of Indonesia, by virtue of adoption, and possibly maintained both his citizenship and his passport for many years – or at least long enough to travel to Pakistan in 1981. But because Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship, Obama would have had to relinquish his U. S. citizenship (assuming he was born in Hawaii and actually had it) to be a citizen of Indonesia and carry a passport from that country. If Obama never relinquished his Indonesian citizenship, he is not an American citizen – and thus ineligible to serve as its President. The issue could be clarified if Obama would release the appropriate documents, but he refuses to do so.

Assuming Obama was a Muslim carrying his Indonesian passport, it would have been far easier for him to enter Pakistan in 1981. Still, what was his purpose in traveling there? To buy drugs? To participate in Jihad? For religious education in the extreme, Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect? Or simply to visit the country of his college friends?

According to the Obama campaign, Obama visited Pakistan on his way back from Indonesia, after visiting his mother, Ann Dunham, and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. Allegedly he stayed in Karachi, Pakistan, and also visited friends in Hyderabad, India. Traveling with Obama on the trip to Pakistan were the aforementioned Chandio and Hamid. (Hyderabad, India was apparently a “party place” at that time; perhaps that reputation refers to drugs.)

Obama mentions in his book, “Dreams From My Father,” that a roommate in New York was a Pakistani Muslim named “Sadik” (Sohale Siddiqi) who had overstayed his tourist visa. One assumes Obama gave only the first name to protect his friend, who had remained in the United States illegally. (I wouldn’t put that information on my campaign web site either.)

Adding to the mix is the fact that Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, had visited at least 13 countries in her lifetime, and had worked for companies that required travel to Pakistan. Her employers appear to have included the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Note that USAID and the Ford Foundation have (allegedly) been used as covers for CIA agents. As a consultant of ADB, Dunham frequently needed to work in Gujranwala, Pakistan, on an Agricultural Development Program. She reportedly lived (on and off) at the Hilton International Hotel (now Avari Hotel) in Lahore, and traveled each day to Gujranwala. When Barack visited, he stayed at that same hotel.

Although the United States maintained “official distance” from Afghanistan during its war with the Soviet Union, no doubt the CIA collaborated with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to offer assistance in defeating the Soviets – if only as payback for their support of the Viet Cong when the United States was fighting in Vietnam. It is worth noting that many of the Muslims fighting against the Soviets were the more radical Muslims, often from the Wahhabi sect. (The Saudis fund many Wahhabi schools through the world, including within the United States.)

Whether any or all of the above means much may never be determined. Candidate Obama isn’t saying. His former classmates are maintaining their silence, at the very least to keep his Muslim past and anti-Semitic friends out of the political spotlight, but possibly to keep the public from finding out something much more damaging. If nothing else, a review of Barack Obama’s past reveals that he spent a substantial amount of time in school but had no jobs during that period, and he made friends with people who had wealth and power. Perhaps he was, and still is, an Indonesian citizen, the disclosure of which would render him ineligible to serve as President. Or perhaps the secretive person in South America knows more. Daytona Beach it wasn’t, that’s for certain.

Don Fredrick

September 14, 2008