The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom:

• Pfc. Brian R. Bates, Jr., 20, of Gretna, La., died Oct. 27 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device.  He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.

In addition, the Department of Defense announced today the death of a Department of the Air Force civilian who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom:

• Frank R. Walker, 66, of Oklahoma City, Okla., died of non-combat related medical causes Oct 28 at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan.  He was assigned to the 72nd Civil Engineering Directorate, Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. 

Eileen sent this in, courtesy of Beverly Eakman:

It’s zero hour in America. Do you know where your country went?

Now that America’s education system and parenting “experts” have brainwashed a generation of now-grown schoolchildren-cum-parents into believing that what we once called personality quirks, character flaws and moral issues are, in essence, mental disorders, politicians have taken the ball and run with it.  Law enforcement agencies and the judicial system are in the process of adopting Stalinist and Mao-inspired methods of controlling dissidents at home.

Only a few, short years ago, what was held up as independent thinking, speaking one’s mind, and robust dialogue is now decried as a prelude to terrorism.  Our nation’s leaders are pulling off communist-style thought-control by implying that any words uttered in print or out loud that run contrary to “accepted wisdom” (and that can change in a “New York Minute”) is the result of mental illness.

Don’t believe it?  Well, “google” this:

A recent report out of Missouri labeled “not-for-public-distribution” (circulated anonymously by a shocked and patriotic police officer) specifically describes supporters of the three presidential candidates as potential “militia”-influenced terrorists and instructs police to be on the lookout for bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with, of all things, the Constitution—such as “Campaign for Liberty.”  Even a few Members of Congress were implied to be security risks themselves (potential domestic terrorists).  The document, entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” (February 20, 2009), emanated from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), one of several so-called “Fusion Centers” established by the federal government around the country.

Most people are probably not familiar with the term “Fusion Center.”  These were originally intended to allow local and state law-enforcement agents to work alongside federal officers after 9/11 so that terrorist-related activities could be identified, then pounced upon by all three entities at once.  “Fusion Center” offices, therefore, incorporate local, state and federal law-enforcement personnel, a strategy which, prior to the launching of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was deliberately avoided to maintain independence and preserve impartiality.  Predictably, these Centers got out of hand and fell into what is referred to as “mission creep.”

Mission creep is defined by Wikipedia as:

“the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes…. [I]t is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs. The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to [other] fields, mainly the growth of bureaucracies.”

Ongoing improvements in tracking and monitoring of opinions via magazine subscriptions, charitable gifts, school and household surveys, and other computerized data collection has made political prediction on hot-button topics that much easier to secure.  “Predictive computer technology” (already a staple of school assessment testing) entails analysis by behavioral psychiatrists with concurrent degrees in statistics. This same capability has greatly accelerated mission creep among the nation’s Fusion Centers.

The PBS News Hour (not known for its conservatism or, for that matter, for being “alarmist”) recently reported on how political dissidents in China are forced into to psychiatric hospitals Video: Chinese Dissidents Committed to Mental Hospitals.  In the segment, aired September 13, 2009, the manner in which complainants (called petitioners), whistleblowers and outright protesters are “managed” bears an eerie resemblance to a policy shift right here in America.  States’ rights (or the 10^th Amendment) are among the first casualties of a top-down, federal effort to minimize, and eventually suppress, dissent.

Take, for example, an individual or group complaining about government “land seizures” without proper compensation—a property-rights issue that is becoming very familiar to people in the Southwest and Northwest, such as Oregon, Arizona.  Ron Ewart, president of National Association of Rural Landowners and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues can document dozens of cases where farms, livestock and people have had water and other infrastructure cut off, forcing them from their homes and their properties to depreciate on spurious environmental grounds.  But such “land grabs” are moving even into liberal-left states like Connecticut, and for no other reason than “the common good.”  The Kelo v. New London decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2005 essentially allows the State to condemn or take over private residences and small businesses that happen to be in the way of “better” taxation prospects.

Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center in the Washington, DC Metro area explains it this way:

“Say a councilman and a developer decide they could make money using ‘eminent domain’ to take an entire neighborhood of small-tract houses — tearing them down to build a hi-rise condo. That new building would fit the Kelo decision’s definition of ‘common good’ because it would create new and higher taxes than the existing small-tract houses.  Building the condo would mean creating jobs; it would help realtors and furniture stores, and so on, by giving them new products to sell. The only losers would be the old property owners who lose their homes — oh, well….”

Regardless of the strength of a plaintiff’s grievance, it typically costs more to fight than it does to just pack one’s bags.

The point?  That people are suddenly afraid to balk at government overreach, especially if such overreach is tinged with politically correct dogma, as in the case of the “common good.”

And why is that?  Psychopolitics.

Psychopolitics is as the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and “the masses,” via various techniques ranging from “group dynamics,” “cognitive dissonance,” “de-sensitization,” “super-imposing alternate value structures,” “artificial disruption of thought,” the Delphi Method, the Tavistock Technique, to negative or positive “reinforcement.”   If you don’t recognize any of these, don’t feel too badly, because they are not part of any school curriculum.  The people who created them are, for the most part, unknown in our own country, except among those groomed by extremist political organizations to become “change agents,” professional agitators or “provocateurs.”  The pioneers of psychopolitics, including attitude prediction, include individuals such as Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Lewin, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm (Germany); A. S. Neill, A. J. Oraje and John Rawlings Rees (Great Britain); Antonio Gramsci (Italy); Anatoly Lunacharsky and Georg Lukacs (Russia); G. Brock Chishom and Ewen Cameron (Canada); and the U.S.’s own Ralph Tyler and Ronald Havelock.

Although psychopolitics originated under Vladimir Lenin as “political literacy” and “polytechnical education” in the old Soviet Union, and was carried to the free world via Peter Sedgwick (1934–1983) a translator for Victor Serge, author of PsychoPolitics and a revolutionary socialist activist as well as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the term psychopolitics found its way into the American lexicon via Isaac Asimov, a master of the sci-fi genre.  But psychopolitics is no science fiction adventure, and never was. 

By the 1970s, a slew of enablers were establishing a system of numerical codes for so-called mental disorders that would accommodate computerization.  This lent legitimacy to what would otherwise have been considered “questionable illnesses.” The goal was to ensure that medical professionals, the media and government accepted these terms as they might “diabetes,” thereby ensuring that the mental illnesses so codified would remain indelible, beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable.

The long-term game plan of psychopolitics is the conquest, usually by proxy, of enemy nations through “mental healing,” better known as “re-education.”  This entails what we know as “encounter groups,” extensive self-disclosure surveys and peer pressure to conform.  If all that doesn’t work, if certain individuals are still not amenable, then the first step is marginalization as “mentally unbalanced.”

Example:  A study by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $1.2 million, announced on 1 August, 2003, that adherents to conventional moral principles and limited government are mentally disturbed. NIMH-NSF scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford attribute notions about morality and individualism to “dogmatism” and “uncertainty avoidance.”  Social conservatives, in particular, were said to suffer from “mental rigidity,” a condition which, researchers assert, is probably hard-wired, condemning traditionalists to a lifelong, cognitive hell, with all the associated indicators for mental illness: “decreased cognitive function, lowered self-esteem, fear, anger, pessimism, disgust, and contempt” (Jost, J. T., J. Glaser, et al. (2003). “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Psychological Bulletin 129(3): 339-375 online at http://www.apa.org/journals/bul/503ab.html).

This is the sort of unprovable, but nevertheless libelous condescension that is  heaped upon anyone from talk show hosts, to authors to patriots who dare to contradict “common wisdom” (a.k.a. “political correctness”).  If that doesn’t work, contempt may be followed up with “mandatory [psychiatric] counseling” (already a feature of the American judicial system), or even forcible psychiatric drugging (well on its way to legitimacy in this nation’s schools). Finally there is incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, which gratefully is not yet a fixture in American democracy for potential dissenters, but the handwriting is on the wall, as the expression goes.

Totalitarian states like Communist China and Russia may be more blatant in their affronts to human rights and personal property — inasmuch as they don’t need a “reason” — but the differences are narrowing precipitously.

As emphasized during interviews on the PBS segment, the Chinese system is set up in such a way as to pre-empt complaints.  The Chinese government doesn’t wait around for somebody to sound off; it pre-emptively seeks out individuals likely to become troublesome, by assigning a mental-health diagnosis to anyone at the first sign of a provocative or inflammatory remark.

This lies at the heart of what is going on here in America, and we absolutely must put a stop to it, if it isn’t already too late.  Data-mining (which actually pre-dates 9/11), along with longitudinal tracking (that’s tracking over long time periods) and, therefore, ongoing monitoring of individual perceptions, worldviews and beliefs is gaining momentum with every moment that computer technology evolves — which means constantly.  Combine this with the practice of assigning mental-illness labels to private opinions, based on snippets of various information — with anything that might be favorable to the individual conveniently left out!

This “diagnosis,” like the American school child’s, follows the person for life, often compromising his or her college and career prospects.  An why not, after all?  Computerization makes it impossible for anyone to prove that an erroneous or falsified accusation has been purged from the system with no backup copy.

Today’s Chinese authorities, like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) before them, in order to avoid drawing attention to policies that may be morally or ethically distasteful abroad (e.g., the one-child policy and forced abortion) or invite protests that coincide with an event at which international media attention is expected (such as the Olympics), they employ spies, block careers and intimidate family members.

It may be shocking to hear from your college-age children that we going down the same road.  Several universities, like the University of Delaware, in which a lawsuit was filed, have planted paid opinion-monitors in university dormitories (called “resident assistants,” or RAs).

Adam Kissel, Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, explains in a 2008 speech:

The freshman arrived for her mandatory one-on-one session in her dormitory at 8 pm. Classes had been in session for about a week. Her resident assistant handed her a questionnaire. He told her it was “a little questionnaire to help [you] and all the other residents relate to the curriculum.” She “looked a little uncomfortable.”

“When did you discover your sexual identity?” the questionnaire asked.

She wrote in response: “That is none of your damn business.”

Another question: “When was a time you felt oppressed?”

Her response: “I am oppressed every day [because of my] feelings for the opera.  Regularly [people]…jeer me with cruel names.… But I will overcome!  Hear me, you rock-loving majority?”

The resident assistant felt appalled…. He wrote up an incident report and reported her to his superiors.

This one-on-one session was not a punishment…for a recalcitrant student who had committed an infraction. It was mandatory sensitivity training, indeed, but it was part of a program that was mandatory for all 7,000 students in the University of Delaware dorms. It was a thorough thought-reform curriculum that was designed by the school’s Residence Life staff in order to treat and correct the allegedly incorrect thoughts, attitudes, values, and beliefs of the students….

Many other features — the mandatory one-on-one and group sessions throughout the year; the “confrontation” training to help RAs challenge students who were not complying [with political correctness]; the posters with [politicized] messages spread throughout the dorms; the zero-tolerance policy against anything deemed “oppressive”; the individual files on students and their beliefs, in some cases called “portfolios,” which were to be archived after graduation; the RA reports on their “best” and “worst” one-on-one sessions; the scientific analysis of the questionnaires in order to measure improvement toward the “educational objective”; the “strong male RAs” who were hired to break the “resistance to educational efforts” among [especially] the young male students — all of this, according to the university’s own materials, was part of a cutting-edge educational model that had won awards from a professional association for university administrators, the American College Personnel Association.

As if this weren’t enough to prove that psychopolitics is alive and well in America, with the pervasive undercurrent of “mental illness” as justification, schools below the college level have thoroughly succeeded in exchanging academic testing for mental-health “assessment”; left out, rewritten, and altered history texts until virtually nothing is left of the Framers ideals of a constitutional republic; redefined and watered down morality into something called “situation ethics”; removed the physiology from health classes and replaced it with graphic sex education, beginning in kindergarten.

Already, we see the results:

Do you vocally promote the right to self-defense?  Do you voice support for the intact family; national sovereignty and strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Do you criticize easy immigration (i.e., without an citizen-sponsor); unrestricted free trade; free condoms hanging on some college freshmen’s dormitory doors; formalization of same-sex unions; abortion on-demand; mandatory mental-health screening of all pregnant women and schoolchildren?  Do you have a problem with the policies of the Federal Reserve; with “traffic” cameras and other surreptitious surveillance devices; industry-wide bailouts; no-fault divorce and illegitimacy?  Then, my friend, you are not merely holding to a “divergent viewpoint,” to use the 1950s term; you are mentally ill and a potential terrorist.  You are a person who is ripe for radicalization and therefore suspect.  Did you volunteer for certain political candidates in the 2008 election?   Do you, by your choices of magazine literature and religious preference, show that you have “bought in to” theological tenets such as the Creation?

If any of these apply to you, good luck in ever securing a government grant or contract, or getting your child into a top university, when there are others who carry none of this psychological “baggage.”

Americans are supposed to view any opposition to all this as “paranoia.”  Of course, the term paranoia carries a chilling effect, because it screams “mentally unbalanced” to the world.

Once it becomes possible, via technology, to track and legislate private opinions — and even to classify those that don’t conform as “mentally ill” — then we have left the realm of politics and moved into coercion.  We have facilitated the stigmatization of political dissent and vocal objection using labels like “acute stress disorder” or “paranoid schizophrenia,” just as they do a right now, today, in China, according the aforementioned PBS segment.

As a former employee of the U.S. Justice Department, I personally saw several precursors to the MAIC document — “watch-out” reports (for lack of a better term), on a smaller scale, under Janet Reno’s tenure there.  These were distributed to employees following the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.  Obviously, such alerts have been greatly expanded, what with the network of government “Fusion Centers” in state after state.

With pharmaceutical company moguls and politicians sitting on each other’s boards (E. I. Lilly’s chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, sat on the Homeland Security Council under George W. Bush’s administration); with nationwide mental health assessments like the New Freedom Initiative (funded by the House in 2002) sizing up the political “health” of schoolchildren (and curriculum being altered accordingly); and with “behavioral detection officers” (“BDOs”) looking for any signs of irritation among model citizens in airport security lines, while U.S. borders are left open for drug-runners, who then get to sue Border Patrol agents for shooting at them—all this points to an America in big trouble. 

“Political dissent” is now in the eye of the bureaucratic beholder — or the surveillance camera, erected under the guise of traffic safety to pursue revenue and to intimidate through meaningless “gotchas.”

We’re all in China now.

Iraqi forces, aided by U.S. forces advisors, detained several terrorism suspects in Iraq in recent days, including one believed responsible for the Oct. 11 bombing in Ramadi, military officials reported.

Special weapons and tactics personnel and U.S. forces advisors, under the direction of the Iraqi military and the Anbar Operations Center, detained a suspect Oct. 25 in Hit, northwest of Ramadi. The man is suspected in the planning and coordination of the Oct. 11 attacks on the Ramadi provincial government center and hospital.

The suspect is believed to be coordinate vehicle-borne explosives for an al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist cell and is believed to have coordinated the movement of materials and personnel used in the attacks.

Meanwhile, the Ramadi counter-terrorism unit, with U.S. forces advisors, arrested a suspected al-Qaida in Iraq operative Oct. 26 near Ramadi.

The man is charged in a warrant with being involved in insurgent activity. The Iraqi unit arrested two other suspects for questioning due to their links to the suspect.

As shipments of some 3.7 million doses of H1N1 vaccine ordered by the Defense Department continue to arrive from the manufacturer, more than enough will be available for all military personnel and their beneficiaries, military medical experts say.

Navy Cmdr. Danny Shiau, division chief for the Bureau of Navy Medicine and Surgery’s force health protection, and Dr. Robert Morrow, the bureau’s preventive medicine programs and policy officer, took questions about the military’s seasonal flu and H1N1 preparedness efforts during an Oct. 29 “DoDLive” bloggers roundtable.

Morrow explained why it has taken the primary manufacturer, Novartis, longer than expected to produce the vaccine.

“This is a tough little virus to grow,” he said. “It’s pretty nasty when it gets in the eggs, so they haven’t been able to grow it quite as fast as they had hoped, and everybody’s supplies are linked to each other since we’re are all getting it from the same manufacturer.”

Immunization for both seasonal flu and H1N1 is mandatory for all military personnel and it is highly recommended for beneficiaries. When the first cases of H1N1 were diagnosed in April, Morrow said, the department bought 2.7 million doses of the vaccine for mission assurance purposes.

At the time, it was unclear how many doses, per person, would be needed. But a single dose has been determined to be effective, Morrow said. The Health and Human Services Department donated 1 million doses of the vaccine, Sanofi Pasteur, to the department, “so that’s a total of 3.7 million individuals for [Defense Department] active duty, reservists, civilians and essential contractors,” he said.

First priority for the vaccine will go to deployed forces, Shiau said, first in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, then to ships, trainees and health care workers based on prioritizations.

Priorities for beneficiaries in the United States will follow federal and state guidelines, whether beneficiaries opt to get the H1N1 vaccine at military treatment facilities or at non-military clinics, Shiau said. In either case, since the vaccine is free, and there will be plenty of it, it will not matter whether they get their shot from the military or civilian supply.

Overseas, civilian defense workers and beneficiaries will be able to get the H1N1 vaccine at military treatment facilities.

Shiau added that so far, the general severity of cases seen has been mild to moderate and there’s been no operational effect on defense. But, he said, those with symptoms should contact their doctor or treatment facility before heading to an emergency room, because some facilities have special procedures. “The bottom line is, you don’t want to spread it in the ER,” he said.

The extra care being taken may be because “this is the first time that we’ve had two different kinds of influenza going around at the same time and two different kinds of influenza shots going around at the same time, and it’s very confusing, even to those who do this day in and day out,” Morrow said.

His best advice is that when you have questions, “ask and clarify.” Shiau added that to help prevent spreading seasonal and H1N1 flu, people should wash their hands thoroughly, cover their mouths when coughing and, when possible, do not go to work sick.

Jim sent this in:

President Barack Obama has promised a massive change to “modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.” Part of his ambitious health care program will be the computerizing of medical records of all Americans in order to make the health care process more cost-effective.

But even proponents of Obama’s plan have mentioned that ensuring the privacy of patients’ records in a nationalized computer network will be tricky. There are obvious concerns about hackers and system failures. And new online health record systems, such as Google Health are not currently subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national health privacy law.

This is especially true when you consider the advocates of implementing a program using so-called ‘v-chips’ containing all a person’s medical information. No one has said how much information will be contained in those implants. DNA? AIDS information?

With so much information already being compromised within government security systems, how can Obama possibly promise confidentiality of such records?

Although in five years the VeriChip Corp., the US company creating microchip implants, has yet to turn a profit, it has been investing heavily – up to $8 million a year – to create new markets.

The company’s executives have said their present push is the tagging of “high-risk” patients — diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer’s disease.

In a medical emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over a patient’s arm, get an ID number, and then, via the Internet, enter a company database and pull up the person’s identity and medical history.

To doctors, a “starter kit” – complete with 10 hypodermic syringes, 10 VeriChips and a reader – costs $1,400, according to information on the Verichip web site. To patients, a microchip implant means a $200, out-of-pocket expense to their physician. Presently, chip implants aren’t covered by private healthcare insurance companies, or by Medicare and Medicaid.

For almost two years, the company has been offering hospitals free scanners, but acceptance has been limited. According to the company’s most recent SEC quarterly filing, 515 hospitals have pledged to take part in the VeriMed network, yet only 100 have actually been equipped and trained to use the system.

Some patients and their families are wondering why they should abandon noninvasive tags such as MedicAlert, a low-tech bracelet, that warns paramedics if patients have serious allergies or a chronic medical condition, for the microchip implants.

In early September, up to 200 Alzheimer’s patients living in the Palm Beach, Florida area were implanted with the microchip by the company VeriChip absolutely free.

The chip, which is about the size of a grain of rice, contains a 16-digit identification number which is scanned at a hospital. Once the number is placed in a database, it can provide crucial medical information. People are already lining up for the VeriChip, but it’s already stirred up controversy.

The story, carried by ABC TV News, caused one reporter to ask, “Is Big Brother watching?”

The relative permanence is a big reason why Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is suspicious about the motives of the company, which charges an annual fee to keep clients’ records.

The company charges $20 a year for customers to keep a “one-pager” on its database — a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver’s license data and living-will directives. For $80 a year, it will keep an individual’s full medical history. In recent days, there have been rumors on Wall Street, and elsewhere, of the potential uses for RFID in humans: the chipping of U.S. soldiers, of inmates, or of migrant workers, to name a few.

In May 2008, a protest outside the Alzheimer’s Community Care Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, drew attention to a two-year study in which 200 Alzheimer’s patients, along with their caregivers, were to receive chip implants. Parents, children and elderly people decried the plan, with signs and placards.

“Chipping People Is Wrong” and “People Are Not Pets,” the signs read. And: “Stop VeriChip.”

Dr. Katherine Albrecht, the RFID critic who organized the demonstration, raises similar concerns on her www.AntiChips.com  web site.

“Is it appropriate to use the most vulnerable members of society for invasive medical research? Should the company be allowed to implant microchips into people whose mental impairments means they cannot give fully informed consent?” she wrote.

As the polemic heats up, legislators are increasingly being drawn into the fray. Two states, Wisconsin and North Dakota, recently passed laws prohibiting the forced implantation of microchips in humans. Other states, such as Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado and Florida, are studying similar legislation.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma legislators are debating a bill that would authorize microchip implants in people imprisoned for violent crimes. Many felt it would be a good way to monitor felons once released from prison.

But other lawmakers raised concerns. Rep. John Wright worried, “Apparently, we’re going to permanently put the ‘mark’ on these people.”

Rep. Ed Cannaday found the forced microchipping of inmates “invasive…. We are going down that slippery slope.”

Another drawback to microchip implants is the suspicion that they are linked to cancer in test animals. Opponents of human microchipping are concerned with the speed with which these chips received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Opponents such as Dr. Albrecht believe the FDA approval has more to do with politics than medicine.

Opponents believe the government is choosing the most vulnerable citizens for the initial implants — Alzheimer’s patients, the handicapped, retarded, the elderly — but eventually every human being in the US, Mexico and Canada will be required to have the microchip implants if only to keep track of them and their activities.

“Under the federally supported National Animal Identification System (NAIS), digital tags are expected to be affixed to the U.S.’s 40 million farm animals to enable regulators to track and respond quickly to disease, bioterrorism, and other calamities,” according to a Business Week article.

“Opponents have many fears about this plan, among them that it could be the forerunner of a similar system for humans. The theory, circulated in blogs, goes like this: You test it on the animals first, demonstrating the viability of the radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) to monitor each and every animal’s movements and health history from birth to death, and then move on to people.”

After WND’s stunning disclosure yesterday that Michelle Obama publicly admitted her husband’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was “very young and very single” when giving birth to the future U.S. president, three photos of Barack Obama Sr. have now surfaced, raising further questions as to whether the two were actually married.

The photos of Barack Obama Sr. attending a University of Hawaii party in the early 1960s, which surfaced on the Internet, show him enjoying the company of fellow students without the presence of Ann Dunham. His demeanor evident in the three photographs suggests a familiarity with women that would give no indication he was engaged to be married or already wed to Ann Dunham.

While the possibility remains the photographs were taken before Obama Sr. met Ann Dunham, the testimonies from Obama’s fellow students at the University of Hawaii that accompany the photographs make no mention that Barack Obama Sr. was ever associated with Ann Dunham, at the time the photographs were taken, or later.

The photographs are identified as having been taken at the home of Arnie and Suzie Nachmanoff in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, “in the early 1960s.”

One photo shows Barack Obama Sr., smoking a cigarette and talking with an attractive young woman identified on the website only as “Dorothy.”The other two photos show Barack Obama Sr. seated on the floor with other students at the party, again without Dunham.

Several testimonies “by some old friends of Barack Obama when we were in Honolulu, Hawaii,” are posted on the website, reminiscencing about Barack Obama Sr.

Several of the testimonies note that Obama had the historical distinction of being Hawaii’s first African university student; none of the testimonies make any reference to courtship with or marriage to Dunham.

The website, obviously supportive of President Obama, was created by Naranhkiri Tith, a student at the University of Hawaii’s East West Center at the same time Barack Obama Sr. was enrolled. Tith went on to serve for 20 years on the senior staff of the International Monetary Fund.

“Although [Barack Obama Sr.] was not an East-West Center grantee, he was always with us, especially at a Guest House owned and operated by the Asia foundation, situated on the top of a road leading to Manoa valley,” Tith Naranhkiri recalled in an essay titled “Remembering my friend Barak (sic) Obama” that “Atherton House was a place where most East-West Center grantees gathered for a drink or a chat.”

Naranhkiri said in the 1980s an IMF colleague on a mission to Kenya gave him Obama’s telephone number in Nairobi.

“Needless to say that I was very happy to be able to be in contact again with Barak (sic), after more than ten years of silence,” Naranhkiri continued. “We had a long conversation and we were able to talk to each other a few more times until one day, when I called him and his secretary told me over the phone that he had passed away of an accident.”

Naranhkiri makes no reference to recalling Ann Dunham at the University of Hawaii or of discussing her with Barack Obama Sr. in their subsequent telephone conversations after the president’s father had returned to Kenya.

Robert M. Ruenitz, another student at the East-West Center when Barack Obama Sr. was enrolled, had distinct recollections of the president’s father living alone in Hawaii.

“For any of us to say we knew Obama well would be difficult,” Robert M. Ruenitz wrote. “He was a private man with academic achievement his foremost goal. He lived somewhat like a hermit in a small room up in the valleys of Manoa. I visited him there on my Lambretta and wondered how he sustained himself outside of his focused attention to his academic pursuits.”

WND has established that Barack Obama Sr. always maintained his bachelor apartment at 625 11th Avenue. The only family resident at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway – the birth address published in August 1961 in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin – were Ann Dunham’s parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham.

“In my mind, I always picture him at a certain spot under a large tree, just outside the University library,” Bob Craft, another East-West student recalled. “There a small group of us would frequently gather, standing around for a short while chatting.

“All these years – I still believe that I can remember his voice distinctly, which had middle and high tones sitting on top of a deep rumble. I also remember him always being dressed in a white and dark trousers, in contrast to everyone else who usually wore flowered Hawaiian shirts and shorts,” Craft continued, making no mention of Ann Dunham.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D–Hawaii, told the Chicago Tribune that he was part of a group of graduate students at the University of Hawaii along with Barack Obama Sr. and Dunham who spent weekends listening to jazz, drinking beer and debating politics and world affairs. Another of Abercrombie’s recollections, however – that Ann Dunham “disappeared from the University of Hawaii student gatherings” only after Barack Obama Sr. was accepted to attend Harvard University – conflicts with new evidence. 

WND has obtained evidence that Dunham enrolled in extension classes at the University of Washington in Seattle on Aug. 19, 1961, only 15 days after Barack Obama Jr. was born, and that she lived in an apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area, never returning to Hawaii until after Barack Obama Sr. had left for Harvard.

The Chicago Tribune further reported that on a trip to Africa years later, Abercrombie caught up with Barack Obama Sr.

Barack Obama Sr. “was drinking too much; his frustration was apparent,” Abercrombie told the newspaper.

“To Abercrombie’s surprise, Obama never asked about his ex-wife or his son,” Tribune national correspondent Tim Jones wrote.

WND has reported the only documentation for Dunham’s marriage to Barack Obama Sr. comes from their divorce documents that list the marriage date as Feb. 2, 1961.

However, it isn’t clear Obama’s parents were married, since official records have never been produced showing a legal ceremony took place. No wedding certificate or photograph of a ceremony for Dunham and Obama Sr. has ever been found or published.

In his book “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage,” former Time magazine contributing editor Christopher Anderson elaborates: “There were certainly no witnesses (to the alleged civil marriage ceremony on Maui in 1961 between Obama’s parents) – no family members were present, and none of their friends at the university had the slightest inkling that they were even engaged.”

Anderson further quoted Abercrombie as saying that “nobody” was invited to the wedding ceremony.

Obama himself, on page 22 of his autobiography “Dreams from My Father,” wrote of his parents wedding: “In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard.”

President Obama’s birth story is further complicated by the fact that when Barack Obama Sr. arrived in Hawaii as a 23-years-old in September 1959, he already had been married since age 18 to a Kenyan woman named Kezia Aoko.

Obama Sr. ultimately had four children with Aoko, and there is no evidence to suggest he was ever divorced from Aoko, either in Kenya before he left for Hawaii or in Hawaii prior to the alleged marriage with Dunham.

On page 126 of “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama Jr. described his father’s marriage with Kezia in a quotation in which Ann Dunham says, “An then there was a problem with your father’s first wife … he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal documentation that could show a divorce …” (Ellipsis in original text.)

Dunham apparently was suggesting bigamy was not involved in her alleged marriage since Barack Obama Sr.’s marriage to Aoko was a “village wedding” that possibly would not have been recognized as legitimate by Hawaii civil law. Barack Obama Sr. was reportedly a polygamist who had at least four wives, including Ruth Nidesand, who he met at Harvard and became his wife after she followed him back to Kenya.

Source: WND.com

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