Obama, Barack Obama

So, is Pretendident Big Daddy Baracko Whosayin’ Yomama channeling his inner James Bond, or what?  Due to his tendency to play his personal information cards ridiculously close to his vest, speculation has naturally arisen in many diverse camps that he may be some sort of stealth undercover agent of one of the government’s various alphabet soup covert organizations.  Dunno about that, but in light of the latest Twitter Revolution’s possible origins, I found an MSNBO article about his desire to turn America’s college campuses into recruitment arms of the CIA pretty interesting.  Imagine my surprise, nay, shock, shock, I tellya, to find that said article found yesterday is no longer available there today.  Not.

That’s not to say the piece was deliberately, or even permanently “disappeared.”  To the contrary, MSNBO’s sister source, the Washington Post still has the article up.  But, ya do gotta wonder why it’s no longer available on the Celebritician’s favorite network.  In fact, why was it up there in the first place?

But, let’s back up a minute.  The protests in Iran, originally supposed to be in response to allegations of voter fraud by opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, have been characterized as a women, youth and student-led revolt.  With the Iranian government’s crackdown on news reports, it’s pretty easy to see how the anonymous, unverifiable tweets, photos and emails could be manipulated by outside agents infiltrating college campuses specifically for that purpose.  That doesn’t mean that the concerns of the protesters are illegitimate, or that the violence and confrontations are staged, however it could be that the hornet’s nest has been deliberately poked with a stick by entities with an agenda of their own.  That’s what makes this little story so compellingly interesting:

The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream “of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies,” according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

In recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Of course, for the theory that the Twitter Revolution might possibly have been, ahem, “enhanced,” shall we say, to have any validity, one would think that such a campus recruitment program would have had to already be in effect:

Through grants to colleges and universities, intelligence agencies have been building partnerships with academia and specific professors, some of whom in past decades served as channels for recommending applicants to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The intelligence community already has a Centers of Academic Excellence Program that funds programs in national security studies at more than 14 colleges and universities, with a goal of having 20 participating schools by 2015. The programs receive between $500,000 and $750,000 a year.

Since 2004, two separate programs have been in effect, one to assist 400+ cryptology students, and the other, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, which provided funds to over 800 people, including some current staff, studying other stuff:

The director of national intelligence would make the Roberts program permanent under the new proposal and expand it beyond analysts to include personnel in acquisition, science and technology. It also could be used to help recruit employees by reimbursing them for prior education in critical areas.

Now, it could be that the Iranian governments’ accusations of “Western interference” are just so much paranoid ballyhooing.  But, doncha gotta wonder just what the heck all these new, fresh faced recruits are doing with their bright, shiny,  new skills?  As for Obama’s own CIA connections, I’ll leave that analysis to others.