Nobody knows for sure how Barack Obama managed to get into and pay for the elite higher education he received, particularly given his self-admitted lackadaisical approach to school in his younger years. The president's decision to keep his higher education records a secret is considered unworthy of attention by the mainstream media.

Students of Obama's rise have long been intrigued by a television interview granted by Percy Sutton, the borough president of Manhattan, and one of the most influential black politicians in New York City, in which he stated that:

 he had been introduced to Obama "by a friend who was raising money for him. The friend's name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas. He is the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men. He told me about Obama." (snip)

 He also revealed that he had first heard about Obama 20 years previously in a letter where al-Mansour wrote, "there is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?"

Sutton concluded in the interview, "I wrote a letter of support of him to my friends at Harvard, saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly."

At the time the interview was granted in 2008, the Obama campaign succeeded in keeping it out of the mainstream media by having family members put out the story that Sutton in essence was a doddering old man. That's all the media lackeys needed as an excuse to consign the interview to the memory hole, protecting the American public from any disturbing connections of President Obama to the Saudis.

But, as the Bard write, "The truth will out." Not from the media lickspittles of Manhattan and the beltway, of course, but from a newspaperman in Kalispell, Montana fercryin'outloud. Frank Miele, of the Daily Inter-Lake newspaper was reading through old newspaper and came across a syndicated column written by a Chicago Tribune columnist in 1979 that provides a fascinating light on the nature of the cabal that seems to have formed around Barack Obama.

So far as I know, this 1979 column has not previously been brought to light, but it certainly should be because it broke some very interesting news about the "rumored billions of dollars the oil-rich Arab nations are supposed to unload on American black leaders and minority institutions." The columnist quoted a black San Francisco lawyer who said, "It's not just a rumor. Aid will come from some of the Arab states."

Well, if anyone would know, it would have been this lawyer - Donald Warden, who had helped defend OPEC in an antitrust suit that year and had developed significant ties with the Saudi royal family since becoming a Muslim and taking the name Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour.

Al-Mansour told Jarrett that he had presented the "proposed special aid program to OPEC Secretary-General Rene Ortiz" in September 1979, and that "the first indications of Arab help to American blacks may be announced in December." Maybe so, but I looked high and wide in newspapers in 1979 and 1980 for any other stories about this aid package funded by OPEC and never found it verified.

You would think that a program to spend "$20 million per year for 10 years to aid 10,000 minority students each year, including blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, Asians and native Americans" would be referred to somewhere other than one obscure 1979 column, but I haven't found any other word of it.

Maybe the funding materialized, maybe it didn't, but what's particularly noteworthy is that this black Islamic lawyer who "for several years [had] urged the rich Arab kingdoms to cultivate stronger ties to America's blacks by supporting black businesses and black colleges and giving financial help to disadvantaged students" was also the same lawyer who allegedly helped arrange for the entrance of Barack Obama into Harvard Law School in 1988.

The kicker here is that the 1979 column was written by none other than Vernon Jarrett, longtime influential Chicago black leftist, close friend of Frank Marshall Davis, and father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, the closest aide to President Obama, and a major figure in his rise within the Chicago political world.

There is no proof of anything here, of course. We don't know that a close associate of the Saudi royal family funneled oil money into the education of Barack Obama (and presumably other Americans) on spec, hoping he would rise through the political system and be in a position to cripple American oil production and take a hard line against Israel's defense against a nuclear attack. There is no proof ot it. But there is a reasonable suspicion, given the pedigrees of Jarrett and Sutton, that these influential figures actually do know something about the inside story of the curious, inexplicable rise of Barack Obama on the slender reed of his actual accomplishments in life.

Update from Cindy Simpson:

I also researched this a bit yesterday when the news first hit, and found some more interesting connections/pieces:

• The Sutton story was "BenSmithed" in 2008 here.
• The Lynn Sweet "exclusive" article that mentioned the Obama campaign disclosure info on Obama's student loan $'s.
  
• Amanda Carpenter's Townhall column which described Mansour's beliefs and why the connection to Obama would be damning.
• Kenneth Timmerman's articles on Newsmax.    This one is especially interesting because it addresses in detail Obama's tax returns and candidate disclosures on interest/loans.
  
• It's also interesting to recall the nine people charged with illegally accessing Obama's student loan records.
• Also recall Paul Kengor's work on Frank Marshall Davis and the fact that he worked with Vernon Jarrett in Chicago.

Isn't it interesting to see all these pieces coming together?

Bumped