There are so many things the public does not know about the man who sits in the White House.  Who is Barack Obama?  In my search to find out the answers I embarked on a journey that has lasted three years and counting -- and nearly made my head explode.

As usual, when Obama is the subject, Americans can't count on the progressives in the Corporate Mainstream Media (CMM) for much help.  So, what's one to do?  The foreign press proved helpful.  Therefore, gleaned from the foreign press: a few stories which didn't rate any coverage from the U.S. CMM.

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama went on a mission to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN).  The  newly-minted U.S. senator was invited to be part of a Russian fact-finding tour that inspected a nuclear weapons site in Perm, Siberia.  The base Lugar and Obama visited was where mobile launch missiles were being destroyed under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (CTR), which also went by the name of the Nunn-Lugar program.

What happened next -- after the inspections were over -- was at the time reported by several foreign news sources but was never reported in the USA by the CMM.  The Russians detained Obama and Lugar for three hours at the airport, demanding to examine both Obama's and Lugar's passports and search their plane.  Some sources reported that the Russians accused Barack Obama of being a spy.

But wait -- there's more!

According to an Italian source, the Russians did not accuse Obama of being an American spy; they accused him of being a spy for the British!  The report went on to say that the incident ended up involving the White House, the U.S. State Department, and military officials, along with their counterparts in Moscow.

Strangely enough, an official report from Lugar's office about the trip never mentioned the incident.  Neither did Barack Obama in 2008 when he was desperate to exhibit some foreign policy chops.

One other oddity: in the fall of 2008, Obama admitted on his Fightthesmears.com site that he had held dual citizenship with both the United States and Great Britain (the site explained that this was due to Barack Obama, Sr. being a foreign national) until 1982.  Did the Russians know something about Obama's citizenship in 2005 that ordinary Americans don't know in 2011?

Another story no one has seen fit to ask about: Obama's Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure.

In the summer of 1981, 20-year-old Barack Obama embarked on a two-week trip to Pakistan.  At least what little reporting that has been done claimed the length of the trip was two weeks.  The only proof that the trip didn't turn into a longer stay is that we (supposedly) have records which show that Barack Obama enrolled at Columbia University later that same summer.  Of course, the public hasn't seen those records, but that's what we've been told.  Anyone in doubt will be directed to Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Obama clearly gave the impression in DFMF that he was this penniless, somewhat confused young man, in search of an identity.  Obama makes sure readers don't miss the point by writing that he was forced to wear "thrift store clothing" during this time.  Yet he somehow managed to find the cash to finance a two-week trip to Pakistan.

Which he never wrote about.  Which in itself is odd: here's a guy who wrote two autobiographies that explored events real, imagined, and totally fictional that supposedly forged the modern-day Barack Obama from humble beginnings.  That's according to the Obama Narrative^TM -- which gets most of its facts from Dreams from My Father.

Not only did a poor, nearly destitute Obama manage to afford the trip to Pakistan, but once there he somehow financed two weeks in the Lahore Hilton International.  In addition, Obama was introduced to the future prime minister and president of Pakistan -- and went bird-hunting with him.  Which the prime minister mentioned in the Pakistani press in 2008.  There's so much more, including one question the CMM never asked Obama: who arranged all of this?  For a 20-year-old nobody.

Another curious piece to the queer Obama puzzle is the connection -- which hasn't been made in the CMM (attention, Fox News!) -- between illegal foreign contributions to the Obama campaign and subsequent billions in Stimulus money to foreign companies and banks.  During and after the 2008 election, accusations of illegal foreign contributions -- which flowed into the Obama campaign when credit card safeguards were disabled on the campaign's website -- were documented in the conservative press and elsewhere.

Who were these mysterious donors, and in what countries did they live?  Unfortunately, due to the chicanery of Team Obama, we may never know.  Fast-forward to 2009.  Obama's multi-billion-dollar Stimulus is rushed through Congress, and billions of dollars in Stimulus money are doled out to foreign companies and banks.  Finland, China, Brazil, and India are just a few of the beneficiaries of Americans' hard-earned tax dollars. Might these have been payoffs for those shady, unknown donations?

Bill Clinton was the first president to benefit from a foreign spoils system, but Barack Obama has made Clinton look like an amateur. 

One more coincidence in shady fundraising.  The lady involved with Obama's fundraising in the Caribbean?  None other than Vera Baker, who packed up and hurried left the country after the National Enquirer started exploring a possible tryst between her and Obama in a Washington hotel.

Barack Obama can only hope that ObamaCare covers "extreme stress" -- because whoever on his staff is responsible for keeping track of all of the weird stuff in the president's life is definitely a candidate for burnout. 

One final item involves that most elusive of documents: Obama's long-lost long-form birth certificate.

A Chicago-area activist, Sherman Skolnick, writing for a radio show/website (now defunct) by the name of Cloak and Dagger uncorked this headline on his readers.  It referred to another story he'd written in 2005 -- three years before anyone in the media coined the term "birther" to tamp down curiosity about our 44^th president's past.  (All-caps headline in the original story.)

CLOAK'S EXCLUSIVE AUGUST 2005 STORY EXPOSING OBAMA'S KENYAN BIRTHPLACE FORCES OBAMA TO SANITIZE HIS PASSPORT FILE.

Just another day in the life of anyone attempting to pierce the shroud of mystery that surrounds our 44^th president.  The final result is the publication of The Secret Life of Barack Hussein Obama.

Mondo Frazier is the editor/founder of the website DBKP - Death By 1000 Papercuts and the author of The Secret Life of Barack Hussein Obama, published by Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster.