When Barack Obama, America’s newest presidential hopeful, was hit by allegations that he had attended a radical Islamic madrasah school as a boy in Indonesia, the claims spread like a virus through the media and internet.It was a lie — the school was barely more religious than British church schools — but it was also a sign that Obama’s chances of winning the presidency depend to an unusual degree on his life story and character.The race is on to define the gifted but little-known senator for Illinois and The Sunday Times can reveal that his heritage is far more diverse and astonishing than anything American voters have heard so far.Obama, 45, has two half- sisters, one living in Britain, and five surviving half-brothers, the eldest of whom converted to Islam, and whose stories span the globe.Nobody was more surprised to hear that Obama had reportedly been educated in a madrasah than Julia Suryakusuma, a close friend of his mother until her death from ovarian cancer in 1995.Suryakusuma, 53, one of Indonesia’s most outspoken feminist writers, has fearlessly taken on extremist Muslim clerics in print. Last week she described Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, “as a liberal and a humanist”, who learnt to speak fluent Indonesian and adored the culture.“She was interested in religions but didn’t follow one. She was a free-thinker,” Suryakusuma said. “She was a pioneer and when she came to Indonesia she was ensnared and enchanted.”On the coffee table in her cool modern house in Jakarta, full of the beautiful Indonesian fabrics and carvings which captivated her friend, lies an album of photographs which record the happy times.There is Dunham, pale-skinned, jolly and frizzy-haired, celebrating with her friends at an art gallery opening or a drinks party, wearing the baggy, free-flowing clothes often favoured by bohemian western women in Asia. She always seemed to be laughing.“You know Ann was really, really white,” smiled Suryakusuma, looking through the album, “even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I think she just loved people of a different skin colour, brown people.” Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas, but her parents moved to Hawaii in search of a better life. According to Obama, a distant ancestor was a “full-blooded Cherokee."Dunham’s first marriage was to a Kenyan student, also called Barack Obama, but he left the family to study at Harvard and returned to Africa. She went on to marry Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student, and moved to his native Indonesia with six-year-old Barack in 1967, after the new dictator Suharto summoned the country’s citizens home.Soetoro became a government relations consultant with a big US oil company. “He changed when he came back to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma recalled. “Men can be a certain way when they are in the West and when they come back they are sucked into their own culture.” In his memoir,Dreams from My Father, first published in 1995, Obama does not conceal the estrangement between his mother and stepfather as Soetoro made compromises with Indonesia’s power elite. They divorced and he died decades later of a liver complaint.At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite private school. His mother went back to Indonesia with Obama’s half-sister Maya, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, and became an expert on the “feminine crafts”, such as weaving and basket-making, practised by the women of Java.Suryakusuma recalled that Dunham called her son “Berry” — Barry with an Indonesian lilt. “We were both mothers and we talked about how difficult it was for a mother to separate herself and send her child away, but she was really concerned about Barry’s education.” She first met Obama when he came to visit his mother as a young adult. “She was so proud of him. I remember she was glowing with pride when he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.“You know, having a white mother and a black father and coming to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma reflected, “I could see he had the same kind of empathy with people that his mother had.”Obama’s multi-hued heritage has put a distance between him and the African-American community, which has been reluctant to claim him as a “brother”. America’s white community, in contrast, has embraced Obama as a hopeful affirmation that the fabled melting pot can transcend race. With his middle name Hussein (like Saddam) and surname Obama (like Osama), he is a rare and exotic figure in American politics.“I believe the American electorate is ready to support leaders who embody the American dream despite their differences. In doing so, we affirm ourselves as a tolerant people,” said William Galston, a senior fellow in public policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.Yet there are details in Obama’s life that have yet to be subjected to full scrutiny. It may not be the information itself that matters, according to Galston, but “how Obama talks about the facts as they emerge and handles questions and controversies.”The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet was the first to spot in 2004, when Obama burst on the national stage at the Democratic party convention, that his memoir,Dreams from My Father, contained “composite” characters and changed names.“Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not,” she pointed out.Obama admitted as much in his introduction, saying he had altered characters “for the sake of their privacy.” As with the revelation that he took cocaine in his youth, he appears to have been candid about potential areas of controversy.Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire. They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”. His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.After his parents split up, Obama saw his father only once before learning that he had died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.Obama’s eldest brother Roy moved to America and went on to convert to Islam. Obama, in contrast, became a committed Christian while he was working as a community activist in Chicago. Last week he denounced the reports that he was educated in a madrasah as a “ludicrous” smear.Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, believes Obama’s richly textured African and Indonesian background will attract voters, no matter how controversial it is.“America loves a success story — the new generation that rises from the sins and misfortunes of the older generation,” Sabato said.In Indonesia, Suryakusuma said she could still feel the “warm” presence of Obama’s mother Ann. “She would be so proud if she knew about Barry, so proud to think that her little boy would be running for president of the United States.”

The Torture Follies — Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse ... [Andy McCarthy]
As K-Lo notes, I have an article (posted on the homepage this afternoon) which recounts how the Obama administration is urging the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to adopt the same interpretation of federal torture law that it is investigating former Bush administration lawyers for developing. (And why shouldn't AG Eric Holder rely on the memo written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo in 2002? After all, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals already adopted it as the law of the United States in a ruling last year — as I also recount in the article).
But now there's more. As Jan Crawford Greenburg reports at her ABC News blog, Legalities, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility — by playing partisan politics — has blown the critical filing deadline for referring Prof. Yoo for professional sanctions. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good thing — as I've been arguing, there is no legal or ethical basis to pursue this cockamamie investigation. But this is an episode that should be studied given all the blather about how it was Republicans who politicized the Justice Department.
OPR, like the Civil [ACM CORRECTION:] RIGHTS Division, is largely a bastion of the Left at DOJ. But to get some things done, the career lawyers need sign-offs from political appointees, so they butt heads with the brass from time to time if a Republican administration is in power. Patently, they slow-walked the ethics investigation of Yoo and Bybee for years, waiting for President Bush to be on his way out and a more agreeable Democrat administration to come in. In the waning weeks of the Bush administration, they tried to slide their report by AG Michael Mukasey — perhaps figuring he was on his way out the door and wouldn't pay it much attention. Wrong! As Jan Greenburg Crawford recounts:
It appears John Yoo cannot be disciplined or disbarred for writing those memos, even if the Office of Professional Responsibility says it has evidence he should be.
That’s because OPR’s five-year investigation—carefully timed for release only as Bush was leaving the White House and Obama was coming in—dragged on too long. As a result of that timing, OPR blew the deadline for referring possible misconduct allegations against Yoo.
John Yoo is admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. But the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, which would investigate any complaints against him, imposes a four-year limitation for complaints.
Yoo wrote the memos in 2002 and 2003. This is 2009. You do the math....
This is a huge issue for current DOJ officials and Attorney General Eric Holder. Because if Yoo—who wrote the memos and has been vilified as responsible for approving the interrogation program—can’t be disciplined under state bar rules, why then would OPR even refer the matter to state bar officials in the first place?
And what about Bybee? Now a federal appeals court judge, Bybee is admitted in DC and Nevada—those jurisdictions don’t have comparable limitations periods. But how strange would it be to only refer Bybee, when his involvement largely amounted making a few edits and signing Yoo’s legal work?
Then there’s the report itself. The bar for disciplinary action is incredibly high. Legal ethics experts, like Geoffrey Hazard at the University of Pennyslvania, say they expect nothing to happen, even if the state disciplinary boards were to investigate. Hazard says Yoo and Bybee have a number of strong available defenses, and that it’s awfully hard to say the memo was so “outside the range of plausible lawyered judgment that no reasonable lawyer could render it.” Without that, he says, there’s no ethical violation.
When Mukasey read the report, he was so dissatisfied, he demanded Yoo and Bybee be allowed to comment—as [Michael] Isikoff also reported back in February.
Mukasey then wrote a detailed response, also signed by Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, that was harshly critical of OPR’s efforts, which he said veered far afield into matters that were irrelevant to whether Yoo and Bybee gave bad legal advice. What would be the relevance, for example, of details of at least one CIA interrogation that went horribly wrong—if that interrogation had gone beyond what the memos approved in the first place?
So all the talk about referrals, all the leaks about how the two men erred in judgment, starts to feel a little bit like old-fashioned politics. Especially when you think about the timing of the report—as Mukasey was packing up his office and a new administration coming in—and big-time blown deadlines.

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