South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg Being Deployed To Afghanistan As A Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer

Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) may have been elected by the voters of South Bend to serve a four-year term as the city's mayor, but starting next year he will be serving on active duty in Afghanistan as a naval reserve intelligence officer after receiving a recent order to report to the Navy Operational Support Center in Chicago on February 28, 2014. Lt. Buttigieg is being deployed as an individual augmentee, or a unit of one according to the South Bend Tribune.

This will be the mayor's second visit to the war-torn country. He previously traveled there as a civilian economic adviser with the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

"I will be training for about a month and then I will spend about six months in Afghanistan," the mayor said. "My projected detachment (return date) is the 30th of September, and there'll probably be a few days after that of demobilization before I'm back in the saddle here."

He added, "This is something I've trained to do and something I knew was a possibility when I signed up for the reserve in the first place. I’m looking forward to serving. I will miss South Bend and I’ll miss this job. I love this job and I love this city."

It's quite interesting to learn that Buttigieg is being deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence officer. It explains his former job working at the secretive McKinsey & Co. consulting firm where a number of the company's principals are former CIA operatives. A New Yorker magazine article once compared working for McKinsey as a present-day equivalent of working for the CIA in the 1950s. Buttigieg's previous work in Afghanistan for that company helps piece together the missing pieces of this mystery. President Obama's current national security advisor, Susan Rice, the former UN Ambassador who lied to the American people about the cause behind the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic post in Libya, which we now know was actually run by the CIA as an arm-smuggling operation for the terrorist rebels fighting to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, once worked as a management consultant for McKinsey.

The American people have no idea how many people there are with ties to the CIA who have obtained elective office in this country, including at least three recent presidents. George H.W. Bush, who served as CIA Director under President Nixon, first worked for the CIA as a contract employee of the agency starting in the 1950s while working at Zapata Oil, a CIA front company. In a November, 1963 memo in the files of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hoover identified Bush as a CIA employee. Bush's father, Sen. Prescott Bush, was an intelligence officer during his military service and was instrumental in the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the CIA. The first President Bush's son, George W. Bush, worked for a CIA front company in Alaska, Alaska International Industries, which operated an airline and worked on the Alaska Pipeline among other things, as his first job out of college. Barack Obama's first job out of Columbia University was at Business International Corporation, which was a well-known CIA front company in New York, where he supposedly performed work as an editor. Thanks to the National Security Act, the American people can only speculate about their past work, if any for the CIA, since their work would be protected from disclosure as classified national security information.

Under Indiana law, Buttigieg's deputy mayor, Mark Neal, will become active mayor during the period of his deployment. The Tribune's story notes that a number of prominent politicians have been called up by the military for active service in recent years, including Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who was also deployed to Aghanistan as a naval intelligence officer, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden (D), son of Vice President Joe Biden.