Antoin "Tony" Rezko (born 1955) is a American businessman. He lived in Chicago, and was convicted on several counts of fraud and bribery in 2008. He was a fundraiser for Illinois Democratic and Republican politicians since the 1980s. After becoming a major contributor to Rod Blagojevich's successful gubernatorial election, Rezko assisted Blagojevich in setting up the state's first Democratic administration in twenty years. Rezko was able to have business associates appointed onto several state boards. Rezko and several others were indicted on federal charges in October 2006, for using their connections to the state boards to demand kickbacks from businesses that wanted to do business with the state. While the others pleaded guilty to the charges, Rezko pleaded not guilty and was found guilty of 16 of the 24 charges filed against him. On November 23, 2011, Rezko was sentenced to 10 1/2 years in prison.

Rezko was born in 1955 in Aleppo, Syria, to a prominent Syriac Catholic family. After graduating from college there, Rezko moved to Chicago and earned an undergraduate and a master's degree in civil engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in the late 1970s. He joined an engineering company, designing nuclear power plants, then left to design roads for the state Transportation Department, making $21,590 in his first year there.

William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s, in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. During the 2008 US presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. He is married to Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather organization.

Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He attended public schools there until his second year in high school, when he transferred to Lake Forest Academy, a small prep school. Ayers earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in American Studies in 1968 (his father, mother and older brother had preceded him there). His parents are Mary (née Andrew) and Thomas G. Ayers, who was later Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to 1980), and for whom Northwestern's Thomas G. Ayers College of Commerce and Industry was named.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Webster Griffin Tarpley (born 1946) is an American historian, author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. Tarpley maintains that the September 11 attacks were engineered by a rogue network of the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies as a false flag operation. His writings and speeches describe a model of terror operations by a rogue network in the military/intelligence sector working with moles in the private sector and in corporate media, and locates such contemporary false flag operations in a historical context stretching back in the English speaking world to at least the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605.

Tarpley was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946. He received a BA degree summa cum laude in English and Italian from Princeton University in 1966. While a student at Princeton he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin in Italy. Tarpley also obtained a MA degree in humanities from Skidmore College. As well as a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in History.

Nadhmi Shakir Auchi, KSS, GCFO (Arabic: نظمي أوجي‎; born 11 June 1937, Baghdad, Iraq), is a British Iraqi businessman and billionaire, founding president of the Anglo Arab Organisation, and the founder and chairman of General Mediterranean Holding (GMH), a conglomerate of 120 companies worldwide. As of 2011 his net worth was estimated by Forbes to be $1.8 billion, making him the 692nd richest person in the world.

Born in the Karadat Mariam area of Baghdad, Iraq in 1937, Auchi attended Al Mansoor Primary School and Baghdad College High School, before going on to study at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah University. He married his wife Ibtisam in 1963, and together they have 2 daughters, born in 1964 and 1972 respectively. In 1980, he and his family fled to London following an extortion attempt by an enforcer for Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. Six years later, Auchi's younger brother Naseer was hanged by the Baathist regime after discovering the extent of al-Tikriti's corruption. Auchi became a British citizen in 1989 and currently resides in London. He and his wife are practising Muslims and have aimed to promote inter-faith dialogue, unity among Arab states, and to build bridges between the West and the Arab world through charitable and humanitarian work, for which Auchi has been recognised.