Replies

"I changed nothing on the e-mail."

Thanks. That's all I asked.

"I think you owe me an apology."

For what? For claiming that the Hawaii DOH admitted something they still have never admitted? Sorry. No apology is deserved.

"And I’m still waiting to see the communications you received from Okubo."

I know you are... but my source is not Okubo. As we have seen here, Okubo's detailed expertise is rather lacking, since her explanation here actually reflects nothing that is found on Hawaiian birth certificates, either long or short form. She is a public relations person, and while doing her level headed best, she just doesn't have the hands on experience to get it quite right. Remember he saying months ago that they went "paperless" when she actually meant they went "computerized?"

The "explanation" you have posted here is at such variance with the actual documents that we know it is useless. That's why my source is an actual clerk at the DOH, a guy who (though not present in 1961) has a pretty good handle on the process in the 80s and late 70s.

I had a West Point classmate who retired to Hawaii personally go down to the DOH and speak to the clerks. This is what he wrote me back: -----------------------

"I spent about two and a half hour this afternoon at the Department of Health on Punchbowl Street. They passed me around to a couple of different clerical folks until they found someone in the health status monitoring office who handled birth certificates back in the early 80. His name was XXXXXXX.

He said that there were no copies of old procedures that he knew of, so he could not show me anything from the 60s. He said that nobody there had been around long enough to remember for sure what they did in the 60s. He did say that until the registration system went on-line (first at the Department of Health and then connected to hospital “ADT” systems a few years later) there were actually different procedures used to get the records from different outer islands at the same time, and they were not finally standard until some time after he arrived.

I asked him where the numbers were assigned, and he said it depended. For a number of years, hospitals with busy oby/gn practices got preassigned blocks of numbers from the state so that they wouldn’t duplicate each other. For a while before he got there the state actually issued hospitals the stamps that had those blocks of numbers in them, but that became too expensive, so they went back to just assigning the blocks.

Once the paperwork got to Honolulu, the numbers were entered into the state ledgers and the certificates filed. When I asked him if there was a local number too, he said no. The state number was the local number, so you could right to the hospital and find the same record under the same number.

When I asked him your question about how the hospital assigned the numbers he said he had no idea, he had never worked in one. He did figure that different hospitals would use different systems.

Let me know if you need me to go back. I don’t get to the city much since XXXXXXXX retired.

You say Ciao, we say Aloha,

XXXXXXXX"

I had a West Point classmate who retired to Hawaii personally go down to the DOH and speak to the clerks. This is what he wrote me back:

You so happens to have some "West Point" buddy of yours go down to DoH where they explained to him how it was done?? We can all go home now because Wiggs here has conveniently filled in the inexplicably gaps. Pfffft. However, we cannot get coherent answers from either Fukino or Okubo with all the hundreds if not thousands of correspondences they have received over the last two years where they could have just as easily informed the world. You're definitely a ringer.

I am not going to question this supposed letter or statement. Mostly because it is hearsay from a person I don’t know delivered by a person about whom I have serious suspicions about.

I will say this though, a State Official, in a position of authority in the Department of Health, making a statement has a great deal more weight or credibility to it than your “interviewer”.

The information that Butter got came from an actual official, in a position of authority in an email that is public record, and subject to FOIA requests.

This letter from your friend may or may not be true, it may or may not have been a legitimate and accurate source. We don’t know that. All we have is your word, and frankly that doesn’t go far with me.

Any LAWYER would put more weight on Okubo and Fukino’s statements than your letters from friends, by necessity.