That’s right. It’s nothing but a digital file. No one has ever stated that they have seen the document that was allegedly scanned to create the file. No one not even Baghdad Bob Gibbels who has stated that he personally put the file on the internet. (thus implicating himself in document fraud if it is ever proven to be a fraud) The Hawaii Dept. of Health has never said they have ever issued a COLB either.
However there is the original Certification of Live Birth that is on file at the Hawaii Department of Health.
There is no need to rely on a scanned image from a website when the state of Hawaii can print out copies of the COLB if they are ever subpoenaed to do so. Every state in the union issues copies of these every day of the week.
The state of Hawaii issued a copy to the Obama campaign who then forwarded it on to the St. Petersburg Times newspaper for their investigation.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/jul/01/obamas-birth-certificate-final-chapter-time-we-mea/
For Immediate Release: October 31, 2008
STATEMENT BY DR. CHIYOME FUKINO
“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record.
“Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai‘i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai‘i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.
“No state official, including Governor Linda Lingle, has ever instructed that this vital record be handled in a manner different from any other vital record in the possession of the State of Hawai‘i.”
“I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago.”—July 27, 2009
“You know, during the campaign of 2008, I was actually in the mainland campaigning for Senator McCain. This issue kept coming up so much in the campaign, and again I think it’s one of those issues that is simply a distraction from the more critical issues that are facing the country. And so I had my health director, who is a physician by background, go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health, and we issued a news release at that time saying that the president was, in fact, born at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. And that’s just a fact. And yet people continue to call up and e-mail and want to make it an issue. And I think it’s, again, a horrible distraction for the country by those people who continue this. ... It’s been established. He was born here.”—Governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle (R)
Janice Okubo, Director of Communications of the Hawaii Department of Health quoted by the Washington Independent on July 17, 2009: “Ironically, the ‘birther’ movement began in response to Obama’s own efforts to debunk rumors. One year ago this week, the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama launched FightTheSmears.com, a web site designed to push back against false rumors about the first African-American presidential nominee. To push back against rumors that he was not born in Hawaii, the campaign reproduced a Certificate of Live Birth from the state’s Health Department. Instead of terminating the conspiracy theories, that inspired new theories — that the certificate had been forged or that even if it hadn’t been forged it was the sort of certificate that could be given to someone born outside of the United States. But the certificate is specific about Obama’s birth in Honolulu, down to the 7:24 p.m. time.
‘It’s crazy,’ said Janice Okubo, director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health. ‘I don’t think anything is ever going to satisfy them.’”
Okubo, who said that she gets weekly questions from Obama ‘Birthers’ that are ‘more like threats,’ explained that the Certificate of Live Birth reproduced by Obama’s campaign should have debunked the conspiracy theories. ‘If you were born in Bali, for example,’ Okubo explained, ‘you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate. But it’s become very clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. The people who are questioning this bring up all these implausible scenarios. What if the physician lied? What if the state lied? It’s just become an urban legend at this point.’”