Jim, have you seen this yet?
Poring over these early articles on the topic, Allen noticed what she thought was an important pattern. In each instance, someone had posted the articles on the Free Republic Web site, prompting a discussion involving the same handful of people, with several expressing a desire to spread the word about Obama’s supposed faith.
Keeper of the Obama File
Of the file folders that are spread in neat rows across Allen’s desk, only one is bulging. It holds printouts of the reams of conversations about Obama’s religion appearing on Free Republic. Since its start in 1996 by Jim Robinson of Fresno, Calif., the site has grown into a home for discussion of all types — though it is particularly noted for spirited political discussions dominated by conservatives and libertarians. Freepers, as they’re called, converse with a varying degree of transparency. Most remain anonymous.
Allen counted 23 freepers among those engaging in regular discussions about Obama’s religion, and isolated a handful whom she began to suspect as having a role in the e-mail. Sifting through hundreds of postings, she began to piece together their identities. There was “Beckwith,” whom she pegged as a veteran from Boston, old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy, in uniform by 1964, and host of a Web site that devotes considerable space to an “Obama file” that says the senator is “by birth, blood and training, a Muslim.”
Allen found Beckwith discussing the matter in a Jan. 13 clip from a Web-based conservative radio show based in San Diego. In his thick Boston brogue, Beckwith told hosts Jeff Lynch and Mike Howard that Obama’s “relationship to Islam is the big question. When one investigates the background of Obama’s conversion, I can find no record of his baptism.”