As Obama stonewalls on uncertified birth certificate, official doubts mount

Israel Insider ^ | June 28, 2008 | June 28, 2008

[Red Steel]

A senior official in the State of Hawaii's Department of Health, Director of Communications Janice Okubo, confirms that the image published and circulated by the Obama campaign as his "birth certificate" lacks the necessary embossed seal and signature. Backing away from a quote attributed to her that the image on the campaign site was "valid," she told the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times in an article published yesterday: "I don't know that it's possible for us to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents."

Barack Obama has claimed in writing to have a valid printed document: In the first chapter of his book Dreams From My Father, describing his origins, he wrote about finding a local Hawaiian newspaper article about his Kenyan father: "I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school."

So where is that birth certificate? It got lost? The dog ate it? No matter. Barack Obama or an immediate family member can plunk down $10 ($11.50 if he orders online) and have Hawaii mail a certified document to him within a week or two. But more than two weeks have passed since the Obama campaign adopted the suspect, uncertified image of a purported birth document published by a left-wing blog Daily Kos, and nothing certified and nothing on paper has since has been forthcoming. Nor has there been any official comment about the issue from the campaign. They may cling to the hope -- however audacious -- that the one issue that could disqualify their man constitutionally from gaining the presidency will just go away.

Amy Hollyfield of the St. Petersburg Times, and a reporter for the paper's "Politifact" blog, said that she has been seeking the birth certificate "for months." She was frustrated: "Hawaii birth certificates aren't public record. Only family members can request copies, so when the campaign declined to give us one, we were stalled."

Finally, the campaign released the image (resembling the one at the top of this article). Hollyfield e-mailed it to the Hawaii Department of Health, which maintains such records, to ask if it was real.

"It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate," spokesman Janice Okubo told us. Then the firestorm started.

Israel Insider contacted Okubo several days. She could not refer to Obama's specific case, she said, because no one but an authorized family member can do so. But she did confirm that a valid "certification of live birth" would need to have an embossed seal and signature and that it can only be printed and mailed. There is no such thing as an electronic only certification.

In our previous article on this subject we published an example of a certified birth certificate of another Hawaiian citizen, Patricia DeCosta, reproduced below. The stamp and signature are reversed because the embossing is done from the back as per law, as Okubo noted is required by law.

Speaking to National Review Online, Okubo admitted that the Obama image lacked those required features but thought that perhaps the embossing was applied too lightly.

Maybe so, but all the certificates we have seen have the embossed imprint clearly visible, as well as horizontal fold marks.

There's only one way for Obama to show he's a natural born citizen eligible to be President: produce the paper proof.

We got an email yesterday from Bryan Suits who has a radio show on KFI Los Angeles. He writes: "I have just received my State of Hawaii certified birth certificate for my 1964 debut on the planet earth. It looks....nothing like Obama's. We've scanned it at 72dpi, 300dpi. Nuthin. We can't make the emboss disappear. Also, we can't make THE FOLDS disappear!! How did FightTheSmears do it?

I got curious when I compared his (with the 2007 date bleed) to my old beat-up1986 copy. then I went online on June 13 and ordered the thing. It got here yesterday tri-folded in a state of hawaii envelope. I called the State and asked if I could get an unfolded copy. No dice.

Hollyfield brings up other issues that her readers raised, although she does not address them or explain them [bracketed comments from Israel Insider]:

* Where is the embossed seal and the registrar's signature? [Required for validity]

* Comparing it to other Hawaii birth certificates, the color shade is different.

* Isn't the date stamp bleeding through [in reverse] the back of the document [image] "June [6] 2007?" (Odd since it was supposedly released in June 2008.)

* There's no crease from being folded and mailed. [Hawaii requires printing and mailing, according to Okubo. Electronic images are never released, she assured us, nor are they valid.]

* It's clearly Photoshopped and a wholesale fraud.

Hollyfield, frustrated by failing to access the required original, being refused by the Obama campaign, and finding only secondary documents from his subsequent career, asks what's "reasonable" and then claims that skeptics about Obama's published birth certificate believe that there's a conspiracy afoot:

Because if this document is forged, then they all are. If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud. They have done it with conspiring officials at the Hawaii Department of Health, the Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Illinois Secretary of State's office, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois and many other government agencies.

But Hollyfield is mistaken. There would be no need to invent a conspiracy among officials. All Obama needed to do would be to pass off an uncertified document as being certified. He may have done so unwittingly. Then the rest can follow without any need to conspire with any other official. They just take it on faith that the person is an American citizen.

They don't check about the embossing requirements of the State of the Hawaii. They believe Obama. Why should they doubt him, certainly after he becomes a lawyer and a state senator? The officials believe that the claimed document is authentic, and therefore issue other documents, based on the phony one, buried deep in the documentary chain. Unwitting or not, however, the high stakes for basing one's citizenship on an uncertified birth certificate must be pretty obvious to the campaign now.

Nothing else explains why Obama's campaign refused to release the original paper document, to make this distracting controversy go way. Because Hollyfield is right about one thing:

"If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud."

U.S. citizens who have written to Israel Insider or have posted on the Internet are not satisfied. Ordinary people are compelled to produce certified paper birth certificates to get a passport or a driver's license. Why, people are asking, doesn't Obama needed to show one to run for President?

In a follow-up contact by Hollyfield, Janice Okubo backtracked and qualified, pointing to the main issue that Israel Insider and others have brought into focus [our comments in brackets]:

"I guess the big issue that's being raised is the lack of an embossed seal and a signature," Okubo said, pointing out that in Hawaii, both those things are on the back of the document. "Because they scanned the front -- you wouldn't see those things." [But of course, as in the DeCosta sample and others, you can see it clearly.]

Okubo says she got a copy of her own birth certificate last year and it is identical to the Obama one we received. [Well, "identical" cannot be correct. Her name is not Obama, Her certificate number was not blacked out, and her certificate had the required embossed certification. So she can only be saying that the form looked the same, as she said to the National Review Online's Jim Geraghty.]

And about the copy we e-mailed her for verification? "When we looked at that image you guys sent us, our registrar, he thought he could see pieces of the embossed image through it." [Except that she received only what was published on the Internet and circulated by email, and no "pieces of the embossed image" do come through that. We have published the highest resolution available and there is no trace of embossed seal or signature. Readers can see for themselves.]

Still, she acknowledges: "I don't know that it's possible for us "to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents."

And there you have it. Okubo can't "even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents" because she is not allowed access to Barack Obama's personal records. State law prohibits it.

Only Barack Obama (or another immediate family member) can authorize the release of the paper birth certificate, and submit it to objective analysis. He refuses to do so, even though it would seem to be in his interest to do so, to silence the skeptics, to show that they are wrong and he is right, to settle once and for all that he is a "natural born citizen" entitled by the US Constitution to be President of the United States. Yet there is only silence and inaction from Obama and his campaign on the subject. The palpably uncertified document remains online, with an explanation that refers only to the date of Hawaiian Statehood and an irrelevant passage from the Constitution.

Admitting her failure to obtain a demonstrably authentic birth document for the candidate, Hollyfield falls back at the end of her latest article into her reliance on the "straw man" of a conspiracy theory.

And there's the rub. It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice [sic] of the world's biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything's possible.

But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what's reasonable has to take over.

There is not one shred of evidence to disprove PolitiFact's conclusion that the candidate's name is Barack Hussein Obama, or to support allegations that the birth certificate he released isn't authentic.

Here Hollyfield is again incorrect. He didn't release a birth certificate, but an image of a purported "certification of live birth" that contains dubious features, lacks a traceable certificate number and -- as the Hawaiian state official Okubo admits -- lacks the stamp and signature required to make it valid. There need be no conspiracy by state or federal officials, just a willingness to believe Obama and accept an image that might look real but might not be.

If Obama is confident that he has a valid paper birth certificate from Hawaii, it is unreasonable for him to be withholding it.

But if he lacks a valid US birth certificate, and therefore cannot prove that he is an American citizen, then he would have good reason to put up a smokescreen and stonewall as long as he can. He would have good reason to try and slide by, as he may have done in the past, by putting up something that would pass as legitimate to the untrained and uninformed, as the one posted by the left-wing Daily Kos blog did, and which much of the media accepted as such, on his say-so.

Because if Obama lacks a valid birth certificate from Hawaii, it would mean that he has been living a lie his whole life: an illegal alien born outside the country who never obtained American citizenship, never became naturalized, and yet has been passing himself off as a citizen to the Illinois Bar, the Illinois Legislature, the US Senate and now, as a candidate for President.

To give Obama the benefit of the doubt: he may not know that he was not born in Hawaii. This may also be part of the family legend his mother communicated to him. As he himself admits in the first chapter of his Dreams, this would not be the only half-truth or outright life his white family told him. The chapter skips over completely anything about the circumstances of his birth or what preceded it: "First the baby arrived, eight pounds, two ounces, with 10 toes and 10 fingers and hungry for food." Subsequent reports have him born in two different hospitals.

Has Obama -- by the "white lie" of claiming to be born in Hawaii (whether the lie came from him or from his mother) and not Kenya or Canada as some have a suggested -- been misrepresenting himself -- wittingly or unwittingly -- to the people of his state and his nation all along?

If so, he would have every reason to put up a web site accusing his critics of conducting a smear campaign to avoid answering valid questions about his identity and background. He would have every reason to accuse political opponents of planning a campaign that raises these questions -- as if to ask whether a candidate for US President is in fact a US citizen is an illegitimate question.

To this day, the question about Obama's national origins remains unanswered, because the proof offered to date is inadequate, even according to the responsible Hawaiian state officials. The question is not whether he's black or white or somewhere in between. The question is not whether he's a Muslim or Christian, a Democrat or a Communist. The question is whether he can document that he was born in Hawaii and thus meet the requirements of the Constitution.

Yes, the question about whether the candidate is a natural born American citizen is legitimate. But is Obama?

If Obama lacks a certified Hawaiian birth certificate, he's not a natural born American. If he's not a natural born American, he can't be president. That's the law of the land.

If Obama is a legitimate candidate, a natural born citizen of the United States, he must prove it. If he is not, he must admit the truth, and accept the consequences. Now, not later.

This is a matter of US national security. Because there are people in this world who know the truth and can prove it. They would be able to hold that knowledge and proof over his head to make him do their bidding, or else expose him as a fraud, liar and, yes, an illegal alien. That is not a risk that it is reasonable for the American people to take.

Beyond the vulnerability to blackmail, there is a more fundamental question that must be asked if Obama is not forthcoming in producing the requisite documentation of his citizenship: does the American people really want to elect a man who would conceal his past and identity? Does it want to elect a man who would withhold the full truth and stonewall legitimate questions in his pursuit of the presidency, all the while claiming to be a victim and accusing others of fraud?

There's only one way for Obama to show he's a natural born citizen eligible to be President: produce the paper proof.

Whether from popular pressure or a legal challenge to his credentials, it is essential that Obama be forced to release for objective analysis the birth certificate he claimed in own book to possess.

Each American, at watershed moments in his or her life -- to get a driver's license, a marriage certificate, a passport -- must produce a paper birth certificate for official inspection and analysis. Now it's Obama's turn.

[Malesherbes]

Not to worry, B.O. will be covered by the amnesty bill for illegal aliens that the Congress will pass in 2009. It will put him on a fast track to citizenship.

[devere]

“Does the registrar not provide ACTUAL certified copies, or just ginned up versions on current blank stock, purporting to be the original???”

Almost no place provides actual certified copies any more. They just provide a certification. Anyone with inside access to the state computers could conceivably fake that pretty easily.

[Jeff Head]

Obama lies and spins and blows smoke about everyhting. From his brith certificte, early upbringing to his associations, to his stancess on positions, etc., etc.

Why?

For example, here's just as compelling info about his early upbrining and another retraction that is needed on his web site:

Obama's own website says the following:

"Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," followed by: "Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim."

I have a few questions for Obama's campaign and anyone inerested in researching Obama's background...which when considering him for the President of the United States, we as voters in this Republic have a de facto responsibility to do when any questions arise.

1. Did or did not Obama recite the Islamic call to prayer from memory in an interview? Did he or did he not, in that interview refer to it as one of the most beautiful sounds at sunset? - [Reference Obama:Man of the World, March 6, 2007, Nicholas D. Kristoff, NY Times Select]

   From that article:

   “I was a little Jakarta street kid,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in his office (excerpts are on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground). He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics — and more likely to be aware of their nationalism — if he once studied the Koran with them.
   
   Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

2. Do or do not many Islamics consider the recital of that prayer as a defacto part of fundamental Islamic/Muslim religious membership? [Reference The Adhan (Ilsamic call to prayer)].

   Allah is Most Great. Allah is Most Great.
   Allah is Most Great. Allah is Most Great.
   I bear witness that there is none worthy of being worshipped except Allah.
   I bear witness that there is none worthy of being worshipped except Allah.
   I bear witness that Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah.
   I bear witness that Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah.
   Come to prayer. Come to prayer.
   Come to Success. Come to Success.
   Allah is Most Great. Allah is Most Great.
   There is none worthy of being worshipped except Allah.

3. Did or did not Obama attend, as a youth, Muslim schools and was he or was he not considered a member of the religion of his step father in Indonesia? [See notes and reference to number 1 above. Obama admits it himself.]
   
   
4. Was or was not Obama registered in his elementary school classes as a "Muslim" requiring that he study Islamic principles and the Loran each day? [Reference Barack Obnama's Muslim childhood.]

   From that article:

   Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: "My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim." An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that "All the relatives of Barry's father were very devout Muslims."
   
   Barack Obama's Catholic school in Jakarta.
   
   The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that "documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim" while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was "listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school." A blogger who goes by "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" found that "Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro' serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry's religion was listed as Islam."
   
   The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he "was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended."

Clearly, the record is at significant odds with Obama's campaign, and his own statements. Why?

Now, whether or not Obama considers himself Muslim now, whether or not he is willing to admit to his past and upbringing, these questions and his efforts to hide or color the truth of his background are relavent to his aspirations to be President.

If he will not even be truthful about his own upbringing, his own roots...how can we expect him to be truthful about his own stances on critical issues of the day and his ideology as regards the United States?

The answer is plain...we can't.

His own shifting stances on the issues, his own willful associations for decades with virulent anti-Americans and then his attempts to hide from those associations all atest to this.

THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

[P8riot]

There's no sensitive information in a Birth Certificate. Obama has nothing to lose by providing proof.

Unless he wasn't born with a Muslim name. If that was the case when did he convert?

[hellbender]

I think it would be easier to get the Vatican to give you a sample of the Shroud of Turin for destructive testing than to get either Hussein’s birth certificate or Kerry’s form 180.

[ROLF of the HILL COUNTRY]

ping

[musicman]

GREAT LINK!!!!!!!!!!!!

[AmericaUnited]

I've got a copy of Obama's BC and it has " OHSM 1.1"

The Obama BC shown on this thread, from the official Obama site, says OHBM 1.1

[21twelve]

And I'm not sure, but that rev. 11/01 may mean the form was revised in Nov. 2001 - indicating that both of the requests were made after that date.

I hadn't thought of the birth records being hacked - but I think that from the evidence I have heard is that their are lots of discrepancies on the form compared to those provided by the state.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned on this thread I don't think is that back in the day his race would have been “black”. Sounds like someone may have been a bit too fancy in trying to backdate the document by using “African”. (Personally, for 1961 I would have thought Negro or Negroid would have fit).

[Grampa Dave]

"Know what bothers me about all this brouhaha about Obama's Birth Certificate, Dave? As stated above, the whole thing can be cleared up in a week (probably less) for $10 and a Forever Stamp. That's all it'd take.....instead there's forgery and a BS story fueling the fire over natural born citizenship status. There's no sensitive information in a Birth Certificate. Obama has nothing to lose by providing proof."

We probably have as much chance of seeing a real copy of his birth certificate as seeing John Kerry’s full military record. Kerry refused to release his military records, and Hussein ObamaMessiaHamas, the Islamofacist Manchurian Candidate will probably not show his BC. We will be labeled as racists for daring to question his birth.

Maybe Obamination will allow FR to have a fund drive to pay for an approved copy and have it sent to Jim Robinson for an untouched reproduction and free posting on Free Republic. I will pay for half if you will!

[mamelukesabre]

Here’s one for all you on FR to ponder...and maybe someone here actually knows the answer...

Is it possible for a person to be a legal natural born citizen if there is no birth certificate?

I think yes. This is why I think this whole birth certificate goose chase is a waste of time.

What do you all say?

[ballplayer]

There actually a way to copy this document and remove the fold marks. A color copier is used and the copier has an erase feature for making copies of pages in a book that you fold in the open position.THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN COULD have the original copy with the seal on the reverse side ,they erase that side turn it over no seal mark or signature .

[Grampa Dave]

RC51 wrote:

“Personal I think the fonts match perfectly and the letter spacing & kerning match exactly. I think Obama’s is real.”

[cynwoody]

If Barack wasn’t born here, and was never naturalized, he’s an illegal alien!

Pelosi and Reid would just ram through a bill retroactively removing the five years over the age of 16 residency requirement for the mother. Then it would be up to Bush to sign it or veto it.

[devere]

“We probably have as much chance of seeing a real copy of his birth certificate as seeing John Kerry’s full military record. “

Actually, I think that any American could go into federal court and ask for an injunction against Obama assuming the office of President, on the grounds of his being constitutionally ineligible. The main question would be when in the electoral process such a filing would be considered timely. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know, and possibly no one really knows.

[Charles Martel]

Obama’s certificate says “Date Filed by Registrar” and all known valid certificates say “Date ACCEPTED by STATE Registrar”. THIS DIFFERENCE MUST BE EXPLAINED!!!

Hmm. Same official revision number, too. Something definitely smells.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

If he's not a natural born American, he can't be president. That's the law of the land.

At least that's the Constitutional theory. Rats simply ignore anything in the Constitution that is detrimental to their aims or antithetical to their beliefs..

[AmericaUnited]

There is absolutly, positively, something very funny going on here.

The current document on the offical Obama site, (shown at the top of this thread) is form OHBM 1.1. I don't know what OHBM stands for. The Daily KOS document from earlier in the month, and all know valid documents say OHSM 1.1.

If the an Obama staffer suppled the document to the Daily Kos, the story we were told, then why are they different, OHSM vs OHBM!!!

Here's a link an LA Times story. Note the JPEG image date they filed it under: 2008/06/13. Note the doc is OHSM 1.1. The offical Obama site doc looks identical except it is form OHBM 1.1

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/06/obama-birth.html

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/images/2008/06/13/bobirthcertificate.jpg

[ex-Texan]

*BUMP* !

[SERKIT]

The LASER form was revised November 2001 (11/01), so:

1) I don't think there were LASER printers in 1961, and

2) This HAS to be a certified COPY of his 1961 birth certificate, so

3) WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL?

4) Does that mean that the posted birth certificate is "fake but accurate"?

This sounds like a 2008 version of Dan Rather's fake documents on a Remington typewriter. In this case, there were no LASER forms in 1961.

Again I ask: WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL?!?!?!?!