Posted on 11/30/2010 11:42:20 PM PST by rxsid
"Lakin not allowed witnesses, documents, explanation at court-martial Dec. 14!
Lakin Family Attempts to Avoid Confrontation Ignored by Obama
Letters obtained by The Gazette reveal the extent to which a decorated Army officer and his brother struggled to resolve concerns over the President’s eligibility prior to the officer being court-martialed.
The Lakins are long-time Greeley residents. Three Lakin brothers; Dr. Greg Lakin, Capt. Gary Lakin USCG and Lt. Col. Terrance Lakin graduated from University High School in 1977, 1980 and 1983 respectively. The brothers' parents still live in Greeley and have a long history of supporting humanitarian causes in the area.
Lt. Col. Lakin is currently scheduled to be court-martialed Dec. 14 for disobeying orders to deploy after exhausting numerous attempts to resolve issues regarding the President’s eligibility to be Commander-in-Chief. The specific issue involved is the Constitutional requirement that the President be a natural born citizen.
Dr. Greg Lakin has previously been a member of the Greeley Police Department and was a prosecutor in Hawaii. Greg, who was interviewed on the Peter Boyles radio show on Nov. 9, said Lakin, “mulled over this for a long period of time” before he made his decision to refuse to deploy to Afghanistan. He strongly disputed the contention that his brother was a coward for deploying, noting Terry had already served in both Bosnia and Afghanistan.
...
In an interview with the Gazette, Dr. Lakin shared copies of letters he and his brother sent to the President and Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle asking for a resolution of this issue. Greg said the letters were written with a very humble spirit in an attempt to seek information verifying Barack Obama’s birthplace.
...
Lt. Col. Lakin sent a letter to the President prior to being charged saying, as part of the deployment orders, he was required to submit his long form birth certificate and he was “glad to obey this order, and will provide a certified copy of my original birth certificate with common, standard identifiers, including the name of an attending physician and a hospital.” He said he “attempted through my chain of command for many months to get answers to the relentless questions surrounding your eligibility, but was informed that I lack standing. I also sought answers, unsuccessfully, through my Congressional delegation.” He went on to explain the reason for his request had nothing to do with personal differences. “Please assure the American people that you are indeed constitutionally eligible to serve as Commander-in-Chief and thereby may lawfully direct service members into harm's way. I will be proud to deploy to Afghanistan to further serve my country and my fellow soldiers, but want to do so with the knowledge and peace of mind that this important provision of our Constitution is respected and obeyed.”
Dr. Lakin, in his first letter to the president prior to his brother’s arraignment, implored Obama to put the matter to rest stressing his brother tried to resolve the matter through proper channels but was rebuffed. “Approximately 20 months ago while continuing to serve in the Army he attempted to seek clarification regarding your birth certificate through proper military channels. Lt. Col. Lakin filed his requests through the normal chain of command (as the military advised) but continued to meet with frustration as the Army was unable to provide any clarification with regard to your place of birth. He believes this raises a Constitutional issue, a Constitution which he has sworn to uphold.” He stresses that his brother would gladly deploy in an instant once his questions have been answered, saying Terry “remains ready and willing to continue to serve his country in areas of conflict - as he has done in Afghanistan and Bosnia. I believe that upon meeting with my idealistic and principled brother you would find him professional, compassionate and worth helping.” Dr. Lakin even suggested a way to defuse the situation saying that “a meeting with him or our family, whether you chose to do this in private or public setting, would likely defuse this matter.”
He also sent a letter to Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle who he met several times while he was a prosecuting attorney in Maui County. He told her that “a short meeting or phone with him or family (whether done privately or publicly - your choice), would completely defuse this matter.”
...
Dr. Lakin sent another letter to the President after the initial court-martial date was set. In the letter Greg told the president he was a supporter who was pleased to see him elected in 2008. He reiterated that Terry made this decision only after other options had been exhausted. “It is a shame that no one above him in the military ranks and no one in Congress, who represents him, could address his concerns so that he could have avoided the prospect of such an enormous penalty for staying faithful to the oath he swore as an officer.” He went on to say that Col. Lakin was far from alone in his concerns saying, “Many others in uniform share this concern and have conveyed their support to my brother.”
Showing he understands the divisiveness the issue has caused, he told the President, “We should use all means necessary to avoid an escalated controversy this fall when his court-martial is scheduled. There is much strife and tension in this nation now and this would not be healthy or productive.” Emphasizing the desire to find a resolution of the eligibility issue once and for all so the matter could be put to rest, Lakin said, “My family stands ready to provide any further information you might need and to offer our assistance to try to broker any compromise or negotiation that might be acceptable to all parties. We are deeply distressed over this situation, and do not believe that Terry deserves to be imprisoned simply for seeking assurances that he is following legal orders.”
Greg stated that he has not received any response to his letters and is concerned the Army will simply take the easy way out by avoiding the issue and simply lock up his brother. He said based on his experience as a prosecutor in situations like this where there is no case law, “Judges go in with a pre-determined idea how they are going to decide it and take case law and policy statements to say whatever they want. There is no magic law that supports either position.”
Greg said if his brother is not allowed to present evidence on his behalf and is convicted he would be forced to leave his practice to advocate for his brother saying, “My reluctant but determined response would be to forego my busy medical practice treating drug addicts and elderly patients to organize a public outcry for America’s new military political prisoner.”
As the issue drags on, more members of the media appear to be mentioning the issue. Conan O’Brien joked about the President being ineligible in one of his monologues. Rush Limbaugh, who has previously made comments regarding Obama’s birth certificate, said last week, “We have an imposter for all intents and purposes serving in the White House.”
Saturday Night Live has also mentioned the issue with an opening skit having Sen. Harry Reid asking the President to produce his birth certificate. ABC News Jake Tapper questioned White House Security Advisor David Axelrod’s statement that the President has released his birth certificate asking specifically about the long form containing the name and signature of the attending physician."
From: http://www.greeleygazette.com/press/?p=6890
I’ve never claimed that the BC’s were numbered in order of birth or even birth date. The HDOH itself has said that the BC numbers are given by the HDOH on the “date filed”. The actual birth date is irrelevant.
The explanations that people have attempted are:
1) The BC# was given at the hospital, or the hospital was given a bloc of numbers to use. (The HDOH statement that the number was given at the HDOH office rules that out as the explanation.)
2) The BC# was given at the HDOH but the BC’s from several days collected and got out of order. (But the HDOH says the “date filed” is the date the number was given, so out-of-order piles are irrelevant. The Factcheck number was supposedly given 3 days earlier than the Nordyke numbers. Yet it’s higher/later. This explanation doesn’t explain anything.)
I have not “chosen to reject them in favor of my conspiracy”. I have rejected them because the HDOH statements contradict those explanations. That is my epistemology; if there are mutually exclusive claims I infer that one or the other of the claims is inaccurate.
What the HDOH has said contradicts what is on those documents. Either the HDOH is inaccurate, or the documents are inaccurate. I have no way of knowing for sure which is which, so I ASK FOR AN INVESTIGATION.
So what do you do in response to these mutually-exclusive claims? Which do you think is inaccurate - the HDOH, or the online documents?
I also want to add that Janice Okubo made that statement after conferring with Alvin Onaka, who was the person in charge of switching the record-keeping system to electronic, including setting up the requirements for the data fields. It was he who decided that they didn’t need different fields for “date filed” and “date accepted” because it is now all done at once electronically, and the only BC’s where the dates were ever different were ones from outlying islands. So this is a guy who had to know what the processes were in the past so he could know what data fields were significant to retain in the electronic conversion.
I know that she conferred with Onaka because they accidentally sent my colleague the whole e-mail history between Okubo and Onaka when they sent her Okubo’s response that I’ve referenced.
Uh, no. He has due process. That's what the court martial is. But due process is not required to allow the defendant to being in nonrelevant information. Lakin’s current counsel has agreed that the military judge's ruling on relevant information was correct and is proceeding accordingly.
I disagree that this is the case.
“Which makes all the more important to demand full disclosure.”
That would be nice, but you are unlikely to get it.
“We don't have a few dozen, but there have been several random BCs posted that show a general sequential numbering system that goes along with the chronological order in which BCs are filed.”
To demonstrate anything you need a group from a common time period, say a full month. A few here and there over a few years tell you nothing (go read about aliasing). You may as well take the outside temperature at noon once in January, once in May and once in August and insist that temperature increases steadily upward with no fluctuations. Then from that conclude that a claim that it was colder at night on April 3rd than it was during the day on March 29th is clearly false.
“The procedures as explained by a DOH employee support this numbering pattern, so again, the best available evidence supports the idea that the cert. no. is an anomaly and impossibility.”
Claims from folks with no first direct knowledge of how things were done in 1961 do not make other possibilities impossible or irrational.
“Obama’s alleged cert. no. is irrationally out of sequence, and the state of Hawaii REFUSES to affirm that the number belongs to Obama despite having statutory authority to confirm who the number does belong to. Why hide the truth when there's no legal reason to hide it??”
I'm more inclined to think that Hawaii after having tried to make something of a good faith effort, however poorly, figured out that they were dealing with kooks who weren't going to be happy with what they got unless if confirm their presumptions. And that after a point there was no reason to continue the exercise.
For a long time I avoided the Lakin case because all the talk of procedures and what-not made me think it was too complicated for a layperson like myself to understand. Eventually I decided to go right to Article 92 to know what the case was about. I couldn’t believe it. All this mumbo-jumbo clouding things up but when I went straight to the law itself it wasn’t jumbled up.
In order to charge him with an Article 92 violation he needed to disobey a “lawful order” as defined by the elements - which clearly says a lawful order must be in compliance with the Constitution.
All this talk about whether Lakin had to obey the order is irrelevant. All that matters TO THIS CHARGE - which he MUST be allowed to defend himself against - is whether he was given a lawful (law-compliant, Constitution-compliant, and properly authorized) order, and if so, whether he disobeyed it.
The people who have introduced irrelevancies to the case are the prosecution and judge. They refuse to allow him to defend himself against the actual charge, favoring instead some irrelevant “even if” argument (”even if it wasn’t a lawful order according to the law he’s accused of violating, he’d have to obey it for some other reason”).
I can’t help but think that Lind knows what she’s doing.
Did you notice that she inserted one paragraph of “judicial notice” - and in that paragraph she misspelled Obama’s name (IIRC in a different way than Lakin’s counsel misspelled the name so it wasn’t mocking Lakin’s spelling) and referenced an electoral vote certification that didn’t actually fulfill the requirement of the law? That certification became the basis for her whole argument, but it didn’t fulfill the law and was the subject of a pending court case.
I seem to recall five or so possibilities at the minimum. And they remain possibilities. They tend to provide much more plausible explanations as they do not require a person to invoke conspiracies.
So to answer your question, I think the folks you spoke with at HDOH are inaccurate when they try to describe how the process was done in 1961. A process of which they have no first hand knowledge. Nor even second hand knowledge. And in all likelihood was before they were even born.
You said, “I’m more inclined to think that Hawaii after having tried to make something of a good faith effort, however poorly, figured out that they were dealing with kooks who weren’t going to be happy with what they got unless if confirm their presumptions. And that after a point there was no reason to continue the exercise.”
Okubo’s statement appeared to be a triumphant answer to refute the questions people had regarding whether “date filed” means something was deficient with the certificate. She thought she was trumping us all.
In fact, she thought so much of her answer that she sent an unsolicited triumphant e-mail to another colleague of mine, saying she had a better answer to give him than her previous answer of (paraphrased) “We don’t need to answer no steenkin’ questions from the likes of you!”
She thought she was telling us what we DIDN’T want to hear; had no clue that what she said was a knife in the back of the Factcheck COLB.
Regardless of her motives, the facts she stated are either correct (in which case Factcheck is known to be a forgery) or else she triumphantly told a lie in order to get people to shut up (in which case there’s good reason to wonder what ELSE she has lied about to keep powerful people from pressuring her...) No matter how you slice it, an investigation is definitely in order.
Or she was simply wrong. Can you accept this as a possibility?
Not allowing the defense witnesses is a DIRECT violation of Amendment 6.
How about witnesses that claimed that Bush was responsible for 9/11? Should Lakin be allowed to call them?
Notice your epistemology.
You come across mutually exclusive claims.
So you write it off as just people pretending they know what they’re talking about when they don’t.
How would you falsify that belief? What would convince you that the numbers really don’t match up?
The archive of the article referenced isn’t available, but a small blurb about it at http://www.iolani.org/wn_alum_062708_cp5.htm says the June 2008 article notes Onaka’s 40+ year career in public health records. That tells me that he began his career before 1968. The HDOH Administrative Rules for the territory were converted to state rules in 1962 and no changes were made to those rules until 1972 when COHB’s were eliminated and 1976 when the current form of the rules was adopted.
IOW, Onaka - who told Okubo what to say about this issue - was in his public health records career when the procedures that applied to Obama’s BC were still in effect.
That calls your explanation into serious question.
What were the other explanations for the discrepancy?
I remember somebody saying maybe the numbers weren’t given sequentially. Maybe they hopped around with the numbers at the HDOH office. But in their 1961 Natality Report the CDC specifically said that the 50% sampling they used was reliable because the numbering at the state level WAS done sequentially. And Hawaii law has always required HI certificates to conform to the standards of the CDC (and its predecessor). Current CDC standards not only require that the numbers be given sequentially but that they begin with 1. We know the Nordyke certs are sequentially numbered.
You just can’t bring yourself to say that Lakin disobeyed LAWFUL orders, can you? You just can’t add in that critical point, which is the entire substance of the charges against Lakin - the LAWFULNESS of the orders.
Lakin will be found guilty of disobeying orders. There is no doubt that he disobeyed orders.
But he did not disobey lawful orders, and that is the only thing that matters because that is what he is charged with.
And it’s precisely what Lind won’t allow him to defend himself on, or compel witnesses in his favor. It’s a travesty.
If I’m brought “back to earth” from my position of observing this heinous injustice it won’t be because I’m coming DOWN to earth but because I’m going back UP to earth, from this hellish alternate reality we’ve been living under in the Obama coup.
She could be wrong. God knows she’s been wrong on a heckuva lot.
That’s why I say it should be investigated.
Why shouldn’t it be investigated? We’re talking about potential federal crimes and treason on the part of Obama if Onaka (who has been working with public health records over 40 years, starting before 1968) is right on what he told Okubo about this basic, routine office procedure. Why is this not worth investigating? Is treason no big deal to you?
I still say that he is incorrect if he was indeed trying to say that the BC numbers should have been sequential with birth date and time in 1961.
And do consider, rules or procedures saying that something should be done a certain way doesn't give you an ironclad guarantee that they necessarily were done that way.
I stand by the statement that there are numerous rational explanations for discontinuities in BC numbers that do not require conspiracies or criminal collusion and that you are trying to draw too strong of conclusions from far too little information.
Because they have better things to do than try to satisfy your personal curiosity regarding an issue they consider settled?
Because no one with any authority or legal clout agrees that there is any basis for your claims?
Because to those with access to the actual records it's pretty plain that you are chasing phantoms?
Sorry, is that what you want? Then let me make it clear: Lakin is charged with disobeying the LAWFUL order of three superior officers. I believe that he will be found guilty of that charge as well as the other ones, and that will happen regardless of what eventually happens to Obama.
Clear enough?
No, it's not. You have no idea what you're talking about if you think it is.
Ever watched any of those court shows on TV? Ever seen any of those silly surprises and objections where the judge then looks grave and says he/she will allow something or not? Here's a clue—when they say they won't allow it, that's not a violation of the 6th Amendment.
You get to bring information and witnesses relevant to the charge or issue under litigation. All courts have the responsibility to decide what information is relevant. They disallow irrelevant information and witnesses. Everyone who gets portions of their case disallowed feels annoyed, but that's too bad, and it isn't a violation of the 6th Amendment. It's the way legal processes work.
If you think it's a violation of the 6th Amendment, take it up with Lakin’s current counsel. He doesn't. But then, he does have the advantage of knowing what he's talking about.
You said it again. It seems like you’re not grasping that it isn’t the BIRTH DATES that are numbered sequentially. It’s the BC’s filed on a particular day - the DATE FILED.
That means on a given date that they’re filing all the BC’s that came in that day, they use the mechanical stamp and change the number to go up 1 each time they stamp something, instead of moving around a couple numbers, figuring out which numbers they used, and then going backwards and forwards hopping about.
And then the next day they know what number they last stamped from the day before because that’s what their stamp is set on. They move the number up one and they’re good to go - stamp, switch, stamp, switch, stamp...
This is basic stuff.
I used to work in the Financial Aid Office when I was in college. I opened the mail. You put it all in a pile and then you take the date stamp: bang, bang, bang, bang until you’re done. Then you deliver them where they need to be. Usually they had me check the financial aid index number and scan the doc to see if all the fields were complete and sort into piles based on whether the index number was within the range for pell grants and whether all the info was complete. So I’d sort the piles as I opened the envelopes, stamp the pile, and then deliver the piles to the people who had to process them. Sometimes documents would come in that didn’t need to be processed; I would date-stamp those and then file them.
That’s how I can imagine an office working. A secretary takes the pile of BC’s that have come in from a particular hospital, thumbs through them to see if any are missing anything, stamps the ones that are good, writes them in an index, and then files them.
The Factcheck one was done on Tuesday. The Nordykes’ were done on Friday.
How do you say the Tuesday one ended up 2 higher than the Friday ones?
>>Not allowing the defense witnesses is a DIRECT violation of Amendment 6.
>
>How about witnesses that claimed that Bush was responsible for 9/11? Should Lakin be allowed to call them?
“Objection! Relevance.” — ;)
But seriously, yes; to disallow someone to call witnesses — or to be called AS a witness — based on their political views can [rather easily] condemn the innocent and free the guilty.
Imagine that you were minding your own business, driving through a little “hickville” town that happened to be having a Truther Convention and your car guns out of gas, so you decide to walk the several blocks to Bubba’s Gas Station and buy a gas-can and some gas to get your car started and to the pump so you can fuel-up. On your way you stumble upon a guy who was murdered and are snapped up by the police because you happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now lets assume that your trial date comes and everyone you attempt to call to the stand, the people you bumped into and asked for directions to the gas station, is refused to be allowed on the stand because they’re a bunch of nutball truthers. (You were in the middle of a truther convention, after all.)
Ah, sucks to be you, doesn’t it?
**********************************************
Now, in a world where people are allowed to call witnesses for their defense you could easily produce random people from that crowd to witness to your innocence; they saw & talked to you at the time of the murder. And so the jury may make an informed decision.
What WOULD be a violation of the 6th Amendment? Give an example.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.