Blogger admits Hawaii birth certificate forgery, subverting Obama claims (Uh-oh)

Israel Insider ^ | 3 July 2008 | Reuven Koret

[SE Mom]

Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of fraudulent Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.

The evidence of forgery and manipulation of images of official documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of Hawaii birth certificate images on the Photobucket site and the detective work of independent investigative journalists and imaging professionals in the three weeks since the publication of the images, implicate the Daily Kos, an extreme left blog site, and the Obama campaign, in misleading the public with official-looking but manipulated document images of doubtful provenance.

The perceived unreliability of the image has provoked petitions and widespread demands for Obama to submit for objective inspection the paper versions of the "birth certificate" he claimed in his book Dreams from My Father was in his possession, as well as the paper version of the Certificate of Live Birth for which the image on the Daily Kos and the Obama "Fight the Smears" website was supposedly generated.

Without a valid birth certificate, Obama cannot prove he fulfills the "natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution, throwing into doubt his eligibility to run for President.

McKinnon, who says he is 25-30 years old, operates a website called OpenDNA.com and uses the OpenDNA screen name on various web sites and blogs, including his comments and diary on The Daily Kos. In recent years he has divided his time between Long Beach, California and Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a Democratic political activist, frequent contributor to the left wing Daily Kos blog, and a fervent Barack Obama supporter.

[tsmith130]

So if you concede that the person looking could have possibly made a mistake in their search, you can’t then say definitively “we looked; it wasn’t there.”

[Fred Nerks]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/06/from-the-fact-c.html

Excerpt:

In Obama’s book Dreams of My Father, interestingly enough, he writes about meeting Malik as an adult: “I checked into the cheapest room I could find and waited. At nine, I heard a knock. When I opened the door, I found a big man standing there with his hands in his pockets, an even-toothed grin breaking across his ebony face. ‘Hey, brother,’ he said. ‘How’s life?’ In the pictures I had of Roy, he was slender, dressed in African print, with an Afro, a goatee, a mustache. The man who embraced me now was much heavier, over two hundred pounds, I guessed, the flesh on his cheeks pressing out beneath a thick pair of glasses. The goatee was gone; the African shirt had been replaced by a gray sports coat, white shirt, and tie. Auma had been right, though; his resemblance to the Old Man was unnerving. Looking at my brother, I felt as if I were ten years old again.”

It was later that Malik converted to Islam, Obama wrote in Dreams: “The person who made me proudest of all, though, was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol. He still works at his accounting firm, but talks about moving back to Kenya once he has enough money.”

[RubyR]

I’ve found a reference that Roy/Malik was born in March, 1958

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-506338/Barack-Obamas-stepmother-living-Bracknell-reveals-close-bond-—mother.html

and that Kezia was 3 months pregnant with Auma in the summer of 1959 when BO,Sr left for Hawaii.

I’m trying to figure out the ages of Bernard and Abo. It could be interesting if one of them might have been conceived in the summer of 1961.

[Spunky]

"I believe Roy is “Malik Abongo”. I’ve just been checking and it appears his estimated birth year is 1958/1959."

Thanks! So there is no way "Malik" was a 10yr old brother of Obama in 1961 who supposedly came to Hawaii to help his father take Ann back to Kenya with him. That is if some still think the picture of Obama Sr and Ann at that very same airport is a wedding picture.

[Spunky]

See my link at posting #2518. It said construction continued into the 70’s.

[WOSG]

“You just keep driving along making these unsupportable pronouncements—I am going to stop responding to you. You may think Safire was in error, but most of the Constitutional Lawyers I talk to have an equally firm view to the contrary. “

LOL, my judgment of Con Lawyers goes down a peg. ... that was a quote from an immigration lawyer in the New York Times that you are responding to that you claim is beneath responding to.

This statement he made ...
“A far more logical and reasonable meaning, however, is one who became a citizen naturally, through the circumstances of birth, and not through being naturalized, the lengthy and onerous process by which aliens become United States citizens.”

... is hardly ‘unsupportable’, since the common law definitions, the 1790 law, and other basic definitions of citizenship allow one to acquire citizenship by blood or by birthright, and Mr Kresge expounds on the roots of this.

This article on Volokh Conspiracy also goes into depth and says the same thing:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_02_24-2008_03_01.shtml#1204265246

” If the drafters of the Constitution had wanted to require that presidents be born in the United States, they could have done so. Instead, they invoked the then-standard idea of natural citizenship as reflecting natural allegiance to the king or the state.

Standard 18th century dictionaries and commentaries couldn’t have been clearer on this point. ...”

They quote Blackstone

“To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.”

This basic English legal understanding carried over into the US and was used in the 1790 law, helpfully quoted on this thread. You are a natural born US citizen if your parents were US citizens.

“And the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States”. —First Congress, Act of March 26th, 1790, 1 Stat. 103.

The logical error some fall into is one of assuming that since birthright citizenship is the *main* way to become a natural born citizen, that it is the only way. One can be a natural-born US citizen (that is a citizen upon birth without having to undergo any other process) either by blood (jus sanguinis) or by soil (jus soli).

McCain is a natural-born citizen because both his parents were citizens.

See also:
http://stubbornfacts.us/politics/2008_election/mccains_eligibility#comment-13147

[bvw]

I don't know the answers to any of those questions. It would be wonderful if people could turn up more pictures of that 1958-1973 era at Honolulu Airport terminal. Or of wide-band wristwatches or men's ties and woman's dresses like Stanley wears.

Clothes and accessories can date photos to a half-decade or so. Sometimes not always ... for example I saw in the background a classic Hawaiian shirt in one of those Obama family terminal photos -- the pattern looked exactly like one I bought in the hotel gift-shop in 1982.

[Fred Nerks]

from your link:

They have since seen each other in America and Bracknell where Kezia moved to be near her daughter Auma - Barack's half sister - who now lives abroad.

The caption with this image states the photograph was taken in the UK in 1997 at the time his half-sister Auma married Ian Manning.

BARACK'S BRITISH BACKGROUND.LINK.

QUOTE FROM THE ARTICLE:

Unknown to those now rooting for him as America's first black president, there is a branch of his family in Berkshire. And at Ian's wedding to Barack's sister Auma in Bracknell in 1996, he cut such an impressive figure that even the barman predicted he would one day be President.

Doesn't matter where one looks, the dates never seem to match.

[RubyR]

I haven't been able to track down birth info on Abo and Bernard. My guess is that they are the two men in the back row far right in this family pic but they are listed as "unknown" In this Obama Family photo are: (bottom row, from left) half-sister Auma, her mother Kezia Obama, Obama's step-grandmother Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama and unknown; (top row, from left) unknown, Barack Obama, half-brother Abongo (Roy) Obama, and three unknowns. (Sun Times) I think BO is 21 in this pic and those two men look to be very close to his age.

[Political Junkie Too]

Thanks. I caught up to that.

So this fixes the place, if not the time. It's also the ticket area, not the departure lounge.

I don't know if that means anything in 1961, but since the sign at the ticket counter where the Obama photo was taken says "San Francisco," what are we to discern from that? Did they stop there to take the picture, and then move on? Were they getting tickets to San Francisco? Were they going in or going out? International or domestic?

Today, with jetways to the plane, departures are often on the second level while arrivals are routed to the ground level. At Honolulu, I think everything (even today) is all one level.

-PJ

[Fred Nerks]

In 1959, at the age of 23, Obama Sr. left behind his pregnant wife Kezia and their children to become the first African student enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kezia, who is pregnant, remains in Kenya. Senior would have two more children with Kezia in subsequent years...

http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaFamily.htm

[bvw]

By that Blackstone then, Obama would not be a natural born (1) because his dad was not citizen and (arguably) (2) because his mom's later life took her into a gray-area regarding her loyalties -- into citizenship abroad. That last may sound post-facto, but it gets to the heart of WHY the natural born requirement is in there. To insure that there is a foundation of love of country. His dad did not have it or he would have stayed and become a citizen, and his mom was in the process of losing it when she was raising him.

[bvw]

The last bit about Obama’s parents and their love for this country is just my opinion. Seems harsh, but what else to make of the two of them?

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6333496

this article dated 2004 would suggest that Malik-Roy-was 46 years of age when it was written in October of that year.

Quote from link:

“It was in the United States, in 1985, that he first met his 43-year-old half-brother Barack.

“...He was best man at my wedding and I was best man at his,” said Malik, who likes to point out that his younger brother’s name is actually Barack Obama II, because their father was the original Barack Obama...”

[WOSG]

“Congress can apply its understanding of the Constitution, and make laws on that basis.”

Yes. That’s the point I was trying to get across. I wanst trying to say more.

” But they cannot say that “natural born” means anyone naturalized in the first five years of life, or something like that.”

OK, but that’s a hypothetical that’s not at issue imho. I didnt see any argument that Congress was distorting the meaning of the term so much they’d have an unconstitutional law, I was seeing arguments that Congress couldnt regulate the term at all, because to regulate is to define and its ‘already there’ in the Constitution. The latter statement is - arguable at best. People are arguing that it might have to be litigated to know the ‘truth’, at which point the SCOTUS would properly give deference to judgement of Congress and weigh in on the boundaries of what Congress could regulate wrt this term. But SCOTUS has allowed latitude in Congressional definitions and regulations in a number of areas.

“Sometimes determining just what was understood can be difficult, and in this case, as with many terms in the main body of the Constitution, requires recourse to English Common law.”

Sure. See my previous post, which is helpful in the case of the Mccain situation (pretty cut n dried). As previous post points out, there is precedent for natural born being defined to include being born outside the US to citizen parents.

Congress would be well within its powers to define ‘natural born citizenship’ in terms of citizenship of parents and in terms of what the 14th Amendment provides wrt birthright citizenship. I dont have a different view of the boundaries of Congressional power, just a view that the laws being discussed here would not be overturned by SCOTUS, were SCOTUS to follow the law, constitution and precedent.

(BTW, I am sure there *are* areas where Congress could overstep and/or make a contentious claim wrt regulating citizenship. I’m of the belief that the Congress has the power to regulate the birthright citizenship to exclude tourists and illegal aliens; this is based on an understanding of ‘under the jurisdication thereof’; however, I heard via a Congressman that Justice Scalia expounded on it to a group of Congressmen and suggested that it wouldnt survive a SCOTUS constitutional test.)

“”living document” folks, ... You aren’t one of those are you?” Nope. I’m a Scalia/Roberts/Thomas fan.

[tsmith130]

“It was in the United States, in 1985, that he first met his 43-year-old half-brother Barack.

Well isn't that poorly written.

[WOSG]

When one is making up fables for an icon, nothing is out of the question.

[txhurl]

Austinite here, too.

[David]

All birth records I’ve seen published in newspapers do not list the child’s name - only the parents and whether the child is a boy or girl. As in, “Thomas Jones and Veronica Jones, boy”, or in the event unmarried, John Smith and Sarah Golden, girl.

Good point--same for the ones I know about.

By the way, we are also looking in January and February of 1961 for a marriage certificate or marriage license anywhere reportable in Honolulu or Hawaii generally or Maui specifically; Is there a county seat in Lahina?

[jacquej]

it’s ok, null. This issue has brought out both the best and the worst of all of us Freepers.

I am exactly one year younger than Stanley Ann, and have some perspective on the way it went back then. Most “good” girls who got “in trouble” were in a very tough spot, not only with their parents, but with their peers.

I have no right to speak for Stanley Ann, but my experience lends me to believe that she was vulnerable, easily seducible, and totally inexperienced in the way of the world. She was only 17, and while precociously bright and rebellious, she was still so naive about the realities of the world!

I feel sorry for her, her mother, and for her poor neglected son. This isn’t unique to them, for many families have similar problems from those lousy sixties. But, the longer Obama stalls on all these issues of his early life, the worse it will be for him, and then, for all of us.

Stanley Ann should have told him the entire truth, so he could absorb and adjust to it gradually, over time. But, even if she tried to do so, he still might have needed to make up his own version. I am guessing he is still very angry with her and her parents.

His inability to be honest about his mother’s confusing life, the peculiar circumstances of his birth, and his abandonment by both parents, suggests he is a troubled soul, even if verbally talented in finding mythical explanatory stories to explain his circumstances in an effort to deny his painful past.

I feel sorry for him on one level, but on another level, hate him for subjecting us to his miserable efforts to expunge the ghosts of his non-existent/screwed up family of origin.

We have met the enemy, and it is our own totally dysfunctional culture, which encourages people like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Al Gore, etc. to seek power, money and glory, when they cannot manage their own lives and families.

They think they can connect with the least functional of our citizens, hook into the fears and pathologies of these, then get elected on promises of no personal responsibility for messing up in life. Obama has messed up, but can’t admit it, for he has built a life around a myth. One he has created to protect his fragile ego.

Alas, how far we have wandered from the straight and narrow path.