Posted on 07/21/2008 8:39:38 PM PDT by Red Steel
Barack Obama may be on a world tour surrounded by a fawning media, but yesterday an expert in electronic document forensics released a detailed report on the purported birth certificate -- actually a "Certification of Live Birth" or COLB -- claimed as genuine by his campaign. The expert concludes with 100% certainty that it is a crudely forged fake: "a horribly forgery," according to the analysis published on the popular Atlas Shrugs blog. (photos and close-ups, with detailed report)
The purported birth certificate was published by the left wing Daily Kos blog on June 12 in response to unconfirmed reports that Obama was not in fact born in the United States (Canada and Kenya were suggested as the possible locations of his actual birth). Since he would in that case not be a natural born US citizen (his mother was not present in the US sufficiently long as an adult to pass American citizenship on to him automatically), he would not be eligible to be president. Israel Insider has followed the story and uncovered evidence, most recently, of admitted forgery among Daily Kos bloggers, tolerance of electronic forgeries on the blog site, as well as efforts by a blog administrator to conceal the admission of forgery.
The latest examinaton of the purported documents is by far the most detailed and technically sophisticated to date.
Atlas Shrugs publisher Pamela Geller reports that the expert analyst, who goes by the screen name "Techdude", is "an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, International Information Systems Forensics Association -- the list goes on. He also a board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer-based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then."
The pseudonym was apparently inadequate to prevent Techdude's identity from being exposed. He reports that last week one or more persons "decided to track me down and vandalize my car and hang a dead mutilated rabbit from my front door in a lame attempt to intimidate me from proceeding with releasing any details of my analysis. They did succeed in delaying the report by a few days but instead of deterring him they really angered him. To their credit, he says, the extra days enabled him to locate the most damning piece of evidence, the remnants of the previous security border."
Techdude's detailed report, which runs more than 3000 words and 20 pages with extensive magnified illustrations and comparisons, reaches the following conclusion about the documented that was first published on the Daily Kos extreme left-wing blog and subsequently publicly endorsed by the Obama campaign, both in statements by official spokesmen, and featured on its "Fight the Smears" website. Here are some of conclusions:
"The (Daily) KOS image security border pattern does not match any known specimen from any known year. It does not match the pre-2006 nor does it match the post-2006 certificate patterns. The placement of the text in all of the pre-2006 and post-2006 certificates are almost identical pixel location matches while the image's text placement does not match any known specimen from any known year. The shape and kerning of the fonts used in the 2006 through 2008 certificates are identical while the shape and kerning of the fonts used in the image does not match any known specimen. The KOS image shows clear signs of tampering such as the mismatch in RGB and error levels, visible indications of the previous location of the erased security border, easily detectable patterns of repeating flaws around the new security border, EXIF data that says the image was last saved with Photoshop CS3 for Macintosh, and finally a technician from Hawaii who confirms it just looks wrong."
The evidence, he says, allows for two possible scenarios by which the document was fabricated:
"There are two obvious scenarios used to create the image that can be ascertained from evidence. Either a real COLB was scanned into Photoshop and digitally edited or a real COLB was first scanned to obtain the graphic layout then blanked by soaking the document in solvent to remove the toner. After rescanning the blank page to a separate image the graphics from the previously obtained scan could then be easily applied to the blank scan after some editing and rebuilding. It would also explain why date stamp bleeds through the paper and the various bits of toner located around the image as well as the remnants of the previous location of a security border."
After more than a month of controversy and demands that the Obama campaign produce a paper birth certificate for analysis, this damning new evidence raises the stakes for the democratic party and its front-runner.
Will Obama and his people continue to stonewall in the facing of the mounting evidence of forgery, and provide paper proof of an authentic, original birth certificate or even a genuine secondary Certificate of Live Birth? And will the mass media and mainstream pundits, which so far have hesitated to touch the hot potato, finally address the loaded issue of his possible unfitness to meet the basic Constitutional requirement for a President?
Perhaps the outspoken Israeli press corps will be able to do what their American counterparts have failed to do so far. Obama's visit this week to Israel will be an opportunity to begin asking the tough questions, however unpolitically correct, about his apparently forged birth certificate and what that means for his citizenship status and Constitutional fitness to be the next leader of the free world.
PM me.
Couldn’t it be possible that somewhere they are holding his real birth certificate, ready to be whipped out, for two purposes; 1)to waste the time and resources of researchers who could possibly be uncovering even more damning information - and 2)to make conservatives look like paranoid ‘kooks’?
“Couldnt it be possible that somewhere they are holding his real birth certificate, ready to be whipped out, for two purposes; 1)to waste the time and resources of researchers who could possibly be uncovering even more damning information - and 2)to make conservatives look like paranoid kooks?”
Counterfeit money was probably the first government document to be forged. Teenagers got forged IDs to go drinking. 9/11 perps got forged drivers licenses from 7/11 parking lots. Voter registrars like Acorn forge signatures, candidates (like Obama) challenged candidate application signatures as forged or unqualified to eliminate opposition.
The MSM has run altered photos, darkened photos, mis-reported photos, staged photos, Middle East fauxtography. Just a few weeks ago we had the altered photo of Iran's missile launch.
So now we have birth certificates. And now we're being asked to accept web facsimiles of parts of physical documents as if they were the real thing, with all the legal authority that comes with the real thing.
I'm concerned about the possible future precedent of reliance on web facsimiles of parts of documents, rather than the actual physical thing itself, especially for something as important as the presidency of the United States. Even with the forged Texas Air National Guard documents, CBS "experts" complained that they were only shown images of the documents, but never the actual documents themselves, and so were reluctant to authenticate them.
Have we learned nothing from the CBS fiasco? Show us the real thing already.
-PJ
But that's not all. KOS has claimed he received the Obama COLB from the Obama campaign, the same COLB that Obama's website "Fight the Smears" has displayed at a lower resolution. Furthermore, Obama's campaign spokesman Ben Labolt has claimed the disputed Obama's COLB is a genuine document.
Since Obama has not cooperated by producing his real birth certificate, he must be forced by a Court to produce the originals and swear under oath that they are the originals..
If he cannot, he should remove himself as a presidential candidate since the truth will eventually come out..If it is found he lied about his natural born citizenship, he could and should be impeached to preserve the integrity of the Presidency, that is if he were to be elected...we hope not..
Fixed.
That raises the question: to whom would he show "the real thing?" There's no federal law regarding documentary authentication of a presidential candidate's qualifications. The FEC (which is virtually non-existent right now, by congressional design), doesn't have this responsibility. Basically, it falls to individual states to create their own documentary requirements (if any) for a candidate to register for a federal primary, and frankly, since this issue has never been raised before in a presidential campaign, I doubt that anyone working in a state office would have scrutinized a birth certificate two years ago.
This really wasn't even an issue until the media began to question McCain's place of birth as a possible disqualification. His campaign posted a scanned image of his original Panamanian birth certificate, and no one has questioned the authenticity of it. After that, there was a significant drumbeat (accompanied by the usual wild speculation) for a copy of Obama's birth cert. The manner in which it was posted -- on KOS -- didn't help matters, nor did some early apples-to-oranges "analysis" of two COLB images issued years apart.
That brings us back to the first question: who would be trusted to verify an original COLB? The state of Hawaii is under no obligation to release it, and I can't imagine any employee wanting to put themselves in the line of fire by doing it without authorization. Normally, it's the media demanding documentation, but could anyone seriously believe the NY Times (which hounded McCain for months regarding his health records, then meekly accepted a one-page summary report of Obama's fitness from his personal physician) or any other major media outlet, busy strewing daily rose-petals in Obama's path, if they declared it authentic?
then why is the same forgery on obama’s official website?? you people that want to minimize the importance of this are highly suspect to me.
TechDude did some nice work, but also did some nice lifting of my ideas. He, TexasDarlin, and myself agreed to collaborate on one joint report, but I guess that TechDude didn’t want to share the limelight with us, and went renegade on our asses.
His border comparison is a direct ripoff of mine, with
nary a mention of my name,
I wanted to add my 2 cents on the “How” the forgery was made. One of his two scenarios is the plausible one. Washing the toner off of a piece of paper is not it, and as is off-the-wall as it gets.
I defer to Occam’s Razor and the theory of Serendipity here.
There is no doubt that the forgery was done electronically (TechDude’s “other” scenario which is my scenario), and that the odd border could well have been made using dry transfer graphics, like LetraSet. That would explain the smeared patterns.
If you’ve never seen dry transfer letters and graphics, they come on a sheet of clear plastic, like a transparency, and you place it over your paper, and rub against the other side, thereby transferring the letters or border to the paper.
There’s no doubt that the image on FightTheSmears is the same image as what is posted on the Kos, but greatly reduced in size and JPG compression.
Did you know that the Smears site had a bigger and clearer image to begin with?
Yep. That’s right. I saved it to disk. The first image the Smears posted was a 1024 x 1000 image, directly scaled down from 2427 x 2369.
THEN, they replaced it with an illegible 585 x 575 image that is not even a proportional reduction.
Why, we ask, did they ditch the better-quality image?
Why, we ask, did they give the Kos one that is four times as big, yet they show us wshat is basically a thumnail?
EVERYBODY and his brother asks this question, without giving the timeline a second thought.
Hillary QUIT RUNNING FOR POTUS and starfted campaigning for Obama on JUNE 7th. The Kos and Smears images did not appear until JUNE 12th.
Once she threw her weight behind O-Bomb-out, the deal was done.
Prove it?
We did that, in spades.
The Obama camp could have given a birth certificate drawn with crayons, and every one of his supporters would hail it as genuine.
You've just made the implication that I have some sort of ulterior motive in all this. That I set out from the start to discredit Obama. That I am not operating from a position of full disclosure, and total honesty.
I cannot speak for TechDude, but the sole reason I got into my analyses was because the alterations were so obvious, I'd have to be working for the Obama campaign NOT to notice them.
This COLB of his walked, talked, and looked like a duck, and if I said it was a chicken, then I'd be lying.
Probably because it ain't.....just a bunch of Buckhead wannabes getting hysterical.
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