Kenyan document ignites firestorm over authenticity (Let's Discuss Bomford HERE)

WND ^ | 8/4/09 | Staff

[pissant]

A document unveiled by a California attorney in her quest to determine President Obama's place of birth has been condemned as a forgery by critics who deride as nonsense the challenges that have been raised to the president based on the U.S. Constitution's demand that the Oval Office occupant be a "natural born" citizen.

But those on the other side, who would like to see the original documentation of Obama's birth place revealed, say there are factors that indicate the Kenyan birth document could be real.

WND reported when the document was submitted to a California court by California attorney Orly Taitz, who has managed several of the high-profile cases challenging Obama's eligibility to be president.

Then yesterday, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., raised the dispute to the floor of that august body, protesting in a speech added to the Congressional Record that the dispute was not worth one minute of time.

[Genoa]

Well, it’s not flat-out identical. The fields are standardized using similar language, in two commonwealth countries, but how unusual would that be? And someone could have used some elements from a real Australian BC and altered some others.
Concerning the alleged Kenyan BC, it’s interesting that with all of the Obama hero-worshipers in Kenya, no one has yet come forward with another 1964 Kenyan BC extract to show us how different the alleged Obama BC is. They would if they could, no? On the other hand, it’s not hard to imagine why pro-Obama Kenyans aren’t volunteering 1964 BC extracts that DO match this one. Just sayin.

[Marine_Uncle]

Of course someone messed with the original Kenyan one if it really does exist or it is a modified doc from someone else's. Or the Kenyan one is simply generated from scratch as a forgery. The background imprint in the paper is simply to washed out as you clearly show. Jpeg images would be uniform throughout pixel by pixel. No distortions would be inherent. All a jpeg image is are obviously multiple lines of either ones or zeros within each pixel cell. Little room for repetitive messed up pixels unless the binary file that represents the image was held in a computer with one hell of a lot of faulty memory address during it's brief existence before writing out as a file. And that is extremely unlikely. One would be quite aware they had faulty RAM in their system for many good reasons I could go into but will spare the reader. Likewise if one had a number of literally bad areas within a number of sectors on a given track or multiple tracks on a CDROM or on their main Hard Disk where the file was stored, similarly one might remotely consider such uniform washouts to occur within a given stored file. But that is so unlikely based on how we see the washouts within the magnified image you show.
One would in either case above also see parts of the type print also washed out.

[Genoa]

BTW, I’ve seen conflicting statements about when they started using the decimal system in Kenya.

[Genoa]

Calling it a night. . . . .

[john in springfield]

I'm actually going to withdraw part of my argument above. Here's why:

The pixellation around the letters is probably just an artifact of jpeg optimization. Starting with an image with clean letters and doing a jpeg optimization thing (reduction of quality for file-size reduction) I experimented and came up with this:

The original here was clear, the pixellation appeared in the adjusted image.

So where does that leave us? Part of my above argument is invalid. There are still quite a few other things, though, that indicate to me personally that the Kenyan one seems to be the fake:

* The Republic of Kenya issue.

* The fact that a real live David Bomford says it's his Australian cert.

* Having an address for D J Bomford in Adelaide (one of only 2 Bomfords in the Adelaide phone book).

* The fact that nobody has even claimed to be able to produce a hard copy of the Kenyan one.

* The Australian price apparently appearing on both certificates.

* The fact that the Kenya seal is illegible and arguably not a seal at all.

* The fact that the Australian seal includes the readable words, "PRINCIPAL REGISTRAR'S OFFICE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA" and the identifiable seal of the Australian government - but a seal which was probably not easy to come by as it's a slight variation that seems to appear nowhere on the web.

* And my recollection (hopefully accurate) that some freeper earlier in this thread stated that he had been able to confirm Bomford's certificate had been on the internet for a couple of years, whereas all evidence is that the Kenya one only appeared this week.

Does this mean I think Obama's legit? No. But (in my opinion) neither does this Kenyan certificate appear to be.

In that sense, I guess the two go together after all.

[conservativegramma]

There are still quite a few other things, though, that indicate to me personally that the Kenyan one seems to be the fake:......The fact that a real live David Bomford says it's his Australian cert.

Your 2nd point is the one that proves its the BOMFORD one that is the real fake! Do you know anything whatsoever about privacy laws???? Apparently not. The interview I read of David Bomford suggests that he knew nothing about the release of his birth certificate. That means he never authorized the release of any of that information. He should be hiring a lawyer as of yesterday. Instead he laughs it off - very suspicious. He is either 'in on it' or stupid - take your pick.

But I can tell you if anyone posted my legitimate birth certificate on a website WITHOUT my authorization they would get the pants sued off of them and it would be NO laughing matter.

The U.S. has privacy laws. Here is one link They vary from state to state but pretty much all 50 states are in agreememt that you never release any vital record information on a living person to anyone without authorization. And you definitely don't publish it without authorization.

Okay that's the U.S. But Australia has the same types of laws

If David Bomford per his interview never authorized his bc to be published online -- then you have one of two things:

1. A forgery he knew nothing about.

2. A criminal act and violation of his privacy rights.

Either one is punishable by fine or imprisonment or both.

[john in springfield]

He is either 'in on it' or stupid - take your pick.

Do I have to only choose one?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well,,,,I’m back on the fence again....damn.

[backpacker_c]

If you're claim that the south australian document is real, due to that seal, then that right there would discredit that document: official state badge of south australia, the piping shrike, proclaimed in 1904, latter modified in 1910

state coat of arms - current since 1984
coat of arms 1936-1984 consisted of a shield with a partial sun emblem on it, with 3 gathered sleeves of grain above it. linking to private site to avoid wasting their bandwidth- http://www.ngw.nl/int/aus/southaus.htm

south australia had it's own set of state badges, and coat of arms. it would not use the australian coat of arms, for an official state document.

[Mount Athos]

South Australia has its own seal, distinct from the Australian one. This one is from 1936

[Mount Athos]

ANother image of official government seal of south australia.

[john in springfield]

Ho! I stand corrected. The seal is NOT the kangaroo and dodo used for the whole of Australia, it's the very similar official South Australian lion and unicorn.

Actually, I'm wondering whether the kangaroo and dodo seal was derived from the more likely older and more British lion and unicorn.

But no matter. That explains why the tail on the certificate seal is up in the air. It explains why the shield is more rounded than the one on the full Australian seal. And if you look closely, you can see a bit of the shape of the unicorn.

[trueamerica]

Two questions:

1. If someone wanted to create a fraudulent Kenyan birth certificate, why would he start with an Aussie one?

2. What would be an easy way to discredit a Kenyan BC? You could copy the information to another form; hide it on a website where birth certificates normally would be found like an ancestry one and then claim to have magically discovered it.

[john in springfield]

It appears I was right about the kangaroo and dodo being a take-off on the older lion and unicorn. The latter derives from the coat of arms of the British monarchy.

[john in springfield]

1. If someone wanted to create a fraudulent Kenyan birth certificate, why would he start with an Aussie one?

Because there was no access to a Kenyan birth certificate, Australia also derives from the British Empire, and he had access to one?

That's my theory.

[Mount Athos]

By the way I really agree with your concerns about the seal on the kenyan doc, that it looks terribly indistinct. I’ve been looking at a lot of government seals in these searches and they all look like something distinctive.
Wish we had a higher res image of the doc.

[KalElFan]

Upthread someone posted a link to a South Australia forum at ancestry.com. I looked at that and several pages there and this is what I found. The Book series numbers seem to run from 1 to 999, then from 1A to 999A, and then presumably from 1B to 999B. Actual examples seem to end at 1928 according to a knowledgeable poster there mentioning that offhand. Presumably that’s for security reasons so that any living person would have to now be over 80, i.e. they don’t want the site used for identity theft.

The birth registry sequences are different from marriages and deaths. The birth registry examples I saw for the Hin (Hindmarsh) district ranged from mid-1800s I believe, but I looked at about 12 from the 1900s only for specifics. The earliest was a Sep 20, 1900 birth that was Book 664 Page 157, while the latest was an Aug 12, 1928 birth that was Book 216A Page 581. That Page 581 was the highest page number I saw for any of the birth entries. The second highest was from 1911, a Book 872 Page 380 entry.

From 1900 to 1928, the Books per year averaged about 20. The rate of Book usage per year did not seem to increase during this period, in fact the last couple of years it was slightly less by a book a year or so.

To reach Book 44B by 1959, the next 31 year period, the rate of Book usage would have to have increased. To get from Book 216A in that 1928 example, to 44B in 1959, that would require 827 books (assuming 999A then skips to 1B). It’s 999 + 44 - 216 = 827 books, and 827/31 = 26.7 Books per year.

So it’s plausible that we get to Book 44B in 1959, but how we get to page 5733 of Book 44B is difficult to imagine. They would have had to change their system of page numbering. For example if the entire B series was sequential, 5733/44 would get us to about 130 Pages per Book, which is too low based on the 1900-1928 period. I can’t see why they would change their system that they’d been using since the mid-1800s anyway. So the Page 5733 is a problem until that gets explained.

Both Australia and Kenya would have been Colonies of Britain when these Registry systems started, so it’s entirely plausible that they used the same Book and Page approach to record keeping. Australia became independent in 1901 based on Wiki, and their numbering system was continuous, so Kenya’s being continuous makes sense as well. It also makes sense that the forms may have looked similar.

One thing we know for certain, and that’s at least one of the documents (Bomford or Obama) has been forged to look like the other. They could both be bogus, but one has been designed to look like the other right down to the four smoking gun duplicate fields: Registrar, District Registrar, Book number, and Page number. In at least one of the two documents, those fields are forged and conceivably even the Bomford who’s vouched for the Birth Certificate being his would never remember what those were. He’d just see his name and family tree information and so on and say “yep, that’s mine”.

So it still remains plausible that the Kenyan document is genuine, and an otherwise authentic Bomford document (in terms of the actual data that matters) simply had the four fields and a few format changes to match the Kenyan document and thereby discredit it. The Kenyans may have used a different page numbering system where the entire B series did get up to 5733 for example, because for them at the time 130 pages per book works whereas for the Australians it’s too low.

A few other curiosities of the Bomford document that haven’t been mentioned. The No. field up top is 2. Why so low? That field seems a more logical place to have a higher number like 47,044 on the Kenyan document. Depending how many entries are listed on each page of the B series for example, and this is page 5733, maybe it’s 8 or 9 listed per page and that was the 47,044th birth in the B series. But 2 in that field? As I joked in another forum it’s like this guy was on Gilligan’s Island and the Skipper got assigned 1 and Gilligan got 2 at the lagoon registry office. It seems too low a number. The 2 also seems a bit different (barely discernible, e.g. a little more curved in the cenral part and perhaps a bit longer top to bottom) than one below in the 62 address number. The reason a forger might have put 2 here is to distinguish it from the 47,044 that they’d been ridiculing. Same with the E.F. Lavender. They didn’t want to keep that so they changed it to G.F., which isn’t a soap (a totally bogus nit anyway).

The G.F. Lavender is also the only entry down the page that’s alligned to the left of other entries above and below it. Odd, since it’s one of the 4 smoking gun fields as to which of these documents is copying the other. The r in Lavender also looks different in the upper right than other r letters in the vicinity. It seems to lack a darker point at the tip or smudge if you want to call it that.

In the upper right of both documents is the Page number duplicated as well. On Bomford the 5733 looks noticeably crisper than other numbers in the vicinity. These anomalies suggest Photoshopping in the smoking gun fields needed to incriminate the Kenyan document. At the bottom where the signature is, that whole section may have looked a bit different on the Bomford original, which is why we see anomalies there like print floating over and unaffected by the creases.

None of which is definitive, but I think the key here is that the hack would at its core be trivial. They want to discredit the Kenyan document, so all they needed is a plausible fit, i.e., some place that used the same British Colonial numbering system. Either find an ancestry site dormant and stupid enough to have a living person’s birth certificate up, or somebody volunteers. Then you put up or leave the real name and other information in place, but most importantly insert the four obscure smoking gun fields and say “Aha!”. Even the original owner might not be part of it, though that can’t be ruled out here. Ideally from the hacker-loon’s point of view, you’d want him to be part of it. If he isn’t, he might debunk you by just looking at his own copy more closely and proving you fudged the four fields. Literally anyone else born in Hindmarsh district around that time would also be able to debunk the Bomford document on those four fields, but to be challenge-proof it would have to involve some independent person(s) and ideally the registry office vouching for it. Otherwise it becomes he said versus he/she said.

It ought to be possible to find out, definitively, since unlike Kenya or Hawaii one presumes Adelaide, Australia and its suburb Hindmarsh, would be willing to engage in massive transparency here. Their registry office doesn’t even have to confirm anything specific about Bomford. Just have two or three officials up the chain of authority there tell us what period Book 44B spans and how many page numbers it has. If April 10, 1959 and Page 5733 falls within that, the Kenyan document is forged and the lawyer was almost certainly set up by her source. The E.F. Lavender joke (changing G to E) and the 47,044 and the Republic of Kenya, even though none of those were implausible, would make sense as the hacker/forger-loon just having fun, but no sense at all for a birther to be doing that and being stupid enough to keep the Book and Page number for example. Especially given how quikly it would have been “debunked”, the debunker and perpetrator would almost certainly have some connection, though perhaps the tip could have been relayed anonymously.

This is my first post to the site. I normally post to Usenet, but this issue was so inside freepdom that I registered and posted this here. One of your most trusted freepers should try to identify and contact the registry office in charge of the Hindmarsh (it’s again a suburb of Adelaide based on a Google search) district in South Australia. No long distance charges that way. Then if they’re willing to answer the question on the 44B Book range and page range, you report back here and because you’re a longtime trusted freeper everyone else here believes it. You can then move on knowing whether the Bomford document was at least tampered with or not. I have no idea who you’d want to be your Fearless Leader representative because I haven’t read the site enough.

[Mount Athos]

Good post, welcome

[Mount Athos]

That is a pretty good match! Only obvious difference to me is that the animals on either side are less upright. But it's a satisfactory match. Glad I found the official South Australian seal of 1934.

Now let's see if we can do anything with the Kenyan seal, even though it is terribly indistinct on the doc.

Could you attempt to compare this seal and see how it looks against the seal on the doc? Obviously the big problem of overlaying an oval on a circle, but can anyone see any similarity? I understand that they may have had a completely different seal than the one I'm putting up but at least it's something to try.

[Mount Athos]

I wonder if we can find the flag of the “Coastal Region” or “Coastal Province”. I know for a fact they had their own flag, distinct from the country of kenya, but I don’t know what it looks like. Perhaps the seal is related.

The reason I ask for the regional flag is that I am really convinced the Country of Kenya didn’t consider itself a republic and it’s just so unlikely they used a seal that said they were. But BP’s theory about the province calling itself a Republic has a tiny possibility of being real, since the province was fairly hostile and skeptical of the main govt... Long story anyway