According to his own story, Baby Obama came into the world with dual American-British citizenship. At the same time, however, there is, to date, zero verifiable evidence to be found of his Hawaiian birth; meanwhile there is circumstantial evidence of alternative nativities.

The Mysterious Case of Obama’s Identity

Thursday, 30 August 2012  Diana West

Why has the President spent millions to suppress his ID and who is he really?

WASHINGTON, DC. (Dispatch International) As President Barack Obama completes four years in office and runs for re-election in November, a majority of Americans – 55% – believe he was born in the United States. However, 20% of Americans do not believe Obama was born in the US, while another 25% aren’t sure where he was born. Never before have so many Americans doubted the fundamental basis of their president’s identity. Why is this so?

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On one level, the answer is easy given the absence of verifiable bona fides attesting to Obama’s life story, from every college record to every travel document, from every medical record to every legal writing to every law practice billing record to every record of his tenure as an Illinois state senator – and more. But the story has had to penetrate the American psyche in spite of a deep freeze on the topic in conventional channels. The Obama identity story, burning at the grass-roots-level for more than four years now, is consistently snuffed out and ignored by American journalists and the political class, from elected leaders to party officials. This silence is strictly non-partisan, and spans the political spectrum.

An investigation, undertaken by a so-called cold case posse working for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, has now concluded that not one but two Obama basic identity documents are, without a doubt, forgeries: 1) the computer file (pdf) of the 1961 birth certificate that appears on the White House website; and 2) the president’s 1980 military draft registration card released by the U.S. Selective Service Administration shortly before the 2008 election. These investigators maintain they can prove this in court.

The story of how they might do so is verboten, too. But somehow the saga doesn’t end up in George Orwell’s “memory hole”. This is due mainly to the irrepressible nature of the Internet.

It is here, for example, and not in the mainstream media, where, following the White House online release of Obama’s 1961 ”long-form” birth certificate on April 27, 2011, a small army of private individuals with varying degrees of technology expertise downloaded the document file and delved into the unexpectedly “unflattened” graphic composition “layers”. They submitted a series of computer forensics analyses to this online public square, arguing that the White House pdf had been fraudulently manipulated. Since that time, similar evidence has been methodically amassed and repeatedly tested under the auspices of Sheriff Arpaio’s cold case team.

Sheriff Arpaio formed this cold case posse after 250 local citizens asked him to determine whether Obama was eligible to appear on the Arizona presidential ballot in 2012.

On two occasions in 2012, the posse presented findings to the public. They concluded that the birth certificate on the White House website didn’t originate on a piece of paper but rather was created, or, more precisely, forged as an electronic file on a computer. As one Adobe expert and posse consultant put it: “The only time Obama’s long-form birth certificate image exists as a paper document is when a computer user selects Print from the File menu.”

At this point, the posse would like to turn over all of its evidence to Congress for a formal investigation. Like a hand grenade that could go off at any moment, however, such an investigation has no takers. And so the fuse burns on not one, but two potential constitutional crises.

One involves the biggest unsolved mystery in American history: If Arpaio’s findings are correct, who did it? The other potential crisis, while linked to the first, is much more transparent. The U.S. Constitution lays out three criteria for president and vice president. Article II, Section 1, requires that the president be at least 35 years of age, have lived 14 years in the United States, and be a “natural-born” citizen.

“Natural born” citizens are distinct from citizens who are native-born (born in the country) or naturalized. While native-born or naturalized citizen may hold any other office, only “natural born” citizens are eligible for the presidency, the idea being that America’s founders wanted to ensure that the chief executive had allegiance only to the American republic.

The Constitution doesn’t define “natural born”, but according to common law at the time and, later, the 1875 U.S. Supreme Court case “Minor v. Happersett”, a “natural born” citizen is understood to be someone born in the U.S. to citizen parents (plural). “Minor” spelled out this definition and is thus the signal case. It is remarkable that in mid-2008, as Barack Obama was clinching the presidential nomination, references to the “Minor” case inexplicably disappeared from 25 related U.S. Supreme Court decisions archived at Justia.com, a leading legal search engine popular with journalists and legal bloggers. Coincidence? When attorney and blogger Leo Donofrio, whose Obama eligibility challenge went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2008 (dismissed), discovered this apparent tampering in 2011, Justia called it a “programming error”. The blogosphere called it “Justiagate”. The media, of course, said nothing at all.

So where does this leave the president, the son of a white American teen mother and a black British subject from Kenya? (Kenya became independent in 1963.)

According to his own story, Baby Obama came into the world with dual American-British citizenship. At the same time, however, there is, to date, zero verifiable evidence to be found of his Hawaiian birth; meanwhile there is circumstantial evidence of alternative nativities. For example, the personal biography Obama’s former literary agent used to promote Obama described him as “born in Kenya”. This biography, written in 1991, remained on the agency website until April 2007 – two months after then-Senator Obama announced his presidential run.

Other oddities include a missing week of immigration cards tracking American arrivals into Hawaii from abroad that should be in the national archives. Obama’s birthday in August 1961 falls in this missing week. In light of unexplained facts such as these, in light of the Obama documents that remain sealed, it’s really not so hard to see where a foreign nativity story comes from – or at least why a number of Americans are confused.

Many have heard about the two 1961 newspapers that published announcements of Obama’s birth. Posse investigators discovered that foreign-born children were similarly announced as Hawaiian births in these same papers, while they also found a set of adopted twins who were several years old before their “birth” announcements appeared.

Further complicating Obama’s citizenship story is an undisputed school record from Jakarta which identifies young Obama as a citizen of Indonesia. With all of this in mind, it’s hard to stamp Obama “natural-born”. Still, no challenger to date has managed to convince an American court of this. Of course, almost every single case has been dismissed before trial.

Also worth noting is that almost every single case sought the same thing: the release of the Obama birth “long-form” birth certificate. This is the very document the White House website put on display in April 2011. Obama spent an estimated one to three million dollars to fight previous attempts to compel him to release this same document. What happened to make the president change his mind?

Two senior White House officials presided over the birth certificate’s unveiling at a pen-and-paper, off-camera, no audio-recording, press conference. One journalist in the pack pointed out, “some people are going to remain unconvinced”. He continued: “They’re going to say that this is just a photocopy of a piece of paper. You could have typed anything in there. Will the actual birth certificate be on display or viewable at any …”

The White House transcript breaks off with the word: “(laughter)”.

Who will get the last laugh? Barack Obama? Sheriff Arpaio? The politicians who keep their heads down, or the citizens who take their Constitution seriously? Whoever laughs last, it seems safe to say that the Obama birth certificate is a very funny document.