Hawaii refuses to verify president's online COLBs

In response to a direct question from WND, the Hawaii Department of Health refused to authenticate either of the two versions of President Obama's short-form Certification of Live Birth, or COLB, posted online – neither the image produced by the Obama campaign nor the images released by FactCheck.org.

Janice Okubo, the public information officer for the Hawaii DOH, also had no explanation for why Dr. Chiyome Fukino's initial press release last October and subsequent press release last week also avoided declaring the posted images to be of authentic documents.

In June 2008, Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, released the initial short-form Obama COLB to various newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, declaring, "This is Sen. Obama's birth certificate."

This short-form Obama COLB was released as a .jpg Internet image, displaying no signs of having been folded or of carrying an official State of Hawaii embossed seal.

COLB image released by Obama campaign June 2008

As demonstrated by a poster on Free Republic identified as "musicman," the COLB the Obama campaign released in June 2008 apparently had a date stamped on the back that bled through to the document's front side.

Date stamp bleeding through

When magnified and reversed, the date "JUN 8 2007" appears to be legible.

Close-up of stamp bleeding through

Image magnified and reversed

When this short-form COLB was released, the Obama campaign did not explain who obtained the document from the Hawaii DOH or why the document had been held for a year before being released to the public.

Anomalies in this version of the Obama COLB, however, raised several questions among skeptics:

The printing on the document clearly appeared done by a laser printer, not by any printing device available in 1961.
The father's "race" was listed as "African," not "Negro," the more expected designation in the less politically correct environment of the early 1960s.
As noted above, the document evidenced no embossed seal from the State of Hawaii.
The lack of folds on the document raised questions if and how the document had been mailed by the Hawaii DOH to the requesting recipient.

Two months later, however, on Aug. 21, 2008, FactCheck.org, an organization funded by the same left-leaning Annenberg Foundation that also employed Barack Obama and former Weatherman radical bomber Bill Ayers, produced a short-form Obama COLB that was very different in appearance.

Responding to questions raised on the Internet about the authenticity of the short-form COLB released by the Obama campaign in June 2008, FactCheck.org produced photographs of a short-form COLB that clearly looked folded and displayed what appeared to be an embossed seal from the state of Hawaii.

In support of its argument that the COLB released in August was identical to the one produced by the Obama campaign in June and was an authentic State of Hawaii document, FactCheck.org offered the following image:

FactCheck.org image of COLB released August 2008

This FactCheck.org document was distinguished by a long blank header that did not appear on the COLB released by the Obama campaign.

This document further came with a stamp on the back, dated June 6, 2007, which suggests the FactCheck.org document could be the source of the image released earlier by the Obama campaign.

Image of date stamp on rear of FactCheck.org document

The image of the COLB released by the Obama campaign displayed no official seal, though FactCheck.org displayed the seal in a side view taken from what appears to be the document's front. The website did not, however, present a similarly enlarged photo of the back to verify whether the pressing had left the identical image on both sides of the paper.

Image of seal on FactCheck.org document

Moreover, FactCheck.org offered no explanation as to why various images of the COLB displayed in the Aug. 21, 2008, article varied dramatically from the originally released Obama campaign COLB.

Close-up of FactCheck.org document

In the above folded version, the certificate number is not redacted, and the "1961" suggests the document was not generated by a 1961 computer, which generally did not print dates in four digit formats, as evidenced by the long-form original birth certificates WND obtained from the Nordyke twins who were born in Honolulu the day after President Obama's reported birthdate.

In the Nordyke original long-form birth certificate, the year is listed simply as "61," not "1961," as is clear in the image below:

Copy of original long-form birth certificate of Susan Nordyke, born in Honolulu the day after Obama's reported birthdate

Both the Obama campaign, when releasing the short-form COLB in June 2008, and FactCheck.org, when analyzing their version of the short-form COLB in August 2008, referred to the document as a "birth certificate" without distinguishing that neither COLB resembles the type of long-form original birth certificate the Nordyke twins received.

The "Certification of Live Birth" posted online and widely touted as "Obama's birth certificate" does not in any way prove he was born in Hawaii, since the same "short-form" document is easily obtainable for children not born in Hawaii. The true "long-form" birth certificate – which includes information such as the name of the birth hospital and attending physician – is the only document that can prove Obama was born in Hawaii, but to date he has not permitted its release for public or press scrutiny.

WND has produced hundreds of stories reporting on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen" and other issues. The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Some of the challenges question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate and other documentation.

Obama's birth certificate is not the only document at issue. WND has reported that among the documentation not yet available for Obama includes his kindergarten records, his Punahou school records, his Occidental College records, his Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, his passport, his medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records and his adoption records.

Note: Members of the news media wishing to interview Drew Zahn, Jerome Corsi, Joseph Farah, Joe
Kovacs, Chelsea Schilling, Les Kinsolving or Bob Unruh on this issue,
please contact WND.