New reasons to question Obama's birth certificate

Until President Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate, I had assumed he was born in the United States. Now I am not so sure.

Beyond the technical anomalies, the sequence of events surrounding the abrupt and dramatic release of the document raises serious questions.

This sequence includes the April 26 posting of Barack Obama Senior's INS files, the April 27 release of the putative long-form birth certificate and the May 2 release of Janny Scott's biography of Ann Dunham, the president's mother.

On April 26, Heather Smathers of the Arizona Independent posted online 55 pages of documents she had received from the INS regarding the status of Barack Obama, Sr., the presumed father of the president.

The enterprising Smathers had requested these documents in September 2010, received them on April 18, 2011, and posted them eight days later.

Why it took the INS seven months to release the documents is unclear, especially since the agency had prepared the same documents for the Boston Globe two years prior.

In the two years since, Globe reporter Sally Jacobs kept the documents under wraps, ostensibly to allow her to reveal them in a forthcoming book on Obama Sr.

Among the 24 pages that relate to the Senior Obama's stay in Hawaii, there are only two memos. One is typewritten and labeled "Memo for File."

The other is handwritten, the only handwritten INS document in the whole file. This "memo" is dated 8/31/61 and describes a conversation between Obama and an INS official named William F. Wood II.

Wood wrote in the Aug. 31, 1961, memo, "They [the Obamas] have one child born Honolulu on 8/4/1961 – Barack Obama II, child living with mother (she lives with her parents & Subject resides at 1482 Alencastre St.)."

On the day of the birth certificate's release, April 27, Smathers innocently took the most newsworthy lead from the file and headlined her article, "Dad's immigration file offers more evidence of Obama's birthplace." Other media ran with the same theme.

As is obvious, the aforementioned memo makes a second salient point, namely that the famed Obama family never lived together, an argument I made at some length in my book, "Deconstructing Obama."

When I stressed this point in an April 29 article on the INS documents, one of my more knowing correspondents took me to task.

He asked whether an Obama operative might have inserted news of a sham marriage as a red herring so that reporters like me would impulsively accept the memo's legitimacy.

If the Boston Globe documents do not include the same memo in the same place, my correspondent has a powerful argument. How hard would it be, after all, to pass off a handwritten forgery subsequently photocopied and sent on a CD?

Even if the Boston Globe cache has this document, we know that an employee of now Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan was caught breaching President Obama's passport files in March 2008. What other files he may have tampered with, we do not know.

Whether a forgery or not, the White House released the birth certificate a day after the confirming INS memo had been posted. One does not have to be a cynic to question the timing.

If the memo is legitimate, it restates only what Obama told the INS agent in 1961. The fact that the baby's birth was registered on Aug. 8, 1961, the day before Obama's visa expired, would raise obvious questions about Obama's motives.

As it happens too, the baby named in the memo has the same unusual designation as on the birth certificate – "Barack Obama II." This smacks of contrivance, either by a scheming Obama Sr. or by a too precise forger.

In an application to extend his stay, filled out in the same month as the birth, Obama crossed out words in the space designated for the name and address of the spouse.

The first word crossed out appears to begin with the letter "K" as in Kezia, his Kenyan spouse. Obama then wrote in "Ann S. Dunham, Honolulu, Hawaii." The "Honolulu" part appears to be written in another hand.

A year later, in August 1962, Obama filed another application to extend his stay in America. This time he gave his status as "married" but left the box blank where it asked for the name and address of spouse.

As to the "name and addresses of children," Obama listed only one child, "Roy Obama," his son by Kezia back in Kenya. So much for the happy little multicultural family on which President Obama based his 2008 campaign.

In a similar vein, Obama operatives had to have an active interest in the content of the Ann Dunham biography, "A Singular Woman," which was released a week after the birth certificate.

As they likely knew in advance, they had nothing to worry about. After two-and-a-half years of research, New York Times reporter Janny Scott served up a stunning void where one would expect hard information in regard to the Obamas' marriage, Dunham's pregnancy and Obama's birth.

Scott dedicates one sentence to the alleged wedding in Maui where the couple "reportedly" married. She offers not a single word on Dunham's whereabouts from January 1961 to the birth of her son in August 1961. She cites not a single person who so much as saw Dunham and Obama together.

As to the birth itself, Scott tells the reader no more than could be gleaned from the birth certificate. There is not word one about the pregnancy, the trip to the hospital, the anxious grandparents. No baby pictures. No pictures of a pregnant Dunham. Nothing.

More troubling, Scott does not bother to explain why she provides no information about the defining moment of Dunham's life, the one reason she merited a biography. Given the controversy about the birth, Scott's failure to explain a hole this gaping raises all kinds of red flags.

Perhaps most troubling of all was the release of the birth certificate itself. Three years of misdirection and obfuscation, three years of burden on Hawaiian officials and strain on the federal courts, six months in prison for Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, and there is nothing at all amiss about the birth certificate?

Color me suspicious.