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Since a shocking new book raising a long list of questions about Barack Obama and his eligibility to be president was released a month ago, there have been jokes, puns and lies about it.
But where are the answers to the issues raised in “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President,” by Jerome Corsi, Ph.D? And where is the media alarm that should accompany significant issues that remain unaddressed about a world leader?
Nowhere, according to the author, who told WND that he’s not seen a single article seriously addressing the uncertainties about Obama – and the valid constitutional issues involved – since the release of the book.
“There have been a lot of people poking fun at the book, and there have been a lot of stories that dismiss it, but no one is bothering even to look at the issues that could involve serious violations of the U.S. Constitution,” Corsi told WND. “But when you ignore violations of the document through which our freedoms are protected, lawlessness is the result.”
The book presents exhaustive research into a list of issues about Obama, including:
- His status as a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the U.S. at his birth, which is a circumstance the Constitution’s framers considered an iron-clad roadblock to the Oval Office.
- The absence of documentation from his birth hospital, the doctor who delivered him or any other witnesses to his birth. The press has widely reported Obama was born at Queen’s Medical Center, then suddenly changed its reports to reflect that he was born at Kapiolani.
- The Associated Press has documented that Obama was registered in school as a Muslim and a citizen of Indonesia as a child, another barrier to U.S. natural-born citizenship.
- The Congressional Research Service, a public policy arm of Congress, officially admits no one in government ever vetted Obama’s eligibility under the demands of the U.S. Constitution.
- What happened in Obama’s family, as evidence indicates his mother left Hawaii with him to go to school in Seattle only weeks after his birth, and his mother and father, Barack Sr., reportedly never shared an address and lived together as a family. Yet Obama claims his father left when he was 2 years old.
- Why is the number for Barack Obama’s “Certificate of Live Birth” as reported in Hawaii out of sequence?
- Why does he apparently use a Social Security number reserved for applicants from Connecticut when he and his family never lived there?
Any one of these issues could impact directly his eligibility for the White House under the Constitution’s demand that a president be a “natural born citizen.”
“There’s a reason this book rose to No. 1 at Amazon and to the New York Times best-sellers list,” said Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND and founder of WND Books. “The American people remain unsatisfied that Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president. Besides WND, however, no other news agency in America has taken an honest look at this issue. They concluded long ago that simply being born in America is the criteria for eligibility, which is totally untrue. Worse than that, we don’t even know for sure that Obama was born in America. What he has offered the American people as a birth certificate appears to be nothing more than a crude forgery. Again, not one news agency has given it even a cursory glance.”
Corsi said comments on websites such as Amazon are important to consider.
“The supporters of the book have read the book thoroughly and can comment in detail on the arguments the book makes. No unfavorable review yet has raised any serious refutation to the content of the book. It is pretty obvious the unfavorable reviewers typically have not read the book — they probably haven’t even bought the book. Negative reviews quickly reduce themselves to ad hominem Saul Alinksy attacks which appear childish in comparison to the thoughtful comments of the books supporters,” he said.
But the larger picture is the eligibility.
“In Washington, D.C., it is getting to be a poorly kept secret that the birth certificate is fraudulent. The problem is that the press and Congress are afraid to do anything about it. African Americans will riot in the streets, I am told, if the American public finds out Obama is a fraud. The problem is that the American people are reading the book and it is apparent Obama is not eligible to be president,” Corsi said.
He said the problem is apparent even to Obama.
“Obama is once again giving signals that he will be satisfied to be a one-term president because Obama knows he is not eligible to be president and that the truth about the forged birth certificate will come out before the 2012 election. Obama knows better than anyone that the eligibility issue will not go away,” he said.
“Some have concluded that the title of this book makes it irrelevant,” said Farah. “The only thing that has happened since this book was published is that Obama released a phony birth certificate. This is one of the biggest scams and cover-ups in the American political history, yet the media are mute. What Corsi has offered in this book is a compelling case against Obama’s eligibility for office. Obama has provided the icing on the cake with a phony, fake, fraudulent document, according to every expert who has examined it.”
The mainstream media’s response largely has been to ignore questions about Obama.
When it is mentioned, almost universally it’s accompanied by sarcasm or disdain. At Pittsburgh Urban Media, reviewer Kam Williams wrote, “Corsi’s 400-plus pages of copiously detailed insinuations read more like the desperate ramblings of a mental patient or a paranoid conspiracy theorist than the product of years of sound, well-reasoned research.”
As for the actual issues raised? No mention. Williams did, however, talk about a “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” book published by “Skylar Blue” and the fact that in April Obama released an image of a “Certificate of Live Birth” from Hawaii that White House officials said was “proof positive” of Obama’s Hawaiian birth.
 Image released by the White House April 27, 2011 |
However, Williams didn’t note that there are experts who believe that at the time the Constitution was assembled, the definition of “natural born citizen” was a person born on the soil of the nation of two citizen parents, which would leave Obama’s status wanting no matter his birth place, since his father was a subject of the British crown.
WND also reported on the “Skylar Blue” book, which was published by Amazon and prominently is displayed by the online retailer when customers search for the title of Corsi’s project. However, it is nothing more than a book of blank pages – such as in a diary.
Amazon’s own customers are warning others that the “diary” isn’t the real deal, and attempts to order the book were unsuccessful.
Obama’s strategic release of an image of a Hawaiian “Certificate of Live Birth” late in April – just as Corsi’s best-seller rocketed to No. 1 among books at Amazon.com – was viewed as an attempt to undercut the book.
On April 27, with great fanfare, Obama released his “birth certificate” after years of stonewalling, defending against dozens of lawsuits brought by citizens wanting to see it, claiming he had already released it and ridiculing everybody who said he had not released it.
Beginning as soon as the document was released, experts from a wide range of backgrounds, including ex-CIA operatives, have said the document is a fraud.
At the time Obama released the document, officials with the state of Hawaii refused to confirm to WND that the image released was an accurate representation of the state’s records. And just in the last week, the state of Hawaii has claimed that the original of the copy Obama released remains confidential and unavailable to the public.
Unsuccessful
Obama’s effort to convince the American public his documentation now has been made available only reached some of his target audience – those who disbelieve his claims about being a natural born citizen. Even after the document was released, CNN reported 17 percent of Americans – one in six – believe he probably or definitely was born not in the United States. A stunning Gallup Poll taken after the document release showed more than half of all Americans remain unconvinced Obama was born in the U.S.
The document that Obama released also has been challenged by a number of document experts and analysts as fraudulent. Corsi previously said he had been warned a fraudulent document would be released.
“With the unprecedented success of this book several weeks ago, reaching No. 1 at Amazon, I fully expected Obama, in desperation, to release a fraudulent document – and that’s exactly what he did,” Corsi reported. “I was warned by excellent sources it was coming. And it’s not even a good forgery.”
The document release, however, undermined some of the statements made by Obama supporters during the battle over his records. For instance, two weeks before Obama finally released his “long-form birth certificate,” Hawaii’s former Health Department chief Chiyome Fukino – the one official who claimed to have examined Obama’s original birth document under lock and key in Hawaii – was interviewed by NBC News’ national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, who reported that Fukino told him she had seen the original birth certificate and that it was “half typed and half handwritten.”
However, the document released by the White House was entirely typed. Only the signatures and two dates at the very bottom were “handwritten.” What Fukino described is apparently a different document from what Obama released to the public.
Since the release of the document, it’s been reported that:
- A private detective in Honolulu claims employees of the state Department of Health forged three Hawaiian birth certificates for Barack Obama to “screw with birthers.” And one of them is a dead ringer for the document released by the White House.
- There’s a question of why the right-hand margin of Obama’s official Hawaii birth certificate includes the very same tell-tale scribblings found in a clearly fraudulent document posted on the Internet about a year ago – a document that alleged he was born in Kenya.
- Then – reminiscent of the blogger analysis that sacked Dan Rather for trying to pass off a document clearly created with a computer as a decades-old typewritten record – two Web document experts reveal various anomalies in the Obama birth document, including a trick typewriters are incapable of performing.
Before Obama’s document was released, Americans had two basic choices:
- Believe that their president, Barack Obama – after years of ignoring the millions of citizens who, according to repeated polls, doubt his official nativity story and just want the truth regarding his birth, his past and his loyalties – has simply been playing games with the public.
- Believe Obama’s adamant refusal to release his birth certificate all this time means he has something to hide and that the latest birth certificate, a copy of a copy of a document, posted on the Internet like the last one, could be fraudulent.
Since neither choice is very palatable to most Americans, the release of Jerome Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate” presented a third choice: evidence for the argument that, based on the U.S. Constitution and the framers’ original intent, Barack Obama is not qualified to be president of the United States.
The ‘money shot’
One of the few to examine the facts in the book was Greg Smith of Official Wire, whose review noted there were several points that needed investigation, including Obama’s Social Security number and the birth certificate numbering sequence.
“But the ‘money shot’, as it were, for me, comes from Obama’s own words. In Obama’s best-selling autobiography, ‘Dreams from My Father,’ published in 1995, Corsi points out that Obama wrote that he had a birth certificate ‘folded’ away but that ‘unlike mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was.’ This sentence (page 27 of Corsi’s book) refers to his alleged half-brother by Ruth who had a child with the man Obama Jr. purports is his father after he, Obama Sr., had left Jr’s mother,” he wrote.
“Most birth certificates have the father’s name on it. If Sr.’s name is not printed on the one Jr. has ‘folded’ away, then, how could Sr.’s name be on the one Jr. showed the world in April?”
Joseph Farah said the establishment news media didn’t want to question Obama’s qualifications when the issues first arose and remains committed to that ideal.
He said Corsi’s report that the U.S. government itself was confused about Obama’s citizenship while he was yet a child, and the fact that Kenya has done investigations to try to find Obama’s birth records in that nation – concluding only that there was evidence records had been tampered with – raise too many questions to ignore.
Even the recent statements by the White House – that Hawaii didn’t issue long-form birth certificates anymore, even to the president of the United States; and that Obama was a ‘natural born citizen’ by virtue of simply being born in the U.S. – legitimately should be challenged, he said.
Not true
“None of those statements was true, but it didn’t matter,” Farah said. “The Big Media were not going to admit they’d missed the biggest story of the decade even if most Americans recognize it. The new position of the establishment press is astonishment that Americans still don’t believe Obama was born in the USA despite the release of the bogus long-form birth certificate. ”
Forum pages online found people sharply divided into two groups: those outraged that anyone would question Obama, found on numerous sites including Amazon and those who say there are questions that need to be answered. At Barnes and Noble’s website one anonymous comment was: “People that refuse to look or even listen to the facts resort to name calling because they have nothing to back them up. And the biggest one staring them in the face is the fact that his father was never a U.S. citizen. Obama has even stated that fact.”
Added another, “His mother was at the time considered a minor. His father was a foreign national. Natural born citizen? I think not.”
A third: “Drum roll please. If his mom is a citizen then yes he is a naturalized citizen of the U.S. However, this does not make him a natural born citizen. In order to be a natural born citizen both mother and father must be citizens and 1 of them residing in the U.S. at the time of birth or born on U.S. soils which can include U.S. embassies overseas and territories. If he was not born in the U.S. on U.S. soil then he is in fact constitutionally ineligible to be president.”
Esquire Magazine had a unique approach.
Fabricated story
The magazine that endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 published a completely fabricated news story claiming Corsi’s book had been disavowed by the publisher and taken out of stores nationwide, with refunds offered to purchasers.
Esquire, established in 1932, alleged on its website under a “BREAKING” headline that Corsi’s book was “pulled from shelves!”
However, the “report” by Mark Warren, the executive editor, was a fabrication.
Farah, who has since begun looking into legal options, said the attack was “a prima facie example of libel and attempt at restraint of trade.”
“This is an astonishingly reckless report by a company that has demonstrated its total disregard for the truth,” said Farah.
Later, after the “news report” had circulated widely and generated widespread misinformation, the magazine added an “Update” in the form of a note at the bottom of the story, explaining it had “committed satire.”
The White House, noting its failure to silence questioners with the release of the “Certificate of Live Birth,” apparently panicked, launching an all-out attack on the book, calling it delusional and laughable, once again without addressing the issues raised.
If that sounds like déjà vu, it’s because the Obama election campaign did exactly the same thing in 2008 when it mobilized a major assault on Corsi’s previous book about Obama, the No. 1 New York Times best-seller “The Obama Nation.” And that was a response to the impact of his previous No. 1 New York Times bestseller, “Unfit for Command.”
Asking for money
In the recent dispatch from BarackObama.com, Julianna Smoot ridicules Corsi by name:
“Corsi’s work is a greatest-hits reel of delusions, ranging from 9/11 conspiracies to claiming that there is an infinite supply of oil in the Earth’s core. In 2008, he published a book about Barack Obama claiming, among other things, that he (a) is a secret Muslim; (b) is secretly anti-military; (c) secretly dealt drugs; and (d) secretly supported terrorist actions when he was eight years old. So many secrets.”
The email tells recipients, “The only thing we can do is laugh at it – and make sure as many other people as possible are in on the joke.”
It also requested money.
The president himself previously confirmed that he ordered the release of the “certificate” right after the best-selling “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President” was profiled on the Drudge Report and reached No. 1 on Amazon.
“If what Barack Obama released is really a valid birth certificate that answers all the questions about this controversy, why is the Obama campaign in attack mode on Jerome Corsi’s best-selling book?” asked Farah.
“Because he fears it is his undoing. … This is an effort to derail media attention from a successful book and media tour that is focusing renewed attention on his ineligibility for office.”
About that déjà vu: In June 2008, Obama launched a website called “Fight the Smears” to stop “ideologues” from “spreading a ‘pack of lies’ about Barack.” As WND reported, the site disappeared in July 2009.
“Whenever challenged with these lies we will aggressively push back with the truth and help our supporters debunk the false rumors floating around the Internet,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor told the New York Times.
Some of the “smears” they intended to smack down included assertions that “Obama’s campaign was funded by foreigners,” “Obama sought endorsement from the (socialist) New Party,” “Obama has connections to Bill Ayers” and “Obama is a Muslim.”
The website reserved a special section for its counter-attack on Corsi’s 2008 New York Times No. 1 best=seller, “The Obama Nation,” featuring a 40-page rebuttal.
‘Smears’ are true?
However, many of the so-called “smears” of 2008 have turned out to be widely recognized as factual. Moreover, many charges made against Corsi by the Obama campaign were themselves fabricated. For instance, not only did Corsi not state in “The Obama Nation” that the president is a secret Muslim, he said the opposite. In advice to John McCain’s campaign, Corsi offered that it would be unwise to make that claim, because one can’t “read another person’s soul.”
Obama’s father was a convert to Islam and his stepfather was a Muslim. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Associated Press published an image of a document that showed Obama’s religion as “Islam” and his citizenship “Indonesian” when he lived in the Muslim-majority nation with his mother and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
 Indonesian school registration for “Barry Soetoro” (AP photo) |
Corsi also endured a fierce backlash to his previous No. 1 New York Times bestseller, co-authored with John O’Neill, “Unfit for Command,” which charged that Democratic Sen. John Kerry fabricated his image as a Vietnam war hero. The book also recounted his radical anti-war effort that followed his deployment. Many political analysts believe “Unfit for Command” and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that accompanied it was a decisive factor in Kerry’s loss to President George W. Bush in 2004.
Media, including the Associated Press, typically call the book’s claims “unsubstantiated” or “debunked,” usually without evidence. Those who offered evidence contended the military’s records supported Kerry’s version of events, without mentioning the group’s assertion that it was Kerry himself who wrote the “official record” in many instances, in after-action reports.
When the Kerry campaign did respond to specific claims in “Unfit for Command,” it was to backtrack, such as in the case of Kerry’s long-held assertion – which he later was forced to recant – that he was in Cambodia illegally Christmas Eve 1968.
Instead of addressing the Swift Boat Veterans’ specific claims, the Kerry campaign threatened lawsuits against the television stations that aired the group’s ads, demanded publisher Regnery pull “Unfit for Command,” accused the group of being run by the Republican Party and attacked the character of co-authors O’Neill and Corsi.
But the lesson the Kerry campaign’s ineffectual response to the devastating Swift Boat campaign was this: When Corsi writes a book, counter-attack swiftly and with all barrels. That was the strategy followed by the Obama campaign in 2008 with “The Obama Nation,” and again now with “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”
On the new book, Salon said, “Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn’t have realized that your entirely pointless search for the ‘long-form’ birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book’s publication.”
But there was no mention of the significant questions about Obama’s record.
The AP mentioned it only because it was on its best-sellers list.
At the Wall Street Journal, there seemed to be an intense effort to ignore the issues raised by the book:
“Back in ’09, we raised the question: ‘So why doesn’t Obama release the original certificate?’ We answered as follows: The real question is: Why should he? The demand has no basis in principle and would have no practical benefit. Obama has already provided a legal birth certificate demonstrating that he was born in Hawaii. No one has produced any serious evidence to the contrary. Absent such evidence, it is unreasonable to deny that Obama has met the burden of proof. We know that he was born in Honolulu as surely as we know that Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Ark., or George W. Bush in New Haven, Conn.”
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