Posted by
Andrews on Friday, August 15, 2008 7:53:39 PM
As many know, I have questioned
the accusations that Obama's birth certificate was forged on two grounds. First, the evidence of forgery could still be easily explained as
artifacts of digital reproduction. (As well as some of the original "irregularities" being proved normal with the surfacing of sample Hawaiian birth certificates.) Second, because it just doesn't matter. I really cannot believe Obama was not born in the US, as that would simply be too difficult to hide for all the time needed to run for office.
I now have seen
a new article on a supposed "smoking gun", and it actually fails to impress me. Why? Because the article says Obama was born in Hawaii, had a new certificate issued in Indonesia when he was adopted, and thus he had to use a
forged certificate.
That "thus" puzzles me. If he was adopted in Indonesia, why would he need a forged certificate? It isn't as if Hawaii was notified by Indonesia. They would still have the old certificate in the records and just use that. Recall in the 80's there was a huge stink over people using birth certificates for infant fatalities to create false IDs? There was no massive networking of record keeping systems within states, much less between states, or between Hawaii and another nation. So, Hawaii would know nothing of his second Indonesian certificate, and would reissue his old Hawaiian certificate based on the information it still had in its system.
Which would look a lot like the one on Obama's site. The supposed forgery.
Sorry, I know a lot of people have spent a lot of time on this, but I still just can't see it. Even assuming everything in the recent article is true, the certificate on Obama's site could easily be very real.
As I keep saying, fight the man on the issues, not on these secondary questions. There is plenty of reason to refuse to elect the man, we don't need to examine every pixel in his birth certificate. Why, just read his "Blueprint for Change", that is more damning than years of document analysis.
POSTSCRIPT
In an earlier post, I mentioned the possibility that lossy encryption could distort pictures, explaining the supposed missing background images. However, having downloaded the image from Obama's site, the explanation may be even more simple. The image is stored at 72 ppi. (For comparison, even the most mediocre "toy" digital camera stores images at 300 ppi, with most storing at least 1000 ppi or more.) With that relatively high granularity, a lot of detail can be lost, and the missing green could be explained by a coincidental alignment of the white on pixel boundaries. (There simply wasn't enough green in the area represented by each pixel to cause it to display as green.)
Of course, this is also the final image, after it has passed through one or more transformations from the original scan to the final website image, it is possible the original images were higher or lower quality and added more artifacts before being formed into this final JPEG. Without the entire chain of images form the original scan to this final image it is impossible to tell what happened, and what is part of the original scan and what is the result of lossy encryption, increased granularity, and so on. Digital images, unlike photographs, cannot be infinitely enlarged. Where individual molecules on the negative are the smallest unit on a photograph, a digital image is much more granular, in this case breaking down into units of only 1/72 of an inch.
That degree of granularity makes it very hard to apply the sort of analysis which has been done on these documents.
UPDATE
I suppose, from reading some comments on the new article, that the assumption was that either he was adopted in Hawaii by his Indonesian father or Hawaii was notified. In that case his birth certificate would have been altered in Hawaii. However, as far as I know adoptions are open court proceedings, so there would be a court record of this in the public records of Hawaii, meaning that we should be able to find evidence of this.
On the other hand, the article seems to suggest he was adopted in Indonesia, which would explain the lack of Hawaiian court records, but would also make it unlikely his birth certificate would have been changed in Hawaii. Honestly, how many parents, after going through an Indonesian court process to have their child adopted think "Oh, yeah, better notify Bureau of Vital Statistics in Hawaii about this too!" More likely the Indonesian government would issue new papers with the new name.
So, I stand by my original conclusion. Either the adoption was Indonesian, and my objections are unchanged, or it was in Hawaii, which the lack of court records argues against.