Thread: Barack Obama's citizenship questioned

The government was also planning to produce a video of Mama Sarah Obama, the President elect's step-grandmother, telling the history of the Obama family.

I wonder if it will include how she remembers witnessing Obama's birth in Kenya.

Originally Posted by MinutemanCDC_SC

http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=1027681&page=2390

Thread closed, topic closed, locked as of Dec. 21 with 23,900 posts. It was a very good resource while it lasted. If only it could be searched.

Fire Watch, a forum moderator, wrote, "Folks, I am NOT kidding about this thread. It's quickly getting on my last nerve. Keep testing me if you wish." Twelve minutes later, without further provocation, he lost his patience and shut the discussion down, but only after banning Colorado, Trip, Lori Patriot, Decman, tunes59, etc., members representing tens of thousands of posts.

Not the best of behavior for a mod, but . . . whatever.

I am the same colorado from the Hannity Board and I stumbled onto this thread while looking around the internet.

Here is a link to that thread, but it is locked as you point out.

http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=1027681

I am looking for the 3 Law Firms Obama hired to defend against showing the very same document he placed in the public on the internet, and now says its private.

Originally Posted by colorado

I am looking for the 3 Law Firms Obama hired to defend against showing the very same document he placed in the public on the internet, and now says it's private.

I can't help you find Three Wise Men in the upcoming administration, much less 3 Law Firms. Would 3 French Hens do? 75% off on Friday morning only?

Which document is the one which he placed on the internet and now says it's private? You don't mean the hokey Certification of Live Birth? Did he ever claim to have posted that? I thought that was strictly a Daily Kos production.

Originally Posted by colorado

I am the same colorado from the Hannity Board and I stumbled onto this thread while looking around the internet.

Here is a link to that thread, but it is locked as you point out.

http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=1027681

I am looking for the 3 Law Firms Obama hired to defend against showing the very same document he placed in the public on the internet, and now says its private.

Here is information on one of the firms, Sandler, Reiff, and Young...

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/022942.php

There's a letter linked in the article about them, which shows their firm letterhead.

Found them

United States District Court of Pennsylvania
Attorney's for Defendant's
Barrack Hussein Obama and
The Democratic National Committee


John P. Lavelle
Attorney ID PA #54279
Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP
1735 Market Street, 51st Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 864-8603
(215) 864-9125 Fax
lavellej@ballardsphar.com

Joseph E Sandler, Esq
SANDLER REIFF & YOUNG PC
300 M Street SE Suite 1102
Washington DC 20003
Telephone: (202) 479-1111
Fax: (202) 479-1115
sandler@sandlerreiff.com
www.sandlerreiff.com

Robert F. Bauer, Esquire
General Counsel, Obama For America
PERKINS COIE
607 Fourteenth Street N.W.
Washington D.C. 20005-2003
Telephone (202)628-6600
Facsimile (202)432-1690
RBauer@perkinscoie.com
www.perkinscoie.com

Originally Posted by MinutemanCDC_SC

Originally Posted by colorado

I am looking for the 3 Law Firms Obama hired to defend against showing the very same document he placed in the public on the internet, and now says it's private.

I can't help you find Three Wise Men in the upcoming administration, much less 3 Law Firms. Would 3 French Hens do? 75% off on Friday morning only?

Which document is the one which he placed on the internet and now says it's private? You don't mean the hokey Certification of Live Birth? Did he ever claim to have posted that? I thought that was strictly a Daily Kos production.

I believe you are correct, after reading this
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-.../2136816/posts

By the way, the Mods on Hannity has allowed the Birth Certificate Thread to be debated with a new thread started by one of the Mods known as Good Life

Originally Posted by colorado

Found them

United States District Court of Pennsylvania

Robert F. Bauer, Esquire
General Counsel, Obama For America
PERKINS COIE
607 Fourteenth Street N.W.
Washington D.C. 20005-2003
Telephone (202)628-6600
Facsimile (202)432-1690
RBauer@perkinscoie.com
www.perkinscoie.com

Interesting firm. Got its start in 1912 in Seattle and grew along with its major client Boeing. It had an entertaining malpractice lawsuit involving a Japanese client and a high cost payout.

Perkins Coie Agrees to Pay $19 Million in Malpractice Suit
Lawsuit is part of a long-running dispute that's pulled in courts and lawmakers from both the U.S. and Japan
Nathan Carlile
Legal Times
September 18, 2007

Perkins Coie reached a multimillion-dollar settlement last month with former client Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho, a manufacturer of large newspaper printing presses. The Japanese company sued two of the firm's Washington-based partners for malpractice in February 2006 stemming from work they did in a legal dispute involving anti-dumping laws.

TKS agreed to drop its suit against the Seattle-based firm on Aug. 22. Days before the settlement documents were filed, the company announced in a press release that it would receive $19 million to settle a malpractice suit arising from an anti-dumping case. It did not name the law firm in the release, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

But two Perkins Coie partners, Yoshihiro Saito, an international trade litigation lawyer, and Barry Reingold, an antitrust litigation lawyer, were named as co-defendants in the company's malpractice complaint. Both declined to comment. Saito brought TKS to Perkins Coie as a client in 1998, when he joined as a partner from Graham & James.

"It was resolved by agreement, and litigation ended," says Robert Giles, managing partner of Perkins Coie. "Other than that, I can't say anything because of the confidentiality agreement."

TKS filed its claim against Perkins Coie, which has more than 580 lawyers, after losing an anti-dumping suit that forced the company to pay $31 million in damages to Goss International Corp., a competitor in the printing industry. The Japanese company claims that it lost the case when a privileged document was negligently handed over to Goss. In the malpractice suit, TKS also sought the reimbursement of more than $3 million in attorney fees and more than $100 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

"It looks like a pretty substantial piece of carelessness by the lawyers at Perkins Coie," says Marc Mayerson, a complex insurance coverage litigation partner at Spriggs Hollingsworth who was not involved with the case. "Law firms don't want to make themselves to be easy targets for malpractice suits. But that has to be balanced with genuine regret when a law firm's error harms a client."

Mayerson says it would be uncommon for a settlement of this kind to not fall well within Perkins Coie's insurance coverage. "If you are sued for a breach of professional obligation in your capacity as a lawyer, then your coverage will apply," says Mayerson. "There are exclusions for dishonesty -- but not for negligence or stupidity."

Peter John and James Benak, litigation partners at Chicago's Williams Montgomery & John, were the lead attorneys for TKS. Barry Nace, a name partner at Washington's Paulson & Nace, was the local counsel. Perkins Coie turned to professional liability defense lawyer Michael Sundermeyer, a partner at Williams & Connolly.

"That amount of money shows that Perkins Coie felt they were exposed," says a Washington partner who specializes in malpractice settlements. "You don't pay $19 million as a law firm if you don't think you can be hurt."

A PRESSING MATTER

The malpractice suit is part of a long-running legal dispute between two makers of newspaper printing presses. The fight centers on TKS' pricing policies and has pulled in courts and lawmakers from both America and Japan. TKS first retained Perkins Coie on the matter in 1996. At the time, the company was being investigated by the Department of Commerce on charges of "dumping," or selling its printing presses in the United States for substantially below the market price of similar products it sold in Japan.

While that investigation played out, Goss, an Illinois-based company, filed suit in 2000 against four international printing press manufacturers, including TKS. Goss alleged that the Japanese and German companies had violated the Anti-Dumping Act of 1916. According to Goss' complaint, the dumping severely affected the company's sales, ultimately forcing it into bankruptcy.

With Saito and Reingold already handling the government's probe, TKS made the duo lead counsel in Goss' litigation as well. The case would become the first civil matter tried under the Anti-Dumping Act.

Three of the four companies settled with Goss in 2003. But TKS says in its malpractice complaint that, following the counsel of Saito, the company declined to accept a $5 million settlement offer that Goss made in December 2002 and decided instead to take the case to trial.

Goss had to clear a high threshold to make its case: Under the act, Goss had to show not only that TKS flooded the market with underpriced presses but that it did so with the specific intent of damaging Goss.

By the time the case went to trial in November 2003, the parties had exchanged more than a million pages of documents, taken scores of depositions on two continents, and translated thousands of communications from Japanese to English.

But in its malpractice complaint, TKS says there was one document in particular that proved critical to the case: In 1996, the company sold two printing presses to The Dallas Morning News with a disguised rebate. TKS and the News originally agreed on a price of $5.2 million for the two presses -- the same price TKS had charged the News two years earlier in a similar deal that the Commerce Department later determined to have violated anti-dumping laws. With that in mind, TKS says in its complaint that Perkins' Saito advised the company to raise the price on the new presses by $2.2 million to avoid another government review. In conjunction with the price increase, though, Saito built a hidden rebate for the News into the deal through a combination of cancelled fees and free supplies that would reduce the paper's cost back to the 1994 price tag. TKS followed Saito's advice.

A SECRET REBATE REVEALED

And that's when Goss got lucky. During discovery, TKS claims that Perkins Coie made the costly error of sending Goss' attorneys privileged documents outlining the printing press transaction with the News. According to the complaint, those documents also showed that Saito advised TKS to destroy any evidence of the true cost of the presses sold to the News.

But Nicholas Critelli, name partner of Nicholas Critelli Associates, who was local counsel for TKS in the Goss trial, says it was unclear that handing over the documents was inadvertent or, in hindsight, a poor tactical decision.

"I think Perkins Coie made a tactical decision with the documents they produced," says Critelli. "But I didn't see those documents as ultimately hurting our case. What was critical to us was the court's ruling on the issue of similarity: Were the presses being sold lower in the U.S. than in Japan?"

In December 2003, a federal jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, answered the question affirmatively and hit TKS with a $10.5 million judgment. Further, because TKS was found to have violated the anti-dumping act by selling products in the United States at below market value with the intent of destroying or injuring a U.S. industry, the award was tripled, bringing it to $31.6 million.

"One way or another, we're going to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals," Barry Reingold told the Corporate Legal Times after the jury's decision. "And if we have to, we'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court."

But TKS had other ideas. Before appealing the case, the Japanese company dropped Saito and Reingold as its lead counsel in favor of a team of lawyers from Sidley Austin led by Washington managing partner Carter Phillips and international trade partner Neil Ellis. (TKS lost the appeal.) Subsequently, TKS filed its malpractice suit against Perkins Coie and partners Saito and Reingold.

"It was going to be a tough case for Perkins Coie," says a lawyer involved with the malpractice settlement. "They had some good defenses, but there were things that were going to come out that a jury wouldn't like. And keep in mind, the settlement shows TKS recognized there was some risk, also."

The case settled before many of the depositions were finished -- and those that were taken remain under seal. The list of local lawyers deposed includes Barry Cohen, a professional responsibility partner at Crowell & Moring, and Peter Koenig, an of counsel at Miller & Chevalier focused on international trade.

Still ahead for Saito and Reingold is the possibility of a call from D.C.'s Office of Bar Counsel.

"If any allegations come to our attention that implicate attorney misconduct," says Bar Counsel Wallace "Gene" Shipp Jr., "we have an obligation to investigate that case."

The firm's website claims that they are on retainer to virtually every Democratic member of Congress.

This report is mirrored here, without the images, in case it should be hacked or removed from the Free Republic site. Read Dr. Polarik's report at the following address.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-blo ... sts?page=1

Polarik's final report: Obama's 'Born' Conspiracy

Forged images, phony photos, and felony fraud[size=117]

By Ron Polarik, PhD

Foreword

The following report is the culmination of over four months of intensive, empirical research whose sole purpose has been to determine if the images and photographs posted on the Internet are true reproductions of a genuine document purported to be Obama's original birth certificate. The idea for the research actually began from the time when the first image was posted on June 12 to the Daily Kos blog. I don't recall on which website I actually saw the story (most likely World Net Daily), but the news had gone viral basically from the moment that it hit the Internet.

Before seeing the image, I had no idea that Barack Obama's birthplace was in question, or that his status as a natural-born US citizen had never been proven. Like millions of other Americans, I believed the story he told about being born in Hawaii to an American Mother (and a U.S. citizen) and an African Father (a Kenyan national attending college on a student visa). I had no idea that this issue would mushroom and take on a life of its own. What I did know, however, was that from the first time I saw the Daily Kos image, or what I now call, "Obama's bogus birth certificate," that something was just not right about it. As someone who has scanned hundreds of thousands of documents in his lifetime, I had a hard time accepting that this was an original scan image made from an original paper document. As Fate would have it, right then, on June 13, I was looking at the conclusive evidence that the text on this image had been graphically altered, or "manufactured," as my first blog post would claim.

From that point onward, I had no inkling of what was to come. I had no idea that I would wind up being the only person on the Planet (at that time) to have spotted the anomalies that I knew were the by-products of intentional, graphic alteration, and to go on record as stating that the Daily Kos image was a fake. I was also not prepared for what came along with this knowledge, for what I had to endure for making it public. Basically, I had painted a big bullseye on my chest and my research findings, and the critics were now coming out of the virtual woodwork taking shots at me personally, and my research, secondly. I had started a new online game called, "Let's pile on Polarik," and every little error I made was magnified into a major transgression. Yet, the crux of my contention was never successfully refuted.

Now, if I had to do it all over again, I probably would not have done it at all, knowing that I'd be spending the next four months conducting further research and compiling evidence on not just the COLB image, but also the digital photographs that were to follow two months later. The personal costs to me were enormous, and I will not elucidate on them (but for those who know me, they also know what were those costs). What began as sort of a curiosity turned into my personal quest for the "Holy Grail," so to speak. I was guided only by the need to uncover the truth, and by the constant harassment by my critics. Had they left me alone from the beginning, I probably would not be writing this report today.

I debated, long and hard, about the title of my report. Aside from it being catchy, I ran the danger of being lumped into a group of false conspiracy theorists, and brushed aside as an idiot wearing a "tinfoil hat." (Actually, that's already happened, many times over). Perhaps there are a lot of false conspiracies, including some really outlandish ones, but there would not be laws on the books, both at a state level and a federal level, that specifically mention the act of conspiracy when the purpose of that conspiracy is to either engage in illegal activity, engage in a cover-up of that illegal activity, or interfering with the investigation of that illegal activity. Conspiracy can involve all of these. Yet, somehow, the word, "Conspiracy," has become a pejorative for "nutty theories from the fringe," as if there has never been a real "conspiracy."

Do you remember, or ever hear about, the "Watergate Conspiracy?" Do you remember, or ever hear about, what happened to President Richard Nixon as a result?

I would tell all of you who think that "conspiracies" are a joke and that the people who claim to have found them are "idiots wearing tinfoil hats," to just ask an FBI agent what he or she thinks about "conspiracy." Or, go ahead and ask a federal judge what he or she thinks about "conspiracy."

"Conspiracy" is no laughing matter, ladies and gentlemen, and neither is "document fraud," as in creating and passing a counterfeit birth certificate.

I should now alert you to the fact that I have been using the phrase, "Bogus birth certificate," as a euphemism for "Counterfeit birth certificate," which is defined as, "A copy or imitation of a state-issued birth certificate that is intended to be taken as authentic and genuine in order to deceive another."

Sound familiar? According to Authenticate-360:

Birth certificates are generally used as “breederâ€

Everyone born in this country has a birth certificate, so if Obama was born here, too, then he should have one. This isn't rocket science. Yet, Obama is the only one, out of millions of natural born Americans, who refuses to show his original birth certificate to verify his citizenship status. Obama is also the only person and politician to ever submit a forged document image in place of a genuine, certified birth certificate, hoping that this act of fraud would go unnoticed.

FactCheck: fraudulent forensics and fabricated images

Up until now, I've limited my discussion to uncovering evidence and motives for fabricating an image that Obama supporters still claim is a genuine copy of Obama's actual Certification of Live Birth (or COLB). I have not talked about the concerted efforts of people and organizations intimately tied to Obama to squelch this process of discovery. Additionally, there have been no shortage of critics and detractors who claim to have no allegiance to, or support for, Obama as a Presidential candidate. Whatever are their real motives, which they have kept hidden, their animosity towards the researchers who question the validity of the COLB image is patently obvious.

Why would anyone, with no professed interest in Obama or this national election, would want to thwart the honest vetting of a Presidential candidate -- one, whose continued efforts to hide his past are both unprecedented and unconscionable -- is a mystery to me. Nevertheless, their repeated attempts to both squelch my research and discredit me personally, will eventually backfire on them, if it hasn't already. Nothing says, "credibility," as allowing your opponent to find the evidence you need, while letting them think that they've got the "proof" to negate your theories.

Sometimes it's better to let your opponents think that you're as dumb as they say you are. After all, your opponents are not going to willingly give you anything that you can use against them.

In this section, I'll show you how and why the forged Obama COLB image was not the only fabricated COLB image being circulated on the Internet, nor was it the only COLB image supported by fraudulent affirmations. It was in this context that FactCheck was determined to have the last word on Obama's "birth certificate." What FactCheck thought would be the end-all to speculation about the veracity and legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate, turned out to be the bomb that would blow apart every claim they made about this fraudulent document, along with everyone connected with what is really, a conspiracy to hide Obama's origins.

In Part One, I spoke about the research I began immediately after seeing the suspicious-looking COLB image posted on the Daily Kos website in mid-June. While I focused on the construction of the COLB image, other critics were focused on its content, such as why "AFRICAN" was listed as a race and how could a laser printed document exist in 1961.

On July 20, another researcher on the forged COLB image took a different approach than mine, and decided to get his work published as an "Exclusive story" on three popular blogs. This publication was accompanied by press releases proclaiming that a "Computer Forensics Expert" had found the Obama COLB image to be a " Horrible forgery that was made using a COLB belonging to Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro." This researcher's expose gained a lot of traction on the Internet precisely because of the exemplary credentials he provided which touting his many years of experience working for the Federal Government as a forensic image expert. Naturally, everyone assumed that anyone with such a solid resume would be beyond reproach as a credible researcher.

However, as things turned out, Obama was not the only one pretending to be something he is not.

At first, I also thought that, given his credentials, he seemed to be credible, albeit not trustworthy or reliable when it came to keeping his promises, or even that knowledgible about the field he professed to represent. I also discovered a lot of inconsistencies and questionable statements in his research, as did a number of his critics. Although the hoopla created by his "exclusive story" tended to be a bit of a distraction, I never let it influence my research.

When I received image copies of an original 2007 COLB, not only did I discover that the border resembled the Obama COLB border, but also that this other researcher had been lying about having one. When he said that the 2007 COLB border was identical to the 2008 COLB border, that blew the lid off his deception. The resume was real enough, but it did not belong to him!

The reason why I brought up this story about this person's now-discredited research is because his fall from Grace as an "image expert" gave FactCheck all the ammunition it needed to shoot down all forgery research, and specifically mine.

In Part Two, there is more emphasis on what FactCheck did in the four months after June 16, the date they posted their copy of Obama's COLB image. This is not to say that the Obama Campaign website, Fight The Smears, did not engage in any shenanigans (which they did), but that their actions pale in comparison to the overt, fraudulent scam that FactCheck was cooking up last August.

If you recall from Part One, FactCheck initially thought that no one would question the veracity of Obama's COLB image after they posted their full-length copy of it. However, they were flat-out wrong to think that no one would notice the flaws in that image. Even if someone, like myself, were to challenge it, FactCheck was prepared to squelch any assaults on its credibility.

They almost pulled it off without a hitch, thinking that their image copy -- and their adamant statements that accompanied it -- had settled the questions about Obama's birth certificate. Yet, for every question that FactCheck thought it answered, other questions began to crop up.

On August 16, FactCheck held a "photo shoot" with Obama's alleged "real, paper COLB" at Annenberg's Chicago headquarters. What was it that compelled FactCheck to run off to the friendly confines of Annenberg, and allegedly take a series of high-resolution (and highly suspicious-looking) digital photos of Obama's "real" paper COLB? Why did they include with these photos a thoroughly confusing and inconsistent account of their actions on August 16, only to add an update to that story five days later?

Why all the changes at FTS and FactCheck?

The answer is simply this:

During the three months of research and evidence that I gathered about the forged COLB image, everyone thought that all this "forgery nonsense" would eventually "roll over and die" as they fully expected it would. If anything, my research and analysis became an albatross around their necks, a modern version of the Sword of Damocles dangling above their heads that just would not go away.

Now, with Obama facing a lawsuit demanding that he produce his "vaulted" original, long-form birth certificate to prove his citizenship, along with steadfastly refusing to present even a current, certified paper COLB, that would have settled the issue and only cost him $12 to obtain, we have reached a point in this saga where the folks at FactCheck and the Obama campaign are circling the wagons, still hoping against hope, that they can sweep under the rug, one of the greatest political frauds ever perpetrated in our nation's history.

All those jokes about us wearing "tin-foil hats" are no longer funny. This is now very serious business, and the longer they obfuscate and attempt to obstruct this investigation, the worse this scandal will become.

Unfortunately for FactCheck, all their efforts to thwart an investigation into their use of forgeries to cover up the malfeasance of a Presidential Candidate will have been for naught, because "this bulldog is not letting go of their leg" until the truth is known.

In case you're wondering who is that "bulldog," all I can say is, "Woof!"

FactCheck's phony photo forgeries

If we've learned anything about Factcheck.org, it is that FactCheck most definitely is not an independent nonpartisan group, but belongs to the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, owned and operated by zealous Obama supporters and funders.

On June 16, 2008, FactCheck was the third group to post a copy of the now infamous Obama forged COLB image to their website :

As I mentioned in Part One, FactCheck claimed that " Tommy Vietor at the Obama campaign sent a message to them and to "other reporters" saying, "I know there have been some rumors spreading about Obama’s citizenship, so I wanted to make sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate."

Nearly four months later, no other "reporters" have ever received a copy of this "birth certificate" image, or any other birth certificate image, for that matter, from Tommy Vietor or any one else.

Which brings us to FactCheck's phony photo session that they allegedly held in August, or as they described it, "recently." The embedded photo data, know as Exif, tell a completely different story. According to the date and time stamps, the photos were taken on March 12 from 10:40 pm to 10:47 pm, or not exactly recently. The Exif data was extensively detailed and provided little wiggle room for FactCheck to try and worm their way out of the date/time stamp conundrum.

Israel Insider called them on it, too, and queried them as to why the date/time stamp was so long ago. However, they did not pursue it past that point. Their response was that the cameraman "forgot" to update the date and time, which Israel Insider took as incompetence on the part of the cameraman. But, was it just that, or something more intentional?

There is clear evidence of sunlight streaming through windows or doors, so the 10:42 pm time is definitely wrong. But, there are some curious parallels to the date and time of the alleged original scan of Obama's COLB. The original image was posted on June 12, and the Exif data in the image indicated that it was allegedly scanned on June 12 at 8:42 am, or that date and time may simply reflect the date and time set by Adobe Photoshop CS3, the program used to modify it.

I wonder: did the cameraman also "forget" to change the the The story that appeared on FactCheck talked about the COLB as if they were visiting a sick friend in the hospital.

The wildfire begins

From the first moment this image was posted to the Internet, the reactions and criticisms spread like a wildfire through a forest. While Obama supporters -- who still cling to its claimed veracity today -- celebrated its appearance as a way to squelch Obama's skeptics, Obama detractors not only protested its appearance for the data that it held and lacked, but also for the way it looked to them; that is, nothing like this one:

To anyone not born in Hawaii, Obama's "original birth certificate" looked nothing like what a traditional birth certificate should look like (such as the one above). At a minimum, original birth certificates contained the names of the hospital where the child was born and the doctor who delivered the baby. Birth certificates also had signatures and stamps or embossed seals on them that certified their validity. By the second week of this controversy, the American public discovered that this type of document was not a photocopy of an original birth certificate completed at birth, but was, instead, a shortened transcript of a person's birth record.

This transcript is called, a "Certification of Live Birth," or COLB as I came to call it. A COLB is what Hawaii's Department of Health now issues in place of actual photocopies of the original, long-form birth certificate. The COLB is a "short form birth certificate," and when duly certified by them, can be used for all intents and purposes that a regular birth certificate would be used.

A genuine COLB (as shown below with private data covered by tape) contains the names of the Father, Mother and Child, the "race" of the Mother and Father, the time and date of birth, and the island and city of birth. Regardless of a person's actual birth date, anyone authorized to request this COLB, will receive the specific data currently listed on a person's actual birth record, on the date the copy was created. This last criteria is crucial to understand because so many of the criticisms leveled against it had to do with the "apparent" conundrum posed by a computer-generated certificate for people whose birth predated the computer age.

This is the front side of a genuine COLB:

And, this the reverse side of a genuine COLB:

Computer printout or photocopy, notwithstanding, many people were still agitated by the apparent lack of visually recognizable features on the Obama COLB that would attest to its validity, such as an embossed seal, official signatures, and a date stamp as shown in the images above. Keep in mind that the public was shown only one scanned image of Obama's alleged COLB, and that was its front side. Had a scan of the reverse side been made, the questions about the absence of seals and stamps would have been answered.

That is, of course, IF the scanned image was genuine. Which it never was from the beginning.

The birth of the forgery

Initially, as someone who had also never seen a Hawaiian COLB before, I was also critical of the omissions apparently absent from Obama's COLB. However, once I got to examine the alleged Obama COLB up close, the focus of my criticisms quickly changed.

Although Obama's COLB image did not look the same as a traditional birth certificate, what captured my attention was not its contents, or lack thereof, but the image anomalies I saw -- anomalies that never would appear in any genuine scan of this document.

Specifically, I saw that the text in this image bore the telltale signs of being graphically altered after the image had been created. From June 13 onwards, the unfamiliar format of this document, and the questionable information that it contained, became tangential to my discovery that the scanned image alleged to be a true copy Obama's original COLB, was a forged document image . Today, with three months worth of research and supportive evidence behind me, I can now say, without any reservations, that my initial recognition of this image forgery was absolutely correct.

Surprisingly, the same people who posted this forged image three months earlier, namely the Obama Campaign, the pro-Obama Daily Kos blog, and the pro-Obama FactCheck group, are still passing it off as a genuine copy of Obama's original birth certificate. At no time during this 3-month period, did any of these pro-Obama groups submit a second scanned image to corroborate the first one, such as a scan of the reverse side where the certification elements appear: the embossed Seal of Hawaii, the date stamp, and the signature stamp of Hawaii's State Registrar.

Rather than make that second scan, FactCheck recently compounded their role in the forgery by posting suspicious-looking photos of the same document that they claimed to have scanned in June 16. Since I now have no doubt that their scanned image was fraudulent, I have no reason to believe that their "photographs" are any less fraudulent. Later on, I will explain why these photos are so suspicious.

Supporters of Obama spent a great deal of time trying to explain away these fraudulent actions, but logic and subterfuge are no substitutes for having independent observers examine not only Obama's original birth certificate, but also a current COLB containing his current birth record -- two things that the American public have yet to see.

I've been working with computers, printers, and scanners, going back to 1969, and with graphic arts as far back as 1965, and given a set of printed letters, I can discern what kind of device made them. Printer output is quite different from the text created by a graphics program, and even if a document looks "official," it may not be. More importantly, graphically altered text in an image would look the same regardless of what was scanned to create the image.

For comparative purposes, shown below is the same copy of Obama's alleged ""original birth certificate," a.k.a, a COLB, that was posted June 12 on the Daily Kos website. Following the Kos image is the only other Hawaiian COLB found on the Internet at that time. I verified that finding by doing an exhaustive Internet search looking for any other COLB examples, only to come back to that same, single image:

Both of these images are in JPG format, which is the most commonly used format with scanners and digital cameras. The reason why JPGs are the preferred format is because they can compress a lot of picture information into a much smaller file size. For example, the image of the Kos COLB shown above would consume over 16 megabytes of file space if it were not compressed; but, as a compressed JPG image, it only consumes one-half of a megabyte of file space. The tradeoff in space savings, however, is a loss of fine detail that was present in the original image produced by a scanner or camera.

Like any printed certificate, the COLB has a border that "frames" the body of information it contains. The original COLB certificate is printed on an 8 1/2" x 11" letter-sized sheet of paper having a green-and-white "Rattan" pattern. The top part of the COLB is blank, and when removed, what remains is an 8 1/2" square of paper. The crosshatched border, however, measures 8.09" x 7.90" and is not exactly square. The COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does not corresponds to the border used that year.

Until I received a copy of a genuine 2007 COLB and confirmed that its borders were similar to Obama's COLB, critics were still taking issue with the look of its border, as compared to the borders on 2008 COLBs.

Once the COLB Genie was out of the bottle, other genuine COLBs started made their appearances on the Internet:

After seeing how differently the Obama COLB borders looked in comparison to these other COLB images, I also had issues about its validity and purpose. Yet, unlike other critics and researchers, verifying the border was never crucial to my investigation. From the very beginning, I theorized that the Obama COLB image had been "manufactured" using someone else's COLB as a template or starting point. I also made allowances for the possibility that a real 2007 COLB could have provided the border for the forgery, even if the rest of it was not used for the other components of the COLB. I had not actually seen what a genuine 2007 COLB looked like, so I focused my research on everything else that lay inside of the border. If the Obama COLB image was, in fact, graphically altered to make it look like an "official" birth certificate, then the border pattern would be inconsequential compared to passing off fraudulent information as genuine -- especially when no one else had ever seen a genuine 2007 COLB before.

Then, the unthinkable happened when I received a genuine 2007 COLB issued less than three months before Obama's COLB was allegedly issued to him or to one of his family members. It was a deal-breaker!

Here was a genuine 2007 COLB, with a border similar to the Obama COLB, that Obama supporters could triumphantly claim was proof that the Obama COLB was genuine. It was also a death knell for another researcher who had based his work on his claim that 2007 COLBs had the same border as 2008 COLBs (as shown above). Needless to say, I was also aware of other fabricated evidence that he produced, but I had pledged to a friend that I would keep the revelations to myself.

Before I ever received a genuine paper COLB, I had no idea how it would look and feel in person. The most surprising thing about the COLB is how thin is the paper that it's printed on. It's as thin and light as a piece of cheap copy paper. The green and white pattern is only on the front side, and whatever pattern that one sees on the reverse side is actually coming from the pattern on the front side.

While both the Daily Kos and Obama's website (aka, "Fight The Smears") posted trimmed copies of the same COLB image, FactCheck.org posted the letter-sized version of the same image copy. Although these three image copies are made from the same source image, they were intentionally made to look different from one another (this will be explained later on).

For display purposes, I am using the Kos copy of the image because it was the first one posted on the Internet, and the first one to catch my eye. Obama's "Fight the Smears" website posted their small, illegible copy of the image after the Kos did, and a week later, FactCheck.org posted theirs.

How Hawaii creates (and how one gets) a genuine Hawaiian COLB.

The entire Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth is a computer-generated graphic that is printed on specially patterned, green and white paper (as shown above). Usually, official certificates are printed on patterned paper that also have a ready-made border. As a safety measure (or as a recognition tool), Vital Records has generated different border patterns every year since November 2001, or when this form was put into service (as indicated by the footnote in the bottom left corner). Although the border patterns were changed annually, the border dimensions have remained the same (well...not exactly as I'll explain below).

The computer-generated COLB is like a form-fillable PDF file. In fact, you can order a copy of a Hawaiian COLB (if you're authorized to get one) by completing an order form that is a form-fillable PDF file on Hawaii's Vital Records website:

Certificate Order Form.

More than likely, what a computer operator at Vital Records gets to see, when responding to a request for a COLB, is a graphically-created template with blank fields that are replaced by the information requested on the order form. That's the Catch-22 in ordering a COLB: you only get back what you correctly request to see. If the name of the father on the form does not match the name of the father on the official birth record, then what you get back is a blank space where the father's name would be.

Once the birth record data has been inputted into the COLB form, it is then sent to a networked laser printer to be printed off on a sheet of COLB paper.

Recognizing "red flags" in an image forgery.

Transferring the computer-generated COLB into a high-quality image file can easily be done with any computer scanner (even with ones that cost less than $100). Scanning a full-sized letter document into a digital image file initially requires a lot of computer memory and file space. However, as a way to reduce the file size while maintaining some of the document quality, the image is saved in a compressed image file format known as JPG (pronounced, "Jay-Peg"). With JPG files, there is always a tradeoff between the file size and the amount of detailed information that can be saved in it. As a consequence of scanning text documents and saving them as JPG files, there will always be some degree of distortion in parts of the document image, particularly around areas of line art and text in the document.

However, the distortion patterns that I initially found when examining the text in the Obama COLB image, were ones that are not produced by either a printer, scanner, or the compression factor of the JPG image. Critics of mine have tried to explain away these patterns as "scanner artifacts" or "JPG artifacts," but to no avail. The anomalies that I found should not be there if a document was faithfully scanned from an original paper document. Yet, these anomalies are there for all to see, and are proof-positive that the text in an original image was deliberately altered, after the image was created, by someone using an image editing program.

Normally, there should be a lot of green pixels from the background showing up between the letters on the COLB, but there is noticeable lack of green pixels can be seen in the first four letters of the word BIRTH (taken from CITY, TOWN, OR LOCATION OF BIRTH) as shown in the following two enlarged images. A grid was laid on top of these images so that the corresponding pixels could be better identified and compared between images. The first example is from the Obama COLB image followed by an example from the genuine 2008 COLB (which I will call "Michele's COLB")

Take a look at the area between the letters in the Obama COLB: very little, if any, hint of green from the background. Plenty of grey and white pixels instead -- exactly the pattern that would result from replacing the existing text with other text.

Now, look at the area in between the letters in Dan's COLB. Lots of green shades from the background -- exactly what should be there if an image is a genuine scan of a laser-printed document.

All of the type on this document was produced by the same graphics program. Whatever made the text for all of the headings also made the text for all of the entries.

Any text made by a typewriter, laser printer, or even ink jet printer, on a piece of colored paper, would have that color showing between the letters. When the paper is digitally scanned, it would still have some of that color showing between the letters. What it would not have, are only smeared, black & white pixels between them. Pixels are the dots that combine to make a digital image or photo. There would always be several pixels bearing the same color as the paper. Printed type produced by a graphics program will look about the same regardless of the magnification, with a minimal number of white and grey pixel patterns between the letters.

Here are some examples:

Here is the "HOUR OF BIRTH" header from Barack's COLB enlarged 5 times:

Here's the same data header taken from Dan's 2007 COLB scanned at the same resolution with the same amount of file compression.

This is how this text data should look on a genuine, unretouched, scanned document image.

Their fate was "Sealed"

When Factcheck published their own copy of BHO's COLB image, it was no more genuine than any of the other three copies made from the forged source image, as I explained in Part One above. Factcheck's COLB image constitutes a counterfeit document image, that was graphically "manufactured by cobbling together parts of images made from real COLBs, covering over the existing textual information with pieces of the background, and then adding deceptive identity information to it, thereby creating a false document made to look like what Obama's genuine COLB might be, if it actually existed in point of fact. The Factcheck image was the exact, same image as first posted to the Daily Kos, with the exception being that the Daily Kos cropped off the extra background on the top and the sides, as can be seen here:

There is a difference between questioning the authenticity of a document image and questioning whether the document image is a deliberate forgery -- especially in this era of manufactured news stories like Dan Rather's discredited "expose" of President Bush's military records. If there were any early critics who were convinced from the moment they saw it on June 12, that they were looking at a stone-cold forgery, they did not make themselves known to the public or the blogsphere until after I began my research to prove that the image posted was unquestionably manufactured.

There is a quantum leap of a difference between someone who just suspects that the image might have been "Photoshopped," (a term I define below), to someone actually conducting empirical studies to answer the question of its authenticity. I can safely say now that I was the first person to do this empirical research and to carry it through until I was 100% certain that I have found irrefutable evidence of a forgery. Whatever anyone thinks of me or my research, I am going to let the evidence speak for itself, because the evidence leaves no more room for alternate theories. That is the reason why it has taken me four months to get to the point where the evidence is so overwhelming, that all I need do is present it, explain it well enough for as many people as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.

The three major players in this little" con game include Obama, his campaign staff, and Annenberg's Factcheck group, with a supporting role played by Politifact: a Factcheck sister organization allied with the St. Petersburg Times. The Daily Kos was just picked as a testing ground for the fledgling forgery. If the Left bought it, and they did, hook, line, and sinker, then with enough word-of-mouth, the rest of the American electorate would also buy it. From the very beginning, this was a clever plan to both deflect any claims that Obama might not be a natural-born US citizen and qualified to run for President, and to promote Obama to the American electorate as a fully American, a self-made man.

On August 16, two months to the day after the publication of the image on the Daily Kos and Obama's website, Factcheck published their story about nine photos they allegedly took of Obama's "real" COLB at his campaign headquarters.

As far as I was concerned, there was no longer any question that the COLB image is a forgery what people posted published is a forgery and that Obama's real COLB is a nonexistent document. Because based on the photographs that Factcheck made of a nonexistent document that they claim is both tangible and authentic. Because it would be an oxymoron and a non sequitur for people to say that they now believe that the COLB document image is a genuine copy

There are no gray areas concerning the evidence I've collected and presented about the COLB image being a bogus, nonexistent document, and that same reality must apply to any and all images and photographs allegedly made from that same document: they cannot be real if their source is bogus. If even one aspect of one photo is demonstrated to be fraudulent, i.e., intentionally altered to create the illusion of authenticity, then all of the other photographs must also be fraudulent. The facts are clear. The evidence is black & white, cut & dried: If anything about the source document is not real or authentic, then everything about the source document is false and fraudulent.

Nevertheless, I have thoroughly examined the photographs that Factcheck published, and have subsequently found clear evidence of tampering with both the alleged source of the photos, and the photos made of that source. Factcheck has committed sins of omission and sins of commission given that their photos reveal both the absence of known, relevant features found on genuine COLBs along with the presence of irrelevant and illogical features that would never be found on real COLBs.

What makes a COLB image genuine?

Feature #1: The tell-tale pixel patterns

On June 12, when I first saw the image claimed to be a true copy of Obama's birth certificate posted on the Daily Kos and Obama websites, I immediately noticed a number of graphical oddities. What bothered me were the fuzzy grey and white pixels that I found in between the letters of the text on the Kos image -- the highest quality copy of the images posted online. I have been making digital document scans for over 30 years, and I have never seen any scanner produce results such as these. In other words, these pixel patterns were not "scanner artifacts" as many others have claimed.

More than that, however, from my experience in working with digital images, I also knew that the pixel patterns I saw were not the result of image compression typically found in JPG files. What I did recognize is how graphically-created text looks when it has been applied over an existing image whose original text had first been covered up with copies made of background on which the original text was written.

Below are some comparisons made between Obama's 2007 COLB image and the image of a real 2007 COLB and a real 2008 COLB. I will compare the word, "BIRTH," that appears in "HOUR OF BIRTH," on the COLBs. The two comparison COLBs were made to have the same size,color count, and level of image compression.

Normally, there should be a lot of green pixels from the background showing up between the letters on the COLB, but there is noticeable lack of green pixels can be seen in the first four letters of the word BIRTH (taken from CITY, TOWN, OR LOCATION OF BIRTH) as shown in the following two enlarged images. A grid was laid on top of these images so that the corresponding pixels could be better identified and compared between images. The first example was made from Obama's alleged 2007 COLB image followed by an example made from a genuine 2008 COLB. The first four letters in the word, "BIRTH," are enlarged five times normal size, and a pixel grid was placed over it to better identify the individual pixels:

Obama's alleged 2007 COLB:

A real 2008 COLB:

Take a look at the area between the letters in the Obama COLB: very little, if any, hint of green from the background. Plenty of grey and white pixels instead -- exactly the pattern that would result from replacing the existing text with other text.

Now, look at the area in between the letters in the 2008 COLB. Lots of green shades from the background -- exactly what should be there if an image is a genuine scan of a laser-printed document.

Here's another comparison between the word, "BIRTH" on Obama's alleged 2007 COLB:

And the word, "BIRTH" on a real 2007 COLB:

The anomalies that I found should not be there if a document was faithfully scanned from an original paper document. Yet, these anomalies are there for all to see, and are proof-positive that the text in an original image was deliberately altered, after the image was created, by someone using an image editing program.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, it is my opinion, as an experienced user of computers and computer graphics, that the images posted on the Kos website, the FactCheck website, Barack Obama website (aka, Fight The Smears), and Politifact, are not the original scanned images of Obama's Certification of Live Birth or COLB, but are graphical forgeries.

Amazingly, four months after I published my original thesis, that the pixel patterns found in between the letters of text on the bogus Obama 2007 COLB were definitive signs of graphical alterations, aka, forging, the claim is the most enduring, irrefutable, and also one of the most damning pieces of evidence supporting my contentions!.

The specific details that differentiate between a real COLB image and a fraudulent one will be presented later on in this report. For now, I wish to discuss what had been the two most prominent features missing from the COLB image when it was first seen. Missing from the COLB image, at initially as seen with the naked eye, were the Seal and signatures. These two elements, along with a missing second fold line, would subsequently appear in the photos allegedly made from Obama's real COLB, and the same COLB allegedly used to make a scanned COLB image. Although the faded outline of the Seal was revealed, after the image was run through edge detection, and the signature stamp revealed, albeit barely, after color enhancements, the lower fold was still nowhere to be found in the image:

Compared to the scans I have that were made from a real 2007 COLB, both the Seal and the lower fold are more easily seen than the Obama COLB -- either with the naked eye:
-- or with edge detection applied:



For that matter, both the Seal and the folds are easily recognized on a real 2008 COLB without edge detection:


The Seal, signature stamp, and the second fold line were all visible in the other real COLB's that have been posted on the Internet:

Jason Tomoyasu's COLB:

Jeremy Smith's COLB:

The PD COLB:

Of all the features found on real COLBs, the embossed Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature are what distinguishes a certified COLB from one that is not. So, it is understandable why they were also the main points of contention when the first COLB image was released on the Daily Kos. Basically, however, it was the fact that the COLB looked nothing like what an original birth certificate looked like, that caused the most disbelief among people not familiar with the short-form "transcript" of a person's birth record. Once people understood what was (and was not) supposed to be seen on the COLB, they were more accepting of the images despite the fact that the second fold line could not be found anywhere in the image.

The people who doubted the authenticity of this image included those who pointed to the obviously missing Seal, Signature, and second fold line, but there was a great hue and cry raised about the use of the word, "AFRICAN" for the RACE of Obama's father. To date, that question has not been satisfactorily answered, but it would be such an obvious mistake to make if, in fact, the term was never used on any other COLBs. Perhaps, if African-American was listed as a race, and the father was not an American, then Obama Sr, would have the

What is "Photoshopping?"

Before continuing, I need to explain the process of copying one portion of a photo and pasting on top of the same one, or a different one -- which is the first thing that comes to mind for most people when the verb, "Photoshopped," is mentioned. To reinforce this association, the two most notorious "Photoshopped" photographs to ever be published in the mainstream media involved "cloning", a process of duplicating a part of an image and transferring it one or more times, in successive locations, on the same photograph. There is a tool in Photoshop, that is also found in most image editors, called the "Clone" tool (appropriate name). The way it works is that you place the tool over the area that you want to copy, press the SHIFT-ALT key combination to set a marker over the starting point, and then move the mouse cursor over to the area where you wish to place the copy. When you begin to trace over the area with the marker, whatever is under the marker will be transferred to the area under the mouse cursor.

During the Second Hezbollah-Israel War, the Reuters news agency published a photo of Beirut -- taken by an Arab "stringer" (aka, freelance photographer) -- showing multiple plumes of black smoke billowing in the distance. To the trained eye, familiar with the "cloning" tool found in Photoshop and many other programs, it was obvious that most of these smoke plumes were copied from one plume and pasted next to it to give the impression that Beirut had suffered much more serious damage from the battle that ensued there.

This act of photo deception was a deliberate attempt by the stringer, and a very willing, historically anti-Israel, media outlet to bring further condemnation on Israel. In fact, making fake photos and videos is a cottage industry for the Palestinian propaganda machine.

The second, more recent Photoshop deception, was a photo of an Iranian missile launch that was made to look like a barrage of missiles had been fired. Recently, there were other likely Photoshopped photos that surfaced on the Internet, one of North Korean president, Kim Jong-Il, apparently standing amidst army officers reviewing a parade. There was also a graduation photo of Barack Obama apparently standing amidst his classmates, but there were a number of objects that were out-of-place, including some shadows that should have been cast if an actual person was standing where Obama was allegedly standing.

There is another process similar to "cloning" that is found in Photoshop and other image editors. It is called, "stamping" and involves taking one area of an image and "pasting" it over another area. It was this simple but somewhat tedious process that the forger used to take portions of the green-and-white background from one or more source COLB images, and paste them over the existing text on the target COLB image. This is the process that a self-admitted, pretend forger, Jay McKinnon, used to create blank and partially filled COLB images that some people seriously thought were the source images for the forgery.

It wasn't until July 3, that this charade was put to rest in a story that first broke on the Israel Insider and the Free Republic forum. Unfortunately, what should have made people more aware of how easily they can be fooled by an image, never seem to have a lasting affect on anyone's mind. Nevertheless, the original image forgery that was posted on four different websites were still drawing a lot of believers and had a lot more staying power than any of the "imitation forged images" made since then.

An interesting subplot to the story about the McKinnon charade is for how long it has remained on the Free Republic as a place where the original Obama COLB forgeries could be discussed along with all the efforts made to get Obama to release his real birth certificate to the public. This July 3 story, appropriately titled, "Blogger admits Hawaii birth certificate forgery, subverting Obama claims (Uh-oh)," has become one of the longest running, and most active, topics on the forum this topic, at last count, was viewed over 17,650 times with 6,643 comments left by visitors to that post. "Uh-oh," indeed!

The number of people who believe that this forged image is a genuine copy of an actual document really blows my mind because it does not take a person with a trained eye, or any proficiency in Photoshop, to spot the obvious alterations to this image. The same can be said for the pictures proffered by Factcheck as genuine photographs of Obama's real COLB. Basically, anyone with a good, "old-school" working knowledge of photography; e.g., how to take into account different shooting angles and different lighting conditions, and to manually adjust a camera accordingly," should be able to recognize when a photo does not reflect reality.

Yet, there may not be that many photo-savvy people left with all of the improvements made in digital photography. Even a novice can take professional-looking photos at the push of a button with a $100 digital camera set on AUTO.

As someone who has been taking pretty good photographs with some pretty good cameras for the past 40 years, I do know an unreal photograph when I see one. For example, if I know that a photo was taken in the afternoon, when the sun is setting in the West, and I see shadows from other objects projected to the East, I do not expect to see any shadows going in the opposite direction, and neither should anyone else.

I don't ask or expect people to accept what I say solely on the basis of my stated experience (as many of my critics have done with theirs). If I cannot explain to a lay person, in common sense terms, why a photo or image appears to be bogus, using concrete demonstrations to convey to them what I see, then I don't bother saying it. Period.

What is an "overlay?

Now that I'm done with the basics of "cloning," Photoshop-style, let me summarize it by saying that, whether a person is copying an object to make it appear multiple times, or copying it to superimpose (overlay) it on top of another part of the same image, the process is identical. The difference lies in whether the pasted part is kept solid, as-is, or is changed in some way so as to blend it into the photo or image.

Therefore, you can take it as a given, that when I am talking about how the forgery was "manufactured" or "Photoshopped," I am talking about how a solid-appearing object, in one photo or image, was actually taken from another photo or image (or even from another part of the same source), and pasted onto that first photo or image to make it look like a genuine, unmodified original.

Conversely, when I'm talking about creating an overlay for demonstration purposes, I am referring to the same process of copying and pasting, with the main difference being that the copied part is made to be partially transparent so that the viewer can simultaneously see both the original image or photo and the part that was copied from another source and pasted over it.

Feature #2: The Seal

Here are the images of real 2007 Seals as they actually appear on a real 2007 COLB (color enhanced), both before and after edge detection:

And, here are the entire COLBs from which the images of these Seals were made:

One feature readily apparent from the real 2007 COLBS seen above, is that a real Seal leaves a dent in the surrounding area of the paper when it is pressed into it.

In stark contrast to the real 2007 COLBs, the bogus 2007 COLB as shown in Factcheck Photo #5 (from the Factcheck COLB collection), there is not even so much as a minute deflection of the paper that would be left by a real, embossed metal seal:

Here's a picture of a stamper, similar in effect to what Hawaii might use to make their Seal:

It is, basically, a clamp, and since I have a real, paper COLB to examine, I can tell you that there is no mistaking what sort of object made its Seal impression. If you have ever had a document notarized, the process and results are identical.

The fact that, in every photo showing the fake Seal -- especially on close-ups of it, there are no deflections whatsoever in the surrounding paper. Why should there be, when you consider that these "fake Seals" were Photoshopped on a printout of a "paper COLB" and not stamped on anything genuine?

The Seals show up best under a form of image enhancement known as edge detection:

Think of it as a way to trace the outlines of objects regardless of their different colors. A real 2007 Seal has two wide double circles:

The fake Seal has two narrow ones no virtually space between them:

Notice also that in the real Seal, there is a break in both outer circles, between the "O" and the "F" in "DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH." No such break can be found in the fake Seals:

The example below is an overlay where the date and registrar stamps on the back of a fake COLB are matched for size with those on a real 2007 COLB. In order to make the comparison possible, the real COLB was color enhanced and flipped horizontally, and the fake Seal was made semi-transparent and overlaid on top of the real Seal. The result aptly shows that the real 2007 Seal is noticeably larger than the fake 2007 Seal:

This finding is the norm, and not an anomaly. On every Factcheck photo, allegedly made of a 2007 COLB, in which a Seal can be seen, its size is not the same as the real 2007 Seal pictured above. As also noted above, The word, "of" is missing from the Seal's bottom logo, STATE of HAWAII, and in its place are what appear to be two dashes. In photo #1, the word itself appears to have been intentionally "scratched out" (and was not caused by light hitting it):

Below are photos after an edge detection filter was applied to make the Seal's details visible:

Notice that "DEPARTMENT" in the "DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH" logo is always blurry. Just as this word is missing, so, too are all of the letters malformed.

In the middle of the Seal is the Caduceus, the symbol of the American medical profession for almost a century. The Caduceus consists of two serpents criss-crossed around a staff topped by a round knob and flanked by wings.

In the real Seal, it looks like this:

In the false Seal, it looks like this:

The wings and serpents in the real Seal are smaller and symmetrical, whereas they are unequal, uneven, and almost touching the inner ring in the false Seal. In fact, wherever the false Seal is shown, it has less detail than the area around it.

The reverse side of a real, embossed seal can be seen from the front side of the COLB, and right-reading on the back of the COLB. However, if you were to take the image of a real COLB, and flip it horizontally, it would not look to identical how the Seal actually appears on the reverse side. In other words, the reverse side of a real Seal is concave with the Seal right-reading. On the front side, it is convex, with the Seal reverse-reading.

Yet, when the front side of the false Seal is flipped over, the reverse side looks identical to how it appears on the back side. The reason for this match is that the front-side image of the false Seal was, indeed, flipped horizontally, and superimposed on the back-side image.

When you recognize and realize that the Seal shown in the photos were not impressed into the document, but were Photoshopped onto the document photo. In other words, the Seal is bogus.

In all, except two, of the photos showing the Seal, the Seal appears to fit inside a circle, or more accurately, a circle that is barely bordering on being elliptical:

Either way, this situation would only be possible when viewing the Seal on the COLB laid flat, with the orientation of the camera perpendicular to the COLB in all directions. The COLB is shot with the camera held vertically (in a portrait layout) and the picture has to be rotated 90 degrees to the left to view the COLB in its upright position:

Also, if you take the photo of the Seal (photo #7) and flip it horizontally, so that the Seal is right-reading, copy it, increase its transparency, and then overlay it on top of the Seal in photo #6, you will have a perfect match between them -- not possible since the two photos were taken of different sides of the COLB and the Seal and from two, very different angles:

If you also look at where the Registrar's stamp is placed (although it is at a steeper angle due to the odd angle of photo #7, you will see that the words, STATE REGISTRAR, fall inside the bottom border. This positioning can also be seen by overlaying photo #9 on top of photo #2.

Because the Seal appears too faint to see all of it, I applied edge detection to this overlay to make it stand out more:

The position of the Registrar's stamp would never be put that low on a real COLB because its position is fully dependent on the position of the Seal. If the Seal is too low on the page, as shown in both the real COLB and the fake COLB, the stamp would go off to the right, and not below the Seal. If you look at where the real Seal is on the real COLB, and compare it to the faked COLB, you will plainly see that the Seal on the faked COLB is lower than the Seal on the real COLB - which has its Registrar stamp off to the left.

For this overlay, I used photo #6 because the photo that I took of the real 2008 Seal is approximately from the same angle -- although the paper was laid almost flat, whereas the subject in photo #6 is bent along the bottom fold line. However, as I noted above, the top part of the Seal above the fold line does not appear to be sufficiently angled with respect to the bottom part of the Seal below the fold line. This is also the reason why the entire Seal can almost be circumscribed by a circle drawn around it. Aside from the minor perspective shown in the upper left quadrant of the Seal in photo #6, there is a very close match between this Seal and the 2008 Seal I photographed.

Here is the "alleged 2007" Seal shown in photo #6:

Here is the actual 2008 Seal shown in my photo of a 2008 COLB:

I used the elliptical selection tool to highlight just the Seal itself, made a separate image copy from it, made a minor color adjustment, and reduced it to be approximately the same size as the Seal in photo #6.

Then, highlighting just the Seal, I copied it and pasted it on top of photo #6 as a separate layer.

Now, here is an animated GIF showing the correspondence between the two: focus your attention on the right side where the word, "HEALTH" and the narrow, double circle exhibit the most correspondence:

There is another anomaly with this Seal, along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp. For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom border, which would never occur on real COLBs.

Back when some enterprising individual had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to where most of it could be interpolated.

Another individual, also hoping to prove me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to manufacture the image.

The result is an animation that alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008 COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of the reverse side:

However, the Registrar stamp is, again, placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or 2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:

It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a shown in this overlay:

There is a remarkable (as in "too close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008 COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:

The COLB coup de grâce

Now, here comes the coup de grâce -- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?

If you recall from the above discussion, I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful way. There's a good reason why:

The Seal is actually a 2008 Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar stamp!

We saw the effects of this cobbling together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the bottom part.

.Basically, when you are mindful of the perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos. Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional ruse used to fool the public.

As noted above, one of the photos (birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features that are not present on the bogus Seals.

The macro shot of the Seal from almost the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.

The center of the Seal and paper also appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image too), and not by any beam of light.

The texture of the Seal in all shots is also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.

Feature #3: Self-defeating evidence presented in support of the COLB.

Case in point: the set of stamps and folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason -- that the first fold line was present but the second one was absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be skeptical of it:

The presence of a very prominent second fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show where it might have been?

As might be expected in this, "Say whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the "Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.

Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution, full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300 DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me, but with the owner information covered up.

That set of scans was still at twice the size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request, though).

Where I'm going with this side story is to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however, before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that, when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the Factcheck image.

Actually, it showed up better on the last set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now, the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly, bled through the paper to the front side.

There is a fourth critical feature of real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy made of the reverse side of the COLB:

In other words, to really ensure her privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with, or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is real from what is not.

As would be the case in nearly all of the evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them have stepped forward to admit it.

Feature #4: a shot to the midsection

If you have ever taken an art class or a photography class, then you probably learned something about perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional one.

The photographer and/or the person directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object positioned at different angles. There is not a single, point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo #3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it, and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the photographer's arm covering the Seal area.

These complications were not accidental, but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the object being held in place was a "three-dimensional" COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a "three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words, "FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate." This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.

Technically-speaking, since we are discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height (up and down), width (left and right), and depth (forward and backward). Depending on how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may not be visible.