I did a bad thing. I said something without checking my facts. I won’t make excuses. I did it and I apologize. What I said, in the article Math anomalies in new article, was that the date of the Obama divorce decree doesn’t jive with Obama moving to Indonesia at age 2 following the divorce. That’s wrong. Barack actually was 2 at the time of the divorce so a move at age 2 would be consistent with a move following the divorce.
So, did Barack Obama really move to Indonesia at age 2, instead of age 6 as I have always said? Could the statue of Barack Obama in Jakarta, Indonesia, shown right, be that of a two-year old?
The way to answer such questions is to look at the record. The Washington Post says the move occurred in 1967, but they don’t source it. The Post wrote:
The son’s notion of his loving mother’s naivete began in Indonesia, when they arrived in the capital city, Jakarta, in 1967, joining Soetoro, who had returned to his home country several months earlier.
That Post article is the source the Wikipedia uses to document the date, and probably where all the conventional wisdom on the subject springs from.
To answer any lingering doubts, one must consult primary sources, and in this case there is a wealth of contemporary information obtained via the Allen FOIA. What we find in the record is that Barack’s stepfather Lolo Soetoro returned to Indonesia in late July or early August of 1966 and that while in Indonesia an application was filed to return to the United States to be with his wife and child. (The visitor program under which Soetoro had been in the US required him to return to his native country for two years prior to returning to the US.) In a document dated October 6, 1967, we find this (page 31):
The applicant’s United States citizen wife resides at 2234 University Avenue, Honolulu, Hawaii, with her 6-year-old United States citizen son by a prior marriage. The applicant, who returned to Indonesia and has been residing there for over 14 months in an effort to satisfy the foreign residence requirement, earns a very meager salary and is dependent upon members of his family. His wife has remained with his stepchild in the United States and earns about $400 per month. She has made an application for a visa for herself and her son to travel to Indonesia as she is determined to join her husband as soon as possible, if he is not permitted to return here, because she can lo longer endure the separation.
Obama was registered in school in Indonesia January 1, 1968. That pretty much nails it. Obama was 6 years old when he went to Indonesia. I should add that the date of the Soetoro marriage (also from the FOIA) is in March of 1965.
Why is anyone discussing this in the first place? There are two answer to that question. First the birthers want to cast doubts on every aspect of Barack Obama’s live story so that they can maintain that he is a “stranger” and is hiding his true self. The second reason relates to Indonesian law. If Obama was 6 (and he was) then Indonesia wouldn’t have granted him Indonesian citizenship without renouncing US citizenship (and that’s impossible for a 6-year-old). So it proves Obama was never an Indonesian citizen.
I want to thank Mario Apuzzo for pointing out my error on his blog, although it would have been more helpful if he had told me directly, since I don’t normally visit his blog.
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