Certificate forger confesses? Naaah.
The Freepers are at it again and Citizen Wells is all over it, this time with a claim that the person who helped forge the COLB has come forward. Here’s the post. [Despite claims that this article had been "scrubbed" from the Internet, I had no problem finding it on the Free Republic site.]
Chanise Foxx, free republic
*** Update below March 7, 2010, 10:06 ET ***
“HUGE NEWS AT FREEREPUBLIC!!!
“My name is Chanise Foxx. I work at a office supply store in Kenwood, IL. After nearly 3 years of silence and death threats to me and my family to stay quiet, I am compelled to come forward and tell the world my secret.
“I helped Obama campaign staffer Divorah Adler create a fake birth certificate for use in the famous Fact Check story to prove the world of Obama’s birth in the 2008 election. Divorah approached me in early 2007 and held onto the birth certificate until she released it in August 2008.
“As I’ve been making fake IDs part-time for local college students for about eight years now, faking a birth certificate was actually quite easy. Our first step was to get our hands on someone else’s birth certificate from Hawaii. We then created the stationary to match…”e had to create an embossed stamp and rubber signature stamp for Hawaiian officials. With the help of a high-resolution scanner at the store, I did most of my work at night when the place was vacant…”
Did you catch the obvioius mistake? Obama’s COLB was released in June of 2008, not August. Another problem, is that is no Kenwood, IL–it’s only a neighborhood. 411.com didn’t turn up any Chanise Foxx either nor does Google have any reference to the name in the past.
It turns out that this is a recycled spoof. [Scroll down the the picture of Chanise.]
Birthers attack DNC documents
Nancy Pelosi
This is early in the story. The Birthers.org have published an article making some serious allegations against the Democratic party, and Convention Chairwoman Nancy Pelosi in particular.
The gist of the claim is that there is a standard certification that the Democratic party sends to state election officials for their candidates for President and Vice-President. After Obama’s selection as the Party’s candidate these certifications were duly signed an notarized. So far so good. But they claim that none of them were actually sent out because the Democratic party officials (and Pelosi in particular) knew that Obama was not eligible. Unwilling to perjure themselves, they sent out an altered version that omits this key phrase:
and that the following candidates for President and Vice President of the United States are legally qualified to serve under the provisions of the United States Constitution
TheBirthers.org makes this claim:
The version which is absent any certification of constitutional standing for the office of President is the version that was filed with every state in the country, and the one used by the DNC to elect Barack Obama President. (more…)
Yet another Kenyan birth certificate
This one is on YouTube. I think the videographer intends the viewer to interpret this sideways video as having been shot in Africa (hence the black extras), and one gets the impression that the speaker has obtained a birth certificate locally.
The video is too shaky and the resolution too poor to do much “analysis” of the document on the screen. Some might be able to freeze frame the image and record some details to see if it is consistent with a real document. The main point to keep in mind is that without any supporting evidence, a video on the Internet is nothing but a video on the Internet. However, it is entertaining, and I thought well done (for a fake).
A much enhanced version of the video is available at AboveTopSecret.com.
Musings on the Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate
Fake Birth Certificate
It looks like, at least in the eyes of its creators, the Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate has been a success beyond their wildest hopes. It has focused the scorn of the national press on the stupidity of the birthers, it has immunized at least part of the public against the next fraudulent document to come out and it tripled traffic here on Obama Conspiracy Theories. It was a very fine hoax because it was good enough to fool some of the people, but also bad enough so that thoughtful people could shoot it full of holes. The errors on it were in gradations of sophistication so as to drag out the agony for a few days.
What if…
What if it had been a forgery rather than a hoax, with the intent to fool rather to embarrass? What if the forger were Kenyan and had access to a real Kenyan birth certificate for someone born in 1961 for a model? Say they even found a blank form from the period in the bottom of some government agency filing cabinet, and typed it up on a vintage typewriter, using real official’s names, but of those no longer living. Forgeries of old documents have fooled experts, and even defrauded museums. It would be well within the realm of possibility that a Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate could be created that would defy all but the most sophisticated analysis.
Despite the offical record of Obama’s birth in the United States and denials from Kenya that claims Obama was born there are “baseless”, there are people whose judgment would latch onto such a document and never let go. In the end, it is not possible to force someone to believe what they do not want to believe through contrary evidence. It’s a fact that we just have to get used to. The birthers are here to stay.
Kenyan birth certificate proven fake – no doubt
In a remarkable piece of detective work, Koyaan over at Politijab.com has posted definitive proof that the Kenyan birth certificate was forged using an Australian birth certificate image on the Internet as the base document. ge. Read the Politijab article for details.
Click for larger view
Click for larger version
