Wikileaks on the birthers

Just on a whim, I entered this query at Google:

“birther” OR (“obama” AND “birth certificate”) site:wikileaks.org

I didn’t expect 59 results. I didn’t expect any.

One, from Stratfor, looks like a joke. A new Stratfor analyst became a US citizen on April 26, 2011, and wrote in an internal email:

Do you think it is a coincidence that Obama released his birth certificate the day after I became a citizen. I don’t think so.

Virtually all of the material is from Stratfor, for example Newsmax sending Stratfor a notice of them publishing an article (and reprints from WND as well), but at least one Stratfor employee has birther tendencies, writing in a 2010 email:

ICE should check Obama’s birth certificate to determine true identity. I would bet that Stick and I could prove US PPT fraud.

That same year, another Stratfor sender wrote about an upcoming Obama trip to Indonesia:

(and maybe Obama will bust out his birth certificate and Quran while he’s there in order to develop a peace treaty with jihadists and earn his nobel peace prize)

I wouldn’t want to paint Stratfor with a birther brush in general based on this more general email excerpt from 2012:

During his presidential campaign, Obama harboured some illusions about a post-partisan America. Given that ideological distinctions between the Democrats and the Republicans have grown fuzzy over the decades, the idea may not have seemed completely fantastical to some. He ought to have known, though, that a rightwards shift in the so-called liberal centre invariably encourages conservatives to drift towards extremes.

What made such a process even more likely was the fact that a substantial proportion of American citizens were discomfited by the very idea of an African-American head of state. Small wonder, then, that the nonsense about Obama’s birth certificate gained so much traction.

It turns out that one of the WikiLeaks documents is a copy of the Honolulu Advertiser announcement of Obama’s birth, from August 13, 1961. They released it on October 28, 2008 (a couple of months after it became public). The item is unremarkable except for the talk page which has some birther-like commentary towards the end.

Another WikiLeaks area is called the Public Library of US Diplomacy, and it contains copies of US Government cables. One is titled “Daily Summary of Japanese Press 07/31/09” containing a book review of “Remove Obama’s mask” by Kazuyki Hamada. (I think that name translates into English as “Jerome Corsi.”) It’s very birther.

I went through all the results (Google first indicated over 400, but wimped out as I paged through them). A few were off topic. Nothing really exciting or new.