Obama eligibility: Kenya question

April 25, 2012 Terry A. Hurlbut 25 Comments

The Obama birth certificate. The birthers know something is wrong with it.

Obama eligibility investigators have overlooked a vital question. An alleged birth certificate for Barack H. Obama lists the birthplace of his father as “Kenya, East Africa.” But that is not the birth certificate that Lucas Smith says he got from a Kenyan army officer. It is the “official” long-form birth certificate file that the White House released last year. The problem: Kenya never had that name.

Obama eligibility: many birth certificates

The first Obama eligibility challenges came from the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, during primary season. For various reasons (including the murder of a close friend of the Clintons), the Clintons stopped their challenge. But others took it up and have talked about it ever since.

The Obama eligibility question has two parts:

Where was Obama born, and
Were both his parents American citizens or nationals, or not?

No one disputes that the man whom Obama identifies as his father, Barack H. Obama, Sr., was a subject of the Queen of England. He was born in Nyasa Province in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. On that ground alone, Barack H. Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States.

But activists still dispute Obama’s birthplace as well as what his parentage means. Obama says that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Until last year, he refused to release anything more than a “short form” with the title “Certification of Live Birth.” For reasons that no one explained, the legislature of Hawaii passed a law permanently sealing the long-form birth certificate in 2010. Then-Governor Linda Lingle signed that law. Her successor, Neil Abercrombie, dumbfounded the country by saying that he could not find the long form! Finally, on April 27, 2011, the White House released the infamous PDF file. Only Obama’s apologists and advocates have ever said that this satisfied them. Famously, Alexandra M. Hill, of Genova, Burns, Giantomasi and Webster, conceded in a New Jersey administrative hearing (April 10, 2012) that Obama would introduce neither that file nor any other document to prove his eligibility.

Other events have clouded the Obama eligibility issue since before the Election of 2008. In October of 2008, Jerome R. Corsi of WND traveled to Kenya to learn more about Obama’s origins and parentage. On October 7, Kenyan immigration authorities detained him and his companion all day. They then bundled him onto a British Airways flight and told him,

Don’t ever come back. See you in hell.

This account of the affair, sympathetic to Obama, admits (or avows) that many Kenyans called Obama a “son of the soil” and maintained his rock-star image long after he toured Kenya in 2006.

On October 8, 2008, YouTube User “syc1959” released this video asking why Obama never released a “long form,” among other things. It also showed what a Republic of Kenya birth certificate might look like. Ironically, that serves as a standard of comparison. In August of 2009, one Lucas Smith tried to sell what he said was a “certified copy of registration of birth” for Obama. This link has that document, and one other that purports to be a hospital birth certificate from Coast Province General Hospital in Mombasa.

The Smith certificate, pro and con

On August 2, 2009, WND asked whether the Smith documents could be genuine.

WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.

The problem: the document form is not identical to the snapshot in the YouTube “syc1959” video. WND did not publish any snapshots of the “other birth certificates” that they got.

Snopes.com, first of the “urban legend research” sites, condemned the Lucas Smith documents as forged. They did show a snapshot of another birth certificate that they compared to the Smith document. That other birth certificate came from Australia. Snopes also asked why Obama Senior and his then wife, Stanley Ann Dunham, would have gone all the way to Mombasa, instead of Nairobi, which was much close to where Obama Senior lived.

But Snopes might have made too much of one other alleged discrepancy. The date on the “certified copy” document is February 17, 1964. Snopes insists that the Republic of Kenya did not call itself that until December 12, 1964. But in fact, the Protectorate of Kenya became independent of Britain on December 12, 1963. Activist Jomo Kenyatta governed Kenya with a caretaker government until the 1964 anniversary, when the new constitution was ready.

CNAV concludes that the document called “certified copy” cannot be genuine. The so-called hospital certificate (with the baby footprint and embossed seal) suffers from association. The source that produced it, also produced an obvious forgery.

Orly Taitz foolishly tried to introduce one or both documents into evidence in August. Undoubtedly she harmed her reputation, even among Obama eligibility challengers, by doing that.

White House certificate

The Obama birth certificate: probable casualty in the Obama eligibility battle

Obama's long-form birth certificate, as released by the White House. A photocopy of an image in a book, with green safety-paper texture added after-the-fact. Suppose a teacher had assigned this as homework? Would that teacher still be teaching?

But the same standards that cause a reasonable person to reject the Smith documents, apply also to the White House document. The blogger “Sherrie Questions All” pointed out a discrepancy with the birthplace of Obama Senior on the White House document the day it came out. Specifically, that certificate lists Obama Senior’s birthplace as “Kenya, East Africa.” Never once did any place in the British Empire have both these names at once. The British first called the region British East Africa, or the Protectorate of East Africa. After the First World War, the British transformed their protectorate into a crown colony. They renamed it Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. This was the name the region held in 1961.

The “Sherrie” blog misstated the real name of the region. But the point is still valid. “Kenya, East Africa” was never a valid name for the birthplace of Barack H. Obama, Senior.

Summary

Many on both sides have clouded the Obama eligibility issue. The “Kenya question” is still open; the Lucas Smith documents prove nothing. But almost a year before Smith produced them, Jerome R. Corsi traveled to Kenya and there the authorities arrested him, detained him, and then deported him. Corsi did not invent that story; even The Huffington Post covered it. The authorities could have reacted in anger at Corsi’s coverage of the political shenanigans of the time. But they also could have taken offense at Corsi for getting too close to Obama’s own origins. Obama’s cousin, Raila Odinga, had a hand in the shady electioneering in Kenya then. That cannot be a coincidence.

Nick Purpura, the lead New Jersey Obama eligibility challenger, told CNAV today that he and his friend Ted Moran will appeal the administrative law judge’s “conclusion” to the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court. Other Obama eligibility challenges are pending in other States. Purpura asked pointedly the same thing that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, asked. Specifically: why won’t Congress investigate the Obama eligibility question? Why, for instance, are landing records for six days in August of 1961 missing from the National Archives? Could a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama exist after all, perhaps in a Nairobi hospital as Snopes suggested would be more logical? Why did Kenyan authorities arrest, detain, and deport Jerome Corsi? Would Kenyan authorities dare treat a US Representative the same way if he traveled to Kenya to follow the same leads Jerome Corsi tried to follow?