Islandboy5150 has linked to several articles about the Obama long-form certificate of live birth (COLB), all from World Net Daily. I've taken a close look at the first one, the June 7 article by Jerome Corsi, and tried to keep an open mind. Corsi himself has no credibility with me, in part because he had already staked his reputation on Obama's non-Hawaiian birth in a book published before the state released the certified copy of the long-form certificate, so I'm not going to take anything he says on authority. I'll just look at what Corsi has to present with my own eyes, not taking any expert's word, and see what I find. I think that's all Islandboy is asking that we do.
Corsi is relying on an analysis by Paul Irey, who says that he used as the source document the Xerox copy of the COLB handed out at a press conference April 27, as shown. Irey says that this is a composite document constructed by extracting letters as needed from various authentic 1961 Hawaiian birth certificates originally typed on different typewriters. His evidence is that the same letter looks different in different places, whereas all instances of the same letter should look the same if they were typed using the same typewriter.
One thing I like about Irey's approach is that he is not basing it on the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version one normally sees posted on the web. To put something on a web page you have to scan it and put it in some kind of computer document format, but the PDF is not what the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH) sent the White House. There has been much confusion generated based on the artifacts created by scanning, but the scanning came later. As shown by the cover letter from Loretta Fuddy, the Director of DOH, what was sent to the White House was on paper, not a PDF: "Enclosed please find two certified copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth. I have witnessed the copying of the certificate and attest to the authenticity of these copies." See
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default ... ndence.pdf. By using the Xerox of one of these copies as given to the press, Irey has avoided the red herring of issues introduced by the creation of a PDF for posting. Unfortunately, we do not know how many generations his copy is from the original. At best, if the White House made copies directly from the certified copy, and Irey got his hands on one of these, rather than a copy of some reporter's copy, then it might be a second generation Xerox. For all we know, it might be a third or fourth generation copy.
In Exhibit 2, Irey identifies each letter typed into the form with a unique number, 1 to 244, and then he magnifies some of these in Exhibit 3 to large size so we can compare differences between No. 144 and No. 146, for example, a pair of As. I will assume that this was done honestly. I don't understand what Irey is up to after Exhibit 3, however. He switches there to some digitized letters different from those shown in Exhibit 3 with no indentifying numbers. I stuck to the part of the article where the source of each letter was identified and I could check the work with my own eyes.
The letters, when blown up, are blobby and irregular. That is what one would expect to see, however, in a multi-generation photocopy. The question Irey should have asked is whether the letters are any more blobby and irregular, and any more different in appearance from one another, than those in a similar document from a reliable source. Fortunately, there is such a document. Back in 2008 a thoroughly conservative blogger born in Hawaii who posts as SnarkyBytes shared a copy of his Hawaii long-form COLB that he got in 1998, before the state switched to giving out the certifications generated from a computer database. It is at
http://snarkybytes.com/2008/06/18/hawai ... cate-1963/, and you can download a copy. Open it to about 200% magnification and just look at the differences between the two As in ALAN in box 1a and that in Army in box 6c. They are blobby and irregular, just like in the Obama COLB, and every bit as different from one another. You can pick any letter and see the same thing. For example, still in box 6c, the upper serif appears to be at a different angle on one of the small Ls. It looks to me like all Irey has proved is that photocopying degrades text. To prove his case, the differences would have to be greater in the Obama COLB than in others, and I don't see it. We should find some other examples to compare with. It looks like idamtnboy already has an experiment like that in mind.
Consider the following as well:
1. This is clearly from an old-fashioned manual typewriter. Notice how the K in Kansas is well above the line and only partially struck? That's what happened back in the day when you were a little uncoordinated with the shift key. Those old typewriters produced especially variable text because the force used varied from stroke to stroke and because they used a cloth ribbon that was reused (simply spooling back and forth) until the type got too light. So we should expect even more variation between different examples of the same letter with a manual typewriter than with a Selectric or modern printer.
2. I think the typeface looks very similar from letter to letter after you allow for the degradation caused by copying. There is a very odd, big hook on each small T, for example, and an extra-curly tail on each small Y.
3. Irey's methodology is based on the theory that a false document was assembled by copying letters from multiple COLBs. Why would this be necessary if DOH were in on the scam? Ms. Fuddy vouched for the authenticity of the document, so if there is a conspiracy, she must be part of it. If so, she could just use an old typewriter to fill in an old form and the dirty deed would be done. None of the hard work would be necessary. Iray's forgery theory is not logical.
4. I understand why it might be necessary to cut and paste in order to create a forgery, but why pick each letter from a different source? Any sensible person would find one A and use it wherever an A was needed, find one B and use it, etc. It makes no sense for each to come from a different document, which is what Irey theorizes. Who has that many old Hawaii COLBs sitting around?
5. I also understand why it might be necessary to cut and paste each letter to create a name like Barack, but there is no reason it would be necessary to assemble the name of the hospital from multiple sources. Surely one could just use the whole block from another COLB for that. Yet Irey finds the same kind of letter-to-letter differences within "Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital" as he does among letters elsewhere in the document. See, for example, Nos. 58 and 63 (i), Nos. 57 and 89 (p), or Nos. 66, 71, and 91 (t). He uses these as examples of differences, and they seem as different from one another as any other letters Irey points to, yet they come from text that would logically have been copied as a single block.
In summary, I have tried to use my own eyes, examine the purported proof dispassionately, and not be a "sheeple." I am not convinced. Have I made an error somewhere?