Investigating the Obama Birth Mysteries

This Extremely Large Ditch, a Feat of Ancient Engineering, Was Dug by Native Americans in the Southwest -- for Drainage and to Provide Shady Areas Where They Could Live and Store their Corn. (While Some Might Doubt this Claim, It Can Be "Indisputably Proven.")

This is the 5th and final part of my response to the July 17, 2012 press conference by Sheriff Joe Arpaio (“America’s Toughest Sheriff”) in which he and his “Cold Case Posse” claimed to have “indisputable proof” that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a “forgery.”

This article was actually written back in August, and was intended to be Part FOUR of my response to Arpaio’s press conference. However, right when the article was almost finished, Arpaio Posse consultant Garrett Papit turned up here to claim that he had absolutely “proven” the PDF was “tampered with.” That was a rabbit-trail that eventually led to this article, which documented the fact that Papit had based much of his “analysis” on technical claims he made that were simply wrong. In addition, it revealed that the PDF had been examined by one of the fathers of the kind of technology that was used to compress (or “optimize”) the President’s birth certificate image, and that genuine, world-class expert had seen nothing he would attribute to manual intervention or tampering.

After that, I had pretty well decided to let this almost-finished article simply die. I honestly was not going to publish it. But then an email exchange with Mr. Papit impressed upon me that birthers are going to keep demanding a “demonstration” that innocently reproduces every characteristic of Obama’s PDF in detail, and will keep claiming that the lack of such a demonstration is “proof” that the birth certificate is a “forgery.”

So this article is still relevant, and I decided to publish it as Part 5, the final part of a series.

Part 1 revealed some important information on what I knew and could document regarding the background of the Arpaio “Posse’s” investigation.

Part 2 exposed that Arpaio’s posse fabricated their most important evidence and in fact lied to the nation.

Part 3 revealed that not only do the fraudulent codes presented to the public by Arpaio’s posse fail to match the real 1961 federal codes, they don’t match the 1961 Hawaii statistical codes, either.

And finally, Part 4 (as mentioned above) showed that Papit’s foundational technical claims that the PDF was “not possible” to have been created using MRC (or MRC-like) compression were just simply wrong, and revealed that one of the world’s top experts in this type of technology saw nothing that really suggested any kind of forgery or “tampering.”

The rest of this article, with the exception of the very end which I am having to finish, is pretty much as I wrote it in August.

An Absolute Sham of an “Investigation,” From Beginning to End.

Before commenting on Arpaio’s “expert analysis,” let me state that I find it astonishing that I should even have had to write this response. If any genuine, complete, competent, real investigation had been done, my writing this would never have been necessary.

There are many indications that the Arpaio posse’s inquiry was never a professional investigation — from its earliest inception. Whether conceived as such or simply steered that way by birther promoter Corsi, the “investigation” seems to have been nothing more than a witch hunt with a pre-determined conclusion.

Aside from the flat-out fraudulent claims regarding the statistical coding, the only other thing the Posse produced of note was two new “experts” who supported their desired conclusion.

In passing, I’ll note that even though they unquestionably knew of me and others (they even mentioned my name during their first press conference) they obviously didn’t invite anyone onto the team who wasn’t likely to further the witch hunt.

This hand-picking of agreeable authorities would explain their choice of Mr. Garrett Papit. Papit has been a birther now for quite a while. In the past, he’s made an entire series of birther assertions that have been shown to be entirely invalid.

For this reason, Mr. Papit’s eagerness to reach the Posse’s desired conclusions — rather than any track record of accuracy — looks to have been his most important qualification.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, below is an example of 7 separate birther claims made in the space of just a few hours by Mr. Papit last year. And every single one of those 7 claims had already been debunked as good evidence of Obama’s ineligibility prior to the time he made them.

I’m not going to go into detail on each of these, because every one of them has been exhaustively covered already. The falsehood of #1 has been shown both here (several different ways!) and by many other writers. The remaining six points were covered at length in my book, published months prior to Papit’s posts.

Now these aren’t the only known invalid birther claims that Mr. Papit has bought into and promoted. But seven in a row, on one single page, ought to be sufficient to show that Mr. Papit — regardless of whether he may do IT stuff for a Fortune 500 company (as he pointed out to me in an email) is not a credible authority on the facts.

And Mr. Papit was their major new “expert witness.”

Having said that… I noted earlier that I thought (at the time, at least) that Garrett’s work was better than that of some of the other birther “experts.” Some of these descend into the downright awful.

So Mr. Papit comes out with yet another birther report — this one’s 30 pages — which makes technical arguments that Obama’s birth certificate just has to be a hand-created forgery. According to his theory, certain kinds of compression just “can’t produce” the effects seen in Obama’s birth certificate.

But as I noted in an email to Mr. Papit, since we have known examples of all of the important characteristics of the document (the layers, the color-background-plus-multiple-single-color layers, the to-the-pixel-duplicated characters, and so on) in other files that are known to have been scanned and optimized, that’s rather like arguing that black swans can’t possibly exist. [Update: As noted, it's now been shown that Papit's major technical claims did not hold water.]

I frankly found their second expert, Tim Selaty, Jr. more credible than Papit. When it comes to basic computer knowledge, Selaty seems quite competent enough. And at this point, I don’t doubt his sincerity; although I must confess I’ve been burned by assuming good motives of birthers before.

In any event, Mr. Selaty didn’t even get his paper presented to the public by Arpaio’s posse. Instead, it was published at his own site.

Why did Arpaio’s posse use Selaty’s name but not his paper? I suspect two reasons. First, I suspect they didn’t want to reveal Selaty’s age. Selaty is about 22 years old, and has no known prior track record of this kind of analysis at all. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself; but personally, I’ve been working with computers since before Selaty was born. So Selaty is hardly the kind of distinguished expert the Posse would like for you to believe. They’re basing their claims that the birth certificate of the President of the United States is “indisputably a forgery” on the statement of an unknown 22 year old? Really?

Secondly, while Selaty was generally supportive, his paper seemed to contradict some of the Posse’s earlier claims.

Like the claim that the birth certificate is a hand-constructed work of graphic art.

Now I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow against either of these papers, because not only is such a response entirely unnecessary, it’s not even appropriate. Both papers were fatally flawed from the very beginning, because the entire approach and methodology used by both authors was wrong from the very start.

Why Their Methodology Is About as Invalid as One Can Even Imagine

Whatever their basic technical competence, I can hardly describe to you how bad, how flawed, how invalid the methodology used by both Garrett Papit and Tim Selaty, Jr. is. And it’s the same methodology used by other birther critics of the PDF.

Here is their method, in a nutshell:

• Start with the knowledge that any graphics or computer file that can be created, can be created by hand. (This is a true fact, by the way; at least in theory; although in practice it may be a different story.)
• Assume that IF Obama’s PDF file was created through optimization and other innocent processes, you can find those exact processes, duplicate them, and get results that are really, really close to the original.
• Assume that if you fail to find the exact processes that produced Obama’s PDF, then the PDF must be a hand-created “forgery.” Or — at the very least — that it must have been “tampered with.”

Now on the surface, this sounds like a fairly reasonable method. But it isn’t.

Let me show you a couple of gigantic flaws here.

The first one seems obvious, at least to me. It assumes that all of the relevant equipment, software and settings that produced the PDF is readily available to you, both in terms of your knowledge of what is out there, and in practical terms. It also assumes that you can test the trillions or quadrillions of possible combinations exhaustively enough (both of their testers ran “more than 600” tests) to find what you’re looking for.

Entities like the United States government tend to (let’s be frank here) spare no expense when it comes to outfitting themselves. A multi-million-dollar budget for White House IT equipment seems not only plausible, but most likely. I frankly don’t have the millions required to buy and test all available multi-million-dollar systems, and I doubt folks like these birther experts do, either. I also know from experience in working with the federal government that the budget is also likely to include custom software as well as modification of commercial software.

So the notion that we can find exactly what software and hardware systems the White House used unless they tell us is a bit unrealistic.

The second gigantic flaw is perhaps a bit more subtle, and it has to do with testing one theory and not the other.

Test Only the Theory You Want to “Disprove.”

We have two basic ideas of how the file could have been produced:

Theory A: All the characteristics of the file were produced through optimization (or “compression”) and other innocent processes, such as a couple of smudges on the scanner glass, maybe somebody adding a clipping mask to clean it up a bit and hide those smudges, and so forth.

Theory B: The file is a hand-created forgery. (Or at least, it was “tampered with.”)

Now we propose to test ONE — and ONLY one — of those two theories. And if we can’t produce the file by that means, then we will accept that the other theory is correct.

Do you see the hole here big enough to drive a train through?

If you’re going to take this approach, then in order for it to be even remotely valid, you’re going to have to test BOTH theories using the same basic approach, and not just one. And you’re going to have to do so objectively.

Not to mention exhaustively, which is a very, very tall order.

If you’re only testing the optimization theory, then you stand a very good chance of simply proving your own ignorance. Because given the unlimited range of possible software that might have produced what you see — including obscure high-end programs, and custom programs whose code and algorithms aren’t even publicly available — and given the possibility of some innocent multi-stage process (e.g., it passed innocently through multiple users including multiple operating systems and software packages) there’s a really, really good chance that it is simply beyond your scope to determine the exact process.

The Grand Canyon Was “Indisputably” Dug by Native Americans.

The same essential method allows us to easily “prove” that the Grand Canyon was dug by the American Indians.

We go out west. We find this enormous canyon, with a river at the bottom. In many places, the canyon is over a mile deep.

Wow. That’s what we call “anomalous.” That’s really anomalous.

And right away, we can think of two possible theories to explain it.

Theory A: The Grand Canyon was produced by innocent natural processes (erosion by the river?)

Theory B: The Grand Canyon isn’t really natural. It must have been hand-dug by somebody, and simply made to look natural.

So let’s use the same basic method Arpaio’s Posse used on the birth certificate.

First, let’s look around and see if rivers ever produce canyons like this one.

2,500 Miles of the Mississippi River -- Plus Hundreds of Other Examples from All Over the World -- "Prove" that Even Massive Rivers Just Don't Create Mile-Deep Canyons.

We look at the Amazon. Nope. No canyon there over a mile deep. Not at all.

We look at a bunch of other rivers: The Ohio River, the Tennessee, the St. Lawrence, the Missouri. We look at a bunch of rivers in Europe and Asia.

Not a single one produces a canyon thousands of feet deep.

True, we do find some rivers with canyons (just as Arpaio’s posse admitted that optimization does produce layers).

But nothing like this.

Okay. So we proclaim on that basis — tentatively, of course — that rivers simply do not create canyons like the Grand Canyon.

So now that we have eliminated that possibility…

It must have been dug by the Indians. There is “simply no other conclusion.”

When our idiotic — I mean invalid — conclusion is challenged, we then go out and find people to “investigate whether it’s possible” that a river could have created the Grand Canyon.

And those hand-selected experts — we take care to avoid choosing anyone to be a part of the team who’s likely to reach a different conclusion — build models of rivers. We have two experts who each build 600 different models of rivers. They even go so far as to use the same kind of rock found in the Grand Canyon, and to estimate erosion over a long period of time. A particular problem is that rivers just don’t cut very deep.

And so our experts, using their methods, are unable to duplicate a Grand Canyon.

It’s “conclusive,” then! We call a nationwide press conference to announce the news. Voila! By the process of elimination, we have “absolutely,” “indisputably” “PROVEN” that the Grand Canyon was dug by the Indians!

Now, do you see the “mistake” we made? Or perhaps — depending on our motives — the sleight of hand that we pulled?

We failed to equally and realistically test the plausibility of our second theory as well.

We failed to apply the same kind of standards in testing whether the Indians could have dug the Grand Canyon. And we assumed that if we couldn’t reproduce the first theory, then the second theory “must” be true.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

A conclusion is only as good as the method used to produce it. And This… One… Is… Garbage.

And this is absolutely nothing new. As I said in my book — published more than a year ago:

To those who would claim that we must duplicate the document using the exact software and settings: Let’s try this.

Why don’t we take the same standard of proof that you want, and apply it to YOUR theory?

Those who claim that the optimization and clarity-enhancing artifacts mentioned are proofs of forgery have never duplicated the file, either.

So… you produce a credible forgery, working by hand, showing ALL of the characteristics that we see in the Obama birth certificate PDF, AND THAT YOU CLAIM ARE EVIDENCES OF FORGERY.

Every single one…

And once you’ve finished with that project — once you’ve successfully duplicated the document — THEN YOU MUST CLEARLY EXPLAIN EXACTLY WHY, AS A FORGER, YOU CHOSE TO DO ALL THAT YOU DID IN PRECISELY THAT WAY.

Oh, It’s Been Tried.

I will briefly note that the experiment has been attempted. Ron Polland, a birther from way back, hand-created a “duplicate” of Obama’s long form birth certificate that at first glance looked similar. But it lacked many of the known characteristics of Obama’s PDF — such as the to-the-pixel duplicated letters. As such, it came nowhere near actually reproducing the document.

And by his own account, it took him five months to create it.

Five months, to hand-create a “duplicate” that wasn’t even a duplicate.

And with not the slightest of remotely plausible explanations for why such a “forgery” would have been created in exactly that way, or why those “anomalies” would have been hand-inserted into such a document.

A Far Better Method

There’s a far better method of considering the origin of the PDF:

List the theories, list the known characteristics of the file, and evaluate which theory or theories can explain the observed characteristics and which can’t.

Such a method will almost certainly produce one of two possible results.

Either we will find that there’s more than one theory which can adequately explain what we see, or we will find that one theory passes, and the other one fails.

I have done just that in the table below.

A green “check mark” means that a particular theory is consistent with the observed characteristic. Two check marks mean that the characteristic clearly supports a particular theory, and three check marks mean that the characteristic strongly supports a particular theory.

Likewise, a red “X” means that a particular characteristic does not seem consistent with a theory. Two red X’s mean that the characteristic really isn’t consistent with the theory, and 3 X’s mean that the characteristic can be considered strong evidence against the theory.

PDF Characteristics Versus the Two Possible Explanations

Characteristic of PDF	Forgery Theory	Optimization & Other Innocent Processes Theory
Existence of Layers
Lower quality than AP document	– Would require either two separate forgeries, or some means of transforming — optimizing — the original forgery into the PDF we have.
Existence of Savannah Guthrie photo with seal
Information identical with AP & Guthrie
Basic nature of layers: color background, 8 other layers of exactly one color each	Manually created documents almost never have only one color per layer.	– known to exist in scanned, optimized documents
Elements of form scattered over multiple layers	– utterly, totally inexplicable by a forgery theory	– similar effects known to exist in scanned, optimized documents
Letters touching images and lines are grayscaled (or “antialiased”); letters not touching are “bitmapped.”	– completely inexplicable by forgery theory	– similar effects known to exist in scanned, optimized documents
Signature split over multiple layers, partly grayscaled, partly bitmapped	– a forger would be insane to do this
Safety paper background	Would have to be scanned
White halo	Very unlikely. A forger or graphic artist would have the safety paper background on its own layer — and it would be pristine, unmarred by bits of other stuff, including the halo. The white halo wouldn’t exist.	Seems unusual, but explainable through innocent mechanical processes
White halo separated onto different layer from some letters (bitmapped), but on same layer with some letters from same words (antialiased)	– Why? For heaven’s sake, why?
“Scattered pixels” in background image	Pretty hard to get there this way.	– obvious and known artifact of optimization – this file WAS optimized.
File size	– Shows clearly that the file was optimized, which casts an enormous cloud on this whole theory.	– Proof again that the file was optimized
Difference in scaling	Would be extremely unusual	– identical to effect known to exist in scanned, optimized documents
Form area slightly blurred	Absolutely no reason for this in a forgery	Not an obvious artifact of optimization, but likely explainable by some feature or glitch of the scanner or image processing software
Letters are image of letters, not actual text	— A forger would’ve had to scan all the letters in — and place them by hand
Precise exact placement of letters
Fonts match fonts from known good certificates		perhaps a slight advantage here, not much
Green stamps	– ludicrous in a forgery	– exactly what we would expect
Apparent lack of chromatic aberration		– slight advantage here, as there is apparently a very small amount of chromatic aberration detectable, exactly as we would expect
To-the-pixel duplicated letters — including those in the form	– absolutely insane from the forgery point of view. There might well have been duplicates in the actual data — but the form would’ve simply been scanned, and that would’ve been it.	– STRONG evidence of optimization. This duplicates the same thing seen in files KNOWN to have been merely scanned and optimized, and not hand forged.
Apparent rotation of images	–	– could happen either manually or innocently.
Marks at right, under clipping mask	Claimed to be statistical coding marks — that is, numbers, but not identifiable as numbers
Presence of clipping mask	Could’ve been manually placed — but wouldn’t show forgery.	May have been mechanical, as left/right and top/bottom margins are identical — unexpected if done manually. Even if done manually, no reason to think it would be anything other than covering smudges
Alleged “kerning”	does not exist	alignment of letters appears authentic
Alleged lack of text curvature	actually, it curves.	slight curvature exists, same as form lines
Use of tab stops		matches that on Nordyke documents
Official seal	difficult to duplicate by hand	faint, not “overdone;” consistent with authenticity
Certificate number		Consistent with authenticity
Description of document		Consistent with authenticity
The alleged “TXE”		Viewed in AP document, it’s clear it’s an “H.” Consistent with authenticity.
Hospital name		Consistent with authenticity
Name of Kenya		Consistent with authenticity
Father’s race	False allegations made by birthers	Consistent with authenticity
Statistical codings	False allegations made by birthers	Not federal, Hawaiian. Awaiting analysis.
Spacing		– A good test, and consistent with authenticity
Inability so far to exactly reproduce document through optimization, etc.
Inability of birthers to exactly reproduce document — with all of its characteristics — through manual processes — and to explain exactly why they did it that way		— ALL characteristics are plausible via optimization and other innocent processes. Virtually no characteristic of the document is plausible via the forgery theory.
Attestation from Hawaii

There Are Multiple Characteristics Here that Just Don’t Occur Naturally in Hand-Produced Graphics Files.

The basis of the crank birther claim that Obama’s PDF is “forged” is that it contains “anomalies” that — according to them — do not occur naturally in optimized files.

I say “according to them” because — as demonstrated in the book I wrote on the topic — we have known examples of all of the most important anomalies actually occurring in files that are known to have been scanned and optimized.

What they won’t tell you is that this kind of analysis — applied to their own theory — destroys it.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is probably not possible to find one single graphics file, hand-produced by anybody, created before April of last year, that contains ANY of the following characteristics… let alone ALL of them at once:

• A full-color, JPEG-pre-optimized background, plus multiple graphic layers on top of that which contain precisely one color each
• A background form in which letters are scattered, apparently randomly, over multiple layers.
• Letters touching images and lines are antialiased; letters not touching are “bitmapped.”
• A signature is split over multiple layers, partly antialiased, and partly solid-color bitmapped
• An original graphics file, containing all the layers used to produce the graphic and all kinds of graphic data over 9 layers, which is roughly the same file size as an optimized JPEG of a graphic the same size (normal, multi-layer graphics files are almost always MUCH larger than similarly-dimensioned optimized JPEGs)
• A representation of an official document, in which six different layers of information — intended to be represented as typed information — all appear as varying shades of green (that is, as varying shades of the non-white background color)
• A large number of to-the-pixel duplicated bitmapped letters — including such letters in the form! (Let me add here that it is very unusual in a graphics file of this type not to use any antialiased letters to start with. Antialiasing is generally a default setting. And it is simply ludicrous to maintain that the form was “hand-faked” by copying letters one by one.)

These are characteristics that simply do not occur “in the wild” of any kind of normal computer graphic art. And the claim that “the forger was incompetent” is absolutely no excuse. Not even a total newbie, or a complete graphics idiot, would create any of these characteristics.

Indeed, the only two things the forgery theory has going for it are the fact that it has layers (which is no advantage at all) and the fact that non-birthers “haven’t duplicated the PDF.”

On the other side of the equation — taking the characteristics of the document one by one — we can see that EVERY known characteristic of the PDF is consistent with authenticity.

As we’ve seen, all of the most important “questionable” characteristics in the PDF are already known to exist in other scanned and optimized files.

In short, the birthers’ call to duplicate the document — if applied equally — is utterly disastrous for the forgery theory.

Of course, they will never apply such a standard equally. Because for a birther:

• A bald birther assertion equals “proof.”
• A person accused by a birther is guilty until proven innocent.
• Non-birthers must disprove every single birther claim or such claims are automatically true (in spite of a track record of over 100 such claims demonstrated to be without merit, at least 85 of which have been shown to be outright false).
• And the requirement to actually prove a claim applies to non-birthers, but never birthers.

Same Conclusion on the PDF As that Reached a Year Ago.

I said it in the book — over a year ago — and the same conclusion holds true today:

Having thoroughly investigated the matter in every respect that we could come up with, we’ve been able to find no good evidence at all — in regard to the characteristics of the PDF file itself — to support the idea that the file is a hand-built forgery.

Not one single point.

On the contrary, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the PDF document — far from being hand-built by a human — was simply optimized by the computer.

A year later, there are only two small things I would adjust in that statement.

First, I would include the fact that there may be one or two small characteristics that might be the result of innocent processes that don’t fall into the category of optimization. A couple of smudges on the scanning glass. Maybe — though this is far from certain — a small amount of human intervention to add a margin to the document and make it more presentable.

Secondly, I would be more emphatic.

So here is the edited statement, a year later:

The evidence is overwhelming that the PDF document — far from being hand-built by a human — is the result of normal and innocent duplicating and presentation processes. By far, the most significant of these is optimization.

Finally: Arpaio’s So-Called “Investigation” Was a Crime Against the Dignity and Authority of Legitimate Law Enforcement Investigation.

As far as I can see, such an “investigation” — including its fraudulent claims regarding the 1961 statistical manual — can only have happened through outright corruption, gross incompetence, or some combination of the two.

Law enforcement agencies have a responsibility to ferret out wrongdoing. But they also have a responsibility not to trump up charges, not to engage in witch hunts, and to have genuine probable cause before making either arrests or public accusations.

Whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio possesses any technical competence of his own is irrelevant. If he was going to sponsor an investigation, Mr. Arpaio had an obligation to make sure it was accurately and professionally done, and that the results would reflect reality — rather than brushing aside the competent evidence, merely to parrot birther fantasies.

The 1961 manual Arpaio’s Posse claimed to have has been found. And it completely contradicts everything they claimed it said.

So why won’t Arpaio’s office either produce their supposed evidence or publicly retract their claims? Because doing so would be admitting they’ve been caught in a major fraud. That’s why.

There's Been a Fraud, All Right -- Sheriff Joe Arpaio and His Lead "Investigator" Michael Zullo Present Their Faked Evidence to the Nation Last Week (July 17, 2012)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (“America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Maricopa County, Arizona) has been widely criticized for his “birther” investigation claiming that President Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. And his “Cold Case Posse” has been widely portrayed as inept.

But the evidence clearly shows that Arpaio’s Posse goes well beyond the “inept” — into the downright fraudulent.

For some important background, see: Statement Regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s July 17, 2012 Press Conference: Part 1

Arpaio and His Posse Based Their Most “Solid” Claim on a 1961 Manual They Claimed to Have, And Obviously Didn’t — But Which They Showed the World Faked Images Of Nonetheless.

Arpaio’s posse was clear and unambiguous in claiming that they had the 1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual from the US government, and that that manual backed their claim Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery.

Listen to them claim to have this 1961 “Code Book,” and the 1961 Hawaii codes, too:

Mark Gillar, in the official video presented on July 17: “In order to decipher these codes, the Cold Case Posse obtained information from the 1961 Vital Statistics Instructions Manual for births. Please note that the number ’9′ was the code used to indicate that an answer to a particular question was ‘not stated.’”

Jerome Corsi Says They Searched "For Months" to Find That 1961 Manual. Really, Jerry? He Also Says He's Going to Publish It Any Day Now. Somehow I Have the Feeling He's Going to Be Searching For a Few More Months To Come.

Michael Zullo, July 18, KABC Interview: “Number ’9′ — and we have the documentation to prove it from 1961 — that signifies information was not presented, or unknown or not stated.”

Michael Zullo, July 18, Peter Boyles show: “The number 9 for the federal code, and the number 9 per the State of Hawaii’s own statistical code, means ‘information not provided’ or ‘information not stated.’”

Jerome Corsi, July 19, Peter Boyles show: “We’ve got the documentation. We’re just going to release it over the next little bit of time. But [in] the original code book in 1961, if the race of the father was not listed or not recorded or not stated, that was coded number ’9.’ You wrote that in by hand, number ’9.’”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, July 18, Peter Boyles show: “[It] had a coding system, in pencil. Then we went to the archives and we picked up what that meant. And there’s a couple of things in the blocks that should be unstated, not anything typed in there, when you look at the code system.”

From the official video, prepared and narrated by Mark Gillar:

Mark Gillar, July 18 (Comment posted as “TeaPartyPowerHour” at the official video): “We have the 1961 manual… We have the V.K.L. recording and the manual. Only a few left in the US. Hard to get.”

“Hard to get,” indeed — as we shall soon see.

Let’s See What They Presented to the World As Being Supposedly From Their “1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual”.

The following images “morph” from the images they presented, to the originals that they took them from. You may find it easier to view the images if you click on them to display them on a separate page, and then return to the article.

The first falsified image from the official video:

Want the actual 1968 source that this came from? Here it is, sourced from the web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And the page that they pulled their graphic from quite clearly says, at the top of the page:

If you have this document, there’s simply no way that you can miss that it’s from 1968 — not 1961.

The second falsified image from the official video:

This one is even more rich. In spite of their claims to the contrary, they didn’t even get this one from the US government, or any government web site! They plagiarized it right out of a discredited article from birther web site “The Daily Pen.”

In fact, the Posse’s “we have the 1961 manual” claim was originally made by the Daily Pen in the same article that the Posse stole the graphic from. And the claim was already proven to be a fraud last March.

Incidentally, we can find a copy of the original 1969 US government document this image was fraudulently taken from over here. The source, again, is the web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Actual Manual Has Been Found. And It Directly and Absolutely Contradicts What Arpaio’s Posse Claimed it Said.

Since the United States Department of Health and Human Services told blogger Kevin Davidson — and he asked them twice — that they thought this particular manual no longer existed, the Posse may have been confident it could pull off this little scam without being held accountable for it. All they had to do was just not show the imaginary manual. Right?

Unfortunately for them, blogger ladysforest (who doesn’t even believe Obama is eligible!) asked a different government office, and was able to turn up a copy of the real manual.

According to the real 1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual and the closely-related tape specifications, the parents’ races weren’t even coded for the federal statistics. They were simply looked at and then used to determine the race of the child, which was coded for US statistics. The mother’s place of birth was also recorded — but only as “native,” “foreign” or “unknown.”

So that’s another false claim made by Arpaio’s posse, who apparently didn’t even have the 1961 manual.

And if they did, they obviously lied about what it said.

Below is an image from the real 1961 manual, showing the only race codes it has. Again, these are codes for the race of the child. And while some determination of parents’ races was made — in order to code the child’s race — that data was not coded by the feds.

The Real Codes from the Real 1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual
(Contrast Enhanced for Readability)

By the way, as you can clearly see, “9″ isn’t “not reported or not stated.” It’s “other nonwhite,” which (according to the manual’s instructions) actually happens to be how Obama’s father’s race would’ve been classified.

You can download the complete general instructions part of the manual here.

But that’s not even the full extent of how far the posse’s claims are from reality… because — as we are about to see — that particular manual isn’t even a key to the penciled statistical codes on Obama’s birth certificate at all!

Actually, the States Didn’t Even Have to Do ANY Statistical Coding to Report Their Data to the Federal Government in 1961.

Instead, they sent the US government all of their actual birth records on microfilm, and the statistics information was both classified and transferred to punch cards by workers who referred directly to the actual, microfilmed birth certificates. From page 5-3 of the US government’s 1961 report on birth statistics:

With the exceptions noted in the next paragraph [which didn't include Hawaii], natality [that is, birth] tabulations for 1961 are based on information obtained from microfilm copies of the original certificates. These copies were received from the registration offices of all States, certain cities, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The statistical information on these records was edited, classified, placed on punchcards, and tabulated in the National Vital Statistics Division (NVSD).

Here’s Where They Likely Change Their Story and Start Claiming, “Actually, Those Were State Codes, and It’s the State of Hawaii Manual We Have.”

But this story won’t fly, either.

First of all, they’ve already quite clearly claimed it was a very specific federal code book they had — the “1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual” — so the lie is on record for all time.

Secondly, they’ve publicly mourned a complete “lack of cooperation” for their birther “investigation” from the Hawaii Department of Health.

And third:

The “Hawaii Girl” Certificate Establishes that the Real Hawaii Codes in 1961 Weren’t What They Showed You, Either.

First, This Certificate Posted in a Corsi Article Disproved One of His Major "Forgery" Claims. Now, It's Shown that Their Claimed Code Set Wasn't Used by Hawaii in 1961.

I subsequently caught them scrubbing information from their site that contradicted and destroyed one of their major conspiracy theory claims.

That claim was that the certificate number on Obama’s birth certificate was “out of sequence.” I was alerted by a reader that WorldNetDaily had changed the images of the birth certificate, for no apparent reason. Curious to find out why, I fished the original images out of Google’s cache, and was able, by enhancing the image of the back of the certificate, to read the certificate number.

And that certificate number completely destroyed the claim that Obama’s certificate number was “out of sequence.”

The “certificate number problem” claim was based in turn on a clearly and indisputably false claim made publicly by Jerome Corsi, that Charles Bennett, Hawaii’s Registrar General, said that “birth certificates were numbered upon acceptance by the registrar-general, and there was no provision that would allow an accepted birth certificate to be put in a pile for three days before a number was stamped on it.”

By the way — I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this publicly before, but in the new image they substituted onto the site, they specifically and deliberately copied a section of safety paper from the bottom of the certificate over the upper left corner, in order to hide the certificate number.

So they went to pains to cover up the certificate number — which contains no personally identifying information — but left enough personal information visible that I and others were able to figure out exactly whose birth certificate it was.

Odd, that.

To give you yet another idea of the honesty level of the Cold Case Posse, in last week’s press conference, they even repeated the debunked “certificate number is proof of fraud” claim — even though it was known and verified to be false last autumn, and no new information has emerged to change that. WorldNetDaily hid “Hawaii Girl’s” certificate number of 61-09945 last fall — after Jerome Corsi brought her certificate to the world and verified that it was genuine — and Corsi and the Cold Case Posse are hiding it now, in order to keep claiming that Obama’s birth certificate is “out of sequence.”

“Hawaii Girl” Came From a Hawaiian/ Asian Family.

Of interest to us now is the coding on what I call the “Hawaii girl” birth certificate.

The race fields for mother and father both have the number “3″ written by them. According to the supposed codes from Jerome Corsi, Mark Gillar and the Cold Case Posse, this means that both parents were supposedly (American) Indians.

But they weren’t.

Online genealogical information indicates that “Hawaii Girl’s” mother was born to a (mostly) Hawaiian father and a mother with a Korean surname. [Note: I have now spoken directly and personally with "Hawaii Girl" herself to confirm her background, and deciphered her parents' race entries -- see my next article!]

Her father has a Hawaiian middle name, and a last name of Chinese origin.

There’s no sign of any American Indians anywhere — let alone on both sides of the family.

Lies, Lies, and More Lies

In the course of the past fourteen months, I have personally investigated something well beyond 60 different significant birther claims that President Barack Obama is ineligible to his office.

These include the claims that his birth certificate is a “forgery,” and also the claims that it takes citizen parents to be a natural born citizen.

Out of all that huge mountain of claims, I have never found even one single significant birther claim that actually stood up to scrutiny.

Simply put, there is plenty of evidence that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961.

Likewise, the evidence is simply and utterly overwhelming that “natural born citizen” means pretty much what everybody always thought it meant. And Barack Obama, born in the United States, is perfectly eligible from a Constitutional, legal and historical point of view to be President of the United States.

So if you don’t like him, do as I will be doing in November, and vote for somebody else.

In the meantime, there is more than enough evidence for any reasonable person to conclude that the birther movement is not just based on misconceptions, mistakes, or “production errors” — as Mark Gillar so eloquently termed the presentation of the second fraudulent image in his video.

It’s a scam from beginning to end. And it’s a scam — for the most part — on conservatives.

This evidence includes:

• Corsi’s known false statement about Charles Bennett’s 1955 article
• the long list of 23 claims in a row, published in my book, that Corsi peddled to the public that don’t hold water
• the fact that Corsi and WND have never retracted his false statement about Bennett or the disproven “certificate number fraud” theory
• Loren Collins’ discovery that one of Corsi’s articles was plagiarized from British news sources
• the fact that Joseph Farah and Corsi and WorldNetDaily practically covered up all of the contrary evidence that I sent them in August of last year
• the fact that they DID cover up the “Hawaii Girl’s” birth certificate number
• the most recent lies from the Cold Case Posse
• and the very long list of transparently false claims made by Mario Apuzzo, Leo Donofrio and others, documented here and elsewhere, to the effect that it takes two citizen parents to be a natural born citizen.

The inevitable conclusion, for any rational person who acquaints himself or herself with the evidence, is that the birther movement is not a mistake. It’s a scam. And while there may have been some honest mistakes on the part of some in the beginning, it is now based on nothing more than lies, lies, and more lies.

Response from Mark Gillar, Producer of the Posse’s Official Video

After an extensive email discussion with Mark Gillar, producer of the official video which contains the falsified images, Mr. Gillar stated that he received all materials and the script from Mr. Zullo of the Cold Case Posse and had no editorial control. A direct request to the Cold Case Posse for a copy of the “1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual” resulted in no reply.

Blogger and internet radio host “Reality Check” also reports that he engaged in a series of email contacts with Jerome Corsi. He states that Corsi provided no further evidence to back his claims. He has since issued a written challenge to Corsi and Zullo to produce the documentation they claimed to have.

Update — The Cover-Up Continues: Jerome Corsi has responded to calls for the Posse to show the manual they claimed to have by making excuses as to why they won’t produce it, and by making additional false claims regarding those who’ve asked them to do so.

Jerome Corsi appeared this week in a YouTube video intended to rally the birther faithful. In that video, he characterizes those calling for the Cold Case Posse to back up their claims as wanting some kind of inside window into the investigation — and as asking for all kinds of different documents. He claims that people who have asked for the evidence have “lost their mind.” He also indicates that the Posse won’t back up their fabricated claim; and he makes excuses as to why.

At around the 8 minute mark, Corsi says:

“August is still gonna be a research month. You’re gonna find Sheriff Arpaio’s group is gonna get increasingly closed-mouthed about the evidence that’s been created. It’s not gonna be released. The Obots are dying to find out what Sheriff Arpaio has, they’re going nuts over on various Obot websites, demanding we show this, demanding that the investigation produce another document, this document, I mean, they’re, they’ve lost their mind.”

Of course, anybody who doesn’t believe the fabricated evidence produced by Corsi and the Posse — including folks who are supporting Romney, like myself — is an “Obot” — an “Obama robot.”

The key thing here is the excuse Corsi makes for not backing up their clearly fabricated claim. And note the interesting wording Corsi uses to describe the Posse’s evidence:

“August is still gonna be a research month. You’re gonna find Sheriff Arpaio’s group is gonna get increasingly closed-mouthed about the evidence that’s been created.”

The evidence that’s been created? I always thought evidence was uncovered, or discovered, or revealed. Or maybe found. The word “created” would not normally seem to fit into that particular place — at all.

Unless, of course, evidence actually has been created.

Which we now know it has.