There have been dozens of legal challenges to President Barack Obama's status as a "natural born citizen" – as required by Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
And WND has reported that among the documentation not yet available for Obama's history is a long-form original birth certificate, kindergarten records, Punahou school and Occidental College records, Columbia University records and thesis, Harvard Law School documents, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records, and his adoption records.
It is possible never before has an American president taken so many pains to hide so much of his background – to the point of hiring lawyers to race around the nation fighting anyone who tries to access his life's records.
But it appears the concerns some doubters have expressed over Obama's Selective Service registration form may not be fully justified.
The charges include a claim the form signed by Obama was created in 1990, not 1980; the postal date stamp had incorrect information on it, and there were a couple of other discrepancies.
Image of Selective Service document |
The allegations, while significant, may have become lost in light of the federal lawsuits being presented to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Obama's presidency and other issues that developed.
But several experts say there is little reason for alarm over this document.
Postal abbreviation
One allegation involved the postal date stamp used on Obama's Selective Service form. It's been reported the form has the abbreviation "USPO" for United States Postal Office, even though when Obama's form was completed in 1980 the agency was using the abbreviation "USPS" because of a change to the name "United States Postal Service" several years earlier.
The National Postal Museum directed inquiries to Dick Sine, one of the top postal historians in the country who wrote a stamp column for the New York Times and authored "Stamp Collecting for Dummies." He reported that it is entirely possible that a clerk was using an outdated stamp.
"Personally, my general rule of thumb is, 'If a clerk might have an outdated device still lingering around someplace with research (especially at a smaller PO) sooner or later it is going to show up on some piece of mail it is not supposed to," Sine responded via e-mail.
Another expert contacted agreed with Sine, "I know that there were still some post offices in Texas using older (double circular) date stamps with the USPO instead of USPS in the time frame you mentioned. There was no requirement that I am aware of for a postmaster to replace his date stamp, and many did not."
Indeed, the experts confirmed some locations were using "USPO" stamps as late as 2000, 20 years after a Hawaiian post office stamped Obama's registration form with a "USPO" stamp.
Document locator number
Another allegation suggesting the forged document theory is that the Document Locator Number (DLN) at the top right of the registration form – 0897080632 – means the form was produced in 2008 and not in 1980, the year Obama signed it. This is based on the fact the first two digits are "08."
However, Will Ebel, the former director of the Selective Service under Ronald Reagan, and Dick Flahavan, the current associate director of the Selective Service who has served the government since the Reagan years, agreed that the number was not a decider.
"Registration forms created prior to the establishment of the Data Management Center had a DLN configuration different than the current format. The first three characters (089) of the DLN for this form designate that this form was key entered by
one of the keying centers of the Internal Revenue Service," they concluded.
The experts reported the "089" number, instead of identifying a date, indicated where the form was keyed in, becoming part of a sequential system only years later.
10 digits
Another claim is based on the 10 digits of Obama's form, while others have 11.
The government reports at the signing by Obama in 1980, Document Locator Numbers were only 10 digits, an identifier that later was changed by the Selective Service to be 11 to help track them.
"The field was later expanded to 11 digits to accommodate the decade change in 1990 and subsequent decades to avoid duplication of some Document Locator Numbers," Flahavan said.
Legibility
Another claim is that the form signed by Obama has a date reference that could indicate it was signed Feb. '90, not Feb. '80, but Flahavan reports while the paper version of Obama's form may be hard to read, the microfilm image of the document clearly shows the date of the form as Feb. '80.
The date
The claims that Obama's signature is dated a day after the postal stamp also remains inconclusive for analysts who reviewed it, who pointed out a clerk can forget to change a stamp, or a person can mistake the day when signing.
Flahavan also reports questions about a possible conflict between Obama's signing date in Hawaii and his attendance at Occidental College is not verifiable. He said the records seem to indicate Obama signed on July 30, 1980, four weeks before classes started at Occidental, and the Sept. 4 date on a computer printout simply is when the record was added to the database.
The issue over Obama's eligibility, however, appears to be far from documented. Some of the lawsuits that have developed – and still are pending – question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.
Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.
Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at approaching $2 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions.
"Where's The Birth Certificate?" billboard helps light up the night at the Mandalay Bay resort on the Las Vegas Strip. |
The campaign followed a petition that has collected about 475,000 signatures demanding proof of his eligibility, the availability of yard signs raising the question and the production of permanent, detachable magnetic bumper stickers asking the question.
The "certification of live birth" posted online and widely touted as "Obama's birth certificate" does not in any way prove he was born in Hawaii, since the same "short-form" document is easily obtainable for children not born in Hawaii. The true "long-form" birth certificate – which includes information such as the name of the birth hospital and attending physician – is the only document that can prove Obama was born in Hawaii, but to date he has not permitted its release for public or press scrutiny.
Oddly, though congressional hearings were held to determine whether Sen. John McCain was constitutionally eligible to be president as a "natural born citizen," no controlling legal authority ever sought to verify Obama's claim to a Hawaiian birth.