HONOLULU, Hawaii – A private investigator claims employees of the state Department of Health forged three Hawaiian birth certificates for Barack Obama to "screw with birthers."
Takeyuki Irei told WND one document placed the birth at Kapiolani hospital, another at Queens Medical Center and a third in Kenya.
The 57-year-old detective, who has been a P.I. since the 1980s, said he was stunned when he discovered that the purported copy of Obama's original birth certificate released by the White House was more or less an exact image of one of the forgeries.
Irei said he was provided a copy of the document indicating a Queens birthplace but ascribed no importance to it. He explained that he was focused on finding evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, which he thought would provide a financial windfall.
Image released by the White House April 27, 2011 |
The image released by the White House was trumpeted as "proof positive" Obama was born in Hawaii in an announcement accompanied by a rare presidential statement on the issue.
However, few other officials were talking. Hawaii authorities ordered WND not to contact the state employee identified as the source of the phony certificates. Also, WND learned the state's employees had been ordered not to respond to WND questions.
Officials at Kapiolani also refused WND permission to ask questions of anyone at the hospital. Spokesman Shawn Nakamoto told WND the hospital would not respond to anyone at "your organization."
Likewise, officials at Punahou High School, where Obama graduated, also refused WND access to information that often is available, such as copies of student newspapers.
Irei explained the state employee told him the fake records were kept in a vault in Room 303 of the Hawaii Department of Health. The room, next to the director's office, is well known and holds files such as the records of residents of the Kalaupapa leper colony on the island of Molokai.
There is no explanation of the image, which can be seen here:
A closeup of the document itself is here:
Among other things, the "Certificate of Live Birth" on the Reporter page says the birthplace was "Kenya; Registered Honolulu HRS 338-17-8 per Grandmother."
The document lists the race for the father, "Barack Hussein Obama Sr.," as "Negro-African."
But it was the document released by the White House April 27 that stunned Irei.
He said the document indicating Obama's birth as Kapiolani looks just like the Queens Medical Center document he had previously possessed, except the hospital name and the doctor's name were different.
"When I saw the birth certificate the White House released, I realized the story had changed from Obama being born at Queens, to him being born at Kapiolani," the detective told WND. "In 2008, when I first got the birth certificate, all the news reports [were] that Obama had been born at Queens."
As WND reported,United Press International and Snopes stated at one time that Obama had been born in
Queens Medical Center.
At the time, Snopes sent WND a statement reading, "A number of readers have written to us to point out thatWikipedia previously updated their Obama-related entries to resolve the same discrepancy, so we included a similar clarification in our latest round of updates."
WND requested confirmation from the state Department of Health that the image released by the White House is an accurate representation of the original Hawaii records. Spokeswoman Janice Okubo referred the question to Donalyn DelaCruz in the office of Gov. Neil Abercrombie. DelaCruz did not respond to a WND request.
WND also requested comment from the White House but did not receive a response.
Two retired police officers in Honolulu, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, also told WND they believe the White House document is a forgery, and they are trying to identify who created it.
Irei said he discounted the worth of the copy of the Queens document he obtained, as he thought the "money" would be in documenting a Kenyan birth.
Takeyuki Irei |
He said he became convinced that Obama was not born in Hawaii because he believed the online "Certification of Live Birth" posted by the Obama campaign was faked, and he could not understand Obama's vehement refusal to allow his records to be released.
If there was documentation of a Hawaii birth, he reasoned, Obama would have no reason to conceal information and would have authorized the release of his records.
He said he and a partner began searching for evidence that Obama might have been born in Kenya. They approached the state employees, asking for help.
Irei said the initial documentation he obtained from the Department of Health employee was the birth certificate indicating Obama was born at Queens. The doctor was listed as John Ohtani, whom Irei remembered as the doctor who also had delivered his own son, Chad, in 1980.
WND confirmed that Ohtani practiced at Queens during the years in questions. He has since died.
Irei said he kept the copy of the Queens document on file until about two months ago when his office was being repainted. The folder holding the birth certificate was among some 20 boxes of old records that were destroyed in the cleanup.
"I thought the money would be in proving Obama was born in Kenya," he said.
"I wish I knew what I had, and I wish I kept it. We thought because the birth certificate we had was fake, it wasn't worth any money. I wish we knew what we had," he said.
"Whoever forged these birth certificates wanted to cover all angles," he said. "Even making a birth certificate that showed Obama was born in Kenya that was an obvious forgery. The grandmother's name was forged."
Irei said the question still remains, "Where was Obama born and who has his real birth certificate?"
The authenticity of the image released by the White House has also been challenged by numerous document specialists.
Moreover, there remains a long list of other unanswered questions.Former Health Department chief Chiyome Fukino, according to NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff, said she had seen the original birth certificate prior to Obama's public document release and that it was "half typed and half handwritten," a statement that clearly conflicts with what the president actually released, which was typewritten.
The president himself even affirmed parental citizenship was a constitutional issue when he co-sponsored a resolution to address Sen. John McCain's presidential eligibility that implied a "natural born Citizen" must be born of "American citizen" parents.
Hawaii says it has Obama's original long-form birth certificate in a bound volume in a secure vault. Department of Health spokeswoman Okubo explained to WND that the original was copied onto "safety paper," and copies were sent to the president.
The White House then posted at image of the copy on this website and made copies to hand out to the press corps.
The document was analyzed by Ivan Zatkovich of Tampa-basedeComp Consultants, which consults on intellectual property for telecommunications, web publishing and ecommerce and has provided services for corporations such as McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, Citicorp and Amazon.com. Zatkovich has 28 years experience in computer science and document management. For more than 10 years he has been an expert witness in federal court in both criminal and civil litigation.
He contended that the multiple layers of the PDF document are anomalous.
"When a paper document is scanned on a scanner and saved as a PDF file it normally contains only a single layer of graphical information. The PDF that appears on the White House website however, contains multiple layers of graphic information. Multiple layers usually appear in a document like this when it is being edited or modified in some fashion," his report said.
"It is possible to take a single layer PDF and inadvertently create multiple layers, without changing the image in any fashion. But that does not appear to be the case here. The multiple layers in the PDF document are a result of changes made to the image."
Zatkovich told WND that the White House image "has specific content extracted from that base layer and enhanced."
He said, "This was done through an explicit operation to edit and/or enhance the printing in the document. There is no ambiguity here. There was an explicit action by a person to modify the document. … Mostly like to enhance the legibility, but still an explicit action none the less."
He explained the analysis he did was similar to the analysis that routinely is done on evidentiary documents for cell phones and computers in cases involving child porn, fraud and murder cases.
"The content clearly indicates that the document was knowingly and explicitly edited and modified before it was placed on the web," he said.
Read more:Hawaii detective charges: 'Birth certificate' a fraudhttp://www.wnd.com/?pageId=295369#ixzz1LsOizL7y
