Birth certificate "painter" mocks Obama claim that image proves authenticity
By Israel Insider staff July 7, 2008
In a rambling interview with the Daily Kos -- the blog site that published the supposedly authentic Barack Hussein Obama birth certificate and his own birth certificate manipulations in the same June 12 post, Jay McKinnon, aka opendna, says he manipulated the Obama birth certificate to create a blank Hawaii birth certificate as a "template," supposedly for a John McCain birth certificate. But he says it was not an attempt at deception but a "lame joke" that he now regrets.
But in trying to avoid legal trouble by diminished the significance of manipulating electronic images, he further undermines the explicit claims of the Barack Obama campaign and the Daily Kos itself that the posted images of his purported birth certificate prove that the candidate was Hawaii-born. McKinnon, who says he was trained in document analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, says it's impossible to assess the authenticity of a birth certificate from image files rather than paper documents. "It should be self-evident that a JPEG [image file] of a scanned official document cannot be valid."
While that conclusion echoes and strengthens the calls of those who have been demanding that Obama provide paper proof, McKinnon undermines his own credibility from the get-go when he claims that he first encountered the Obama birth certificate issue "around June 12, 2008" when "As I recall, someone sent me an email containing two images. One of the Decosta birth certificate and the other from Fight The Smears. The subject line was 'Birth Certificate Appears to be "Invalid."
The only trouble with that statement is that McKinnon had already created the blank Hawaii birth certificate template for John McCain and the "Ahphorgerie" joke on June 12 before Fight the Smears had even published the birth certificate. Kos had published it that morning, about four hours earlier. Patricia DeCosta's birth certificate surfaced in the blogosphere only a week later, on June 19. So how did he compare the documents? And why would he say it was the first he'd heard of the birth certificate controversy when he had already posted his own patently fake certificates.
In any case, McKinnon says, comparing two images to determine the validity of one or the other is a patently ridiculous task: "It was a kin [to] comparing two photocopies of dollar bills to determine if one of them was counterfeit."
There's another oddity. The Fight the Smears image is a low-resolution image which has been proved to be derived directly from the Daily Kos scan. The former would have been useless for McKinnon to look at. So why didn't he look at the Daily Kos scan instead, which he had to know was the source for what appears on Fight the Smears? It doesn't make any sense.
His explanation of the blank template is even more convoluted. "I made another joke about people making allegations of fraud: If people are allegedly faking birth certificates for Obama why shouldn't they fake one for McCain? In fact, why shouldn't both Senators be born in the same place at the same time? I would have left the date of birth in but it was too late to UNDO. Again, I thought it was self-evident what I'd done, how I'd done it and that the motivation was satire. But like I said, they weren't very funny jokes."
Anyone who cares to read the comment thread can see this is a lie. No one was making allegations of fraud at this time: Daily Kos had just published the "real thing" just hours before. They were having fun, showing the Dead Sea scrolls as McCain's birth certificate and other cheap shots. McKinnon is projecting this into the past to rationalize his own suggestion: "Why don't you print one up for him? Here's a blank template." He was just having fun. And while McKinnon may claim that no one took it seriously, the real point is not whether his blank template could be used to create a passable paper document but whether that blank template may have been used to create the birth certificate image file of Barack Hussein Obama, as the Daily Kos produced that very day, and the very same day that McKinnon produced his fakes.
"It should be self-evident that a JPEG of a scanned official document cannot be valid."
Jay McKinnon, DHS-trained document specialist and Microsoft Paint power user
Clearly it could have been, by the exact same technique that McKinnon used: stripping one birth certificate and adding new text for the desired data. We carefully did not accuse him of doing this, but as he proves, supposedly with Microsoft Paint (!), it would have been easy enough to do it. (It's still not clear why he went to all the trouble to make his "lame joke" or why a document specialist with extensive accounts at Photobucket and Flicker is using Microsoft Paint.)
The dubious origins of the BHO birth certificate on the Kos site, without a logical explanation other than that the Obama campaign provided it, strengthens the likelihood that the so-called birth certificate was produced in a similar way, and then "adopted" by Fight the Smears. The process of using Daily Kos as a production and publication facility is beyond irregular, especially given the highly tendentious content on that site, including most recently its promotion of fake press passes.
McKinnon was asked: Weren't you worried someone would download your images and make fake birth certificates? "Not in the slightest. Anyone who tries to pass off a forgery from those JPEGs deserves the jail time they get. (Again, my respect to Hawaii's Department of Health: they've done a commendable job.)"
"I believe a reasonable person would conclude that the intent was satire, humor or virtually anything but fraud. Furthermore, I am confident in ability of 11 and a half out of 12 human beings to distinguish between an image on a computer screen and a physical, printed, stamped and sealed government document (no matter how poor the quality)."
Here, too, McKinnon puts forward a red herring: the issue isn't whether someone is going to use his JPEGs to produce a phony paper birth certificate. Of course it was clear that "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" was a lame attempt at humor. The issue is whether McKinnon or someone else at Daily Kos used a blank template of a Hawaii birth certificate to create one for Obama. The fact that McKinnon, who prides himself on being so much smarter than everyone else, or at least 11 and a half out of 12, doesn't seem to address that issue only adds to the sense that he is being disingenuous and concealing the real timeline of events.
Though McKinnon's interview is transparently intended to exculpate himself, his critique raises the obvious question. There is no evidence that anyone at Daily Kos received Obama's paper birth certificate. So what did they receive? Another JPEG, at most. And after what he says in his Daily Kos interview, why should anybody believe that JPEGs produced by Daily Kos are authentic? As McKinnon himself says, any JPEG can be faked. So why doesn't Daily Kos take seriously the comments of their interviewee and acknowledge that the supposed image of Obama's birth certificate is of no validity in ascertaining the document's authenticity?
So how does McKinnon justify his belief that Obama is "natural born"? By the fact that he used a passport! But how did Obama get his passport? By producing, one presumes, a birth certificate. So where is it? Why is such a problem to produce it? Why should the wannabe President play hide-and-seek with the prime Constitutional requirement for a US President?
McKinnon personal attacks on me deserve only a brief answer. He refuses to discuss anything without his lawyer and asked me to provide the questions in writing. Then, instead of answering, he told me to call "the office", which turned out to be the Public Relations department of CSIS, the "Canadian CIA." I had not said anything about the CSIS or FBI before that. I had submitted, at McKinnon's request, the following question: "What was the role of Kos (Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas) in the preparation and publication of the documents?" McKinnon responded: "When you finally write your article, don't forget to recognize Uncle Mark's hard work. He'd be really hurt if you forgot him."
Another McKinnon joke? Perhaps. But I am not sure Markos Moulitsas will find it amusing.
Finally, McKinnon claimed I didn't include the quote he provided for publication. I guess he didn't read to the end.
But to bring things full circle, let's come back to another lame joke by McKinnon, a comment from June 28 with the surprising title: "Obama's not a citizen, and I prove it." He writes:
Even if we assume that Barack Obama's father is unknown, even is we assume that the father was not a citizen and was a alien from another country or planet, the following statement is still false:
Research has since uncovered the law, in force at the time of Obama's birth, that were he to have been born in another country, his young American mother's youth extended time abroad would not suffice to make him a "natural born citizen." (Reuven Koret, IsraelInsider)
Let's look at the applicable law, shall we? The Immigration & Nationality Act, Section 301(g) [8 U.S.C. 1401]:
"a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years;"
McKinnon then launches into a convoluted and rambling discourse on what Stanley Ann Dunham would have had to do to avoid being in the country. The only trouble is that the law he cites refers to children born after 1986. Here is the 1952 law in question, applicable to those born between 1952 and 1986:
The Immigration and Nationality Act of June 27, 1952, 66 Stat. 163, 235, 8 U.S. Code Section 1401 (b). (Section 301 of the Act). "Section 301. (a) The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: "(1) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof; ... "(7) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States, who prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than ten years, at least five of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.
So my earlier quote and argument stands, and McKinnon's attempt to prove Obama is a natural born citizen by virtue of his mother US citizenship goes the way of his other lame jokes. It's one thing for a document specialist to use Microsoft Paint, but if you're going to be lazy in your research, at least don't be so smug about it.
Once again we get to the main point, that even those who are inclined to believe that Kos of all the blog sites in the world had access to the paper Obama birth certificate and faithfully scanned it. If Obama has the proof of his Hawaiian origin, now is the time to produce it. Because the legal standard, let alone skeptical public opinion, isn't going to be satisfied by what appears on Daily Kos, because even the DHS-trained document analyst says what common sense and Hawaii statutes tell us -- a JPEG image has no legal validity. Obama's eligibility to be President thus hangs on a thread: the need to prove he has a valid paper Hawaiian birth certificate, signed, sealed and delivered.
With all due respect to those who claim that they have "busted" the image analysis of one or another of the birth certificate blogger-skeptics, powerfully joined most recently by "techdude" on Atlas Shrugs (which previously rejected the fake birth certificate thesis) they are missing the point.
It isn't the obligation of a journalist or a blogger or an imaging professional or a DHS-trained self-proclaimed document specialist to disprove that Obama is a natural born citizen. Obama owes it to the American people: he is required by the Constitution to fulfill that condition and to do that every citizen must do from time to time: produce the birth certificate. He prides himself on transparency, so why is he concealing and stonewalling legitimate demands for proof of? If he lacks one, and can't prove he has one, he can't be President. He wrote about having one in his book, Dreams from My Father (Chapter One) and he presumably had to have one to get a passport. So what's the problem? Why the hesitation?
Yesterday the National Review Online, which got this whole thing rolling with a request for Obama's birth certificate, a request supposed fulfilled by Daily Kos, weighed in again for the first time in weeks:
Is There Legitimate Doubt About Obama's Eligibility to be President? [Andy McCarthy]
I had not caught up until today with this apparent controversy over whether the Hawaii birth certificate proffered by Obama's campaign is a forgery and whether there are legitimate questions about whether he was born in the United States -- if he wasn't, he almost certainly would not be qualified under the Constitution and relevant immigration statutes to be president. Our Jim Geraghty seemed to pooh-pooh the birth certificate controversy about a week ago, but according to the above cited report (at a site called DougRoss@Journal) and a new one from Israel Insider, there are new developments, and the Obama campaign appears to be stonewalling. Shouldn't it be a fairly easy matter to prove he was born in Hawaii if he really was? Why wouldn't Obama just end this quickly?
Obama's "Fight the Smears" website, at least on this subject, is an embarrassment. Just look at it. As if when Hawaii became a state is at all an issue, or as if the 14th Amendment of the Constitution has anything to do with the criteria for a natural born citizen. And, really, what is the point of putting up a low-resolution image of an image that could be mocked up by anybody with Microsoft Paint and 10 minutes on their hands? No explanation, no provenance information, no reason to believe in its veracity.
Why, indeed, does not Obama make this issue go away? At this point, there's no good reason -- unless he doesn't have a birth certificate, or has one he feels compelled to hide. But now, after more than three weeks, with the affirmations of his campaign spokesman that the Fight the Smears birth certificate image is "real", he is in an even tighter corner: the real paper birth certificate of the candidate for President had better look a lot like the one on the web site, or he'll have a lot of explaining to do.
It is a matter of time now before a legal challenge is issued in one of the 50 states, or the call for paper proof is issued by a major pundit, publication, or political figure. The longer the candidate waits, the higher the risk.
It's unlikely that this time Jay McKinnon's excuse of "lame joke" will pass muster for Barack Obama.
This is the fifth of a series on the birth certificate. Dear Obama campaign, can you please produce a paper birth certificate so that we can return to our regular beat? Here's where you can find Part 1, 2, and 3 and 4. Other articles about Barack Obama and his mysterious background are linked on the upper left of this article.
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