This article is a response to an article written by blogger Butterdezillion titled: The Whopper that Got Away. Before I begin my comments on the article, I want to say a few words about Butterdezillion. I’ve seen some comments on this blog about Butterdezillion that I don’t think are fair or accurate. In my view, there is no more diligent and tenacious researcher in his Obama Conspiracy business than Butterdezillion. Her contribution to the information store of we work from should not be underestimated. I think Butterdezillion gets it wrong because of confirmation bias and the fallacy that is sometimes phrased “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” This last fallacy came into play the last time Butterdezillion and I tangled on the bogosphere. She had assumed that the State of Hawaii was keeping material secret because she couldn’t find it on the Internet (the information actually was on the Internet). That same issue will come into play in this article.
Readers here may recall that the US Department of State responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Christopher Strunk for passport applications from Barack Obama’s mother. There is a reference in those records to a passport application in 1965, but the 1965 record itself could not be found. According to the State Department documents and an affidavit from the official in charge, routine passport records for the period including 1965 and earlier had been destroyed as part of a program to reduce the cost of storage.
Butterdezillion, in her article, The Whopper that Got Away, alleges that the record destruction is a myth concocted by the State Department to cover up bad things about Barack Obama. This sounds fantastic on the surface. Why would the State Department make up a story about purging 125,000,000 records, when it would have been easier to just not find or alter the one record? The story requires creating a fake State Department document from 1985, one with the names of ten State Department officials who worked on it, that was supposedly circulated to every diplomatic and consular post in the whole world! It requires perjury committed a federal official in a federal lawsuit. For Butterdezillion’s theory to be true everybody must be lying, but pointing out the obvious implausibility of such a theory is not the point of this article. This article is about the argument Butterdezillion makes to support her theory.
The argument is two-fold. First, she alleges that it would be physically impossible to cull 125,000,000 records with the staff available and within the time claimed by contemporaneous documents about the records destruction. The second argument is that the records could not have been destroyed without certain notification appearing on certain federal web sites, notifications that exist for other changes in records retention policy. (If you want to look at the retention schedules, visit this web site of the national archives).
We know that the State Department claims to have culled passport applications from 1925 – 1961 between June 1984 and February 1985 with 40 staff members, according to an internal State Department Memo (see last 3 pages of document). According to a GAO report, the records were not separated as to type; records that were to be destroyed were filed with records that were to be retained. Butterdezillion came up with processing time of about 2 seconds per record. While Butterdezillion doesn’t detail the calculation, the number isn’t much different from what I got, so I’ll use her number.
Based on GAO estimates, the number of records to be retained was about 3% of the total. I envision a worker sitting at a desk with a stack of several hundred application forms and a box of rubber thumbs going through them (the records, not the thumbs) and picking out one in 33 to retain. You can do the experiment with a stack of paper yourself, assuming you have a rubber thumb, and I think you will conclude that it is possible to do a sheet every couple of seconds (two seconds is really a long time if you think about it). Also note that the staff numbers were described as approximate and we don’t know about overtime.
The second part of the argument is there is no independent record of the authorization to destroy the records. Here is where Butterdezillion really presents some good documentation of archived records retention requests from the 70’s and 80’s and records schedule legislation at the National Archives. I was impressed. She showed various documents before and after 1984 regarding the destruction of passport applications, but nothing about the project in the State Department memo from 1985 (links to various documents found are in her article).
Spurred by the belief that Butterdezillion’s thesis was wildly implausible, I dug further and I came across a GAO report from August 6, 1981 titled Management of the Department of State Office of Passport Services Needs To Be Improved that confirmed that the GAO was indeed pressuring the Department of State to dispose of the records. The action described in the Department of State memo matches the GAO recommendations for a 15-year retention of the paper applications from 1925 until microfilming began in 1978. The GAO report includes the approval of the United States Archivist for the records destruction. While the actual records disposition paperwork from 1984 has not been found, this independent GAO report, the contemporary document from the Department of State, and the testimony of a federal official from personal knowledge all combine to confirm that indeed the Department of State purged passport applications for native born citizens between 1925 and the first half of 1978. Also note that prior to a change in the legislation in October of 1984, it was the GAO, not the National Archivist, who was responsible for deciding that records could be destroyed.
There are two passport applications from 1925 until 1978 that are known to have survived, one referenced in an affidavit by a private investigator (Phil Jacobsen) in the Strunk case (Strunk also is rejecting the thesis that the records have been destroyed) and, interestingly enough, a renewal application by Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro herself. Jacobsen’s affidavit is really sworn and notarized, and so I take it much more seriously than those that are not. The passport application copy itself is not included, and one would certainly want to see it before saying too much about it. Obvious questions are whether the record is one that was to be retained under the guidelines, and whether the document is an original or a microfilmed copy. The Dunham/Soetoro application is however, available. I want to think a bit more on that one.
Since Strunk presents the same basic material as Butterdezillion in his objection to concluding his lawsuit, we can expect a more authoritative response from the Department of State that will likely clear up any loose ends.
nutterdezillion gets it wrong because she thinks proving herself right is far more important than discovering what is right.
I have to agree. I have read her blog and observed her interaction on this site when she posted her original conclusions. And I respect the fact that she does extensive research but she ruins that by not being an impartial researcher. She is obviously biased. She is operating from the conclusion that Obama was not born in HI and that the state and the federal government is somehow covering for him. She allows the absence of document or evidence to he her “evidence” or her proof of her conclusions….Which makes her similar to some of the other birthers we ridicule.
Re: the 125 million documents.
1. The memo does not claim that 125 million files were culled between June 1984 and February 1985.
125 million “records” were accumulated in the 59 years between 1925 and 1984. The staff had culled 36 of those years. Assuming a regular accumulation of records, that’s only 76 million of the documents. (I’d also bet against a regular accumulation of records – I’d wager that our State Department generated more paper in 1961 than it did in 1925.
2. Butter’s calculation is further off because she uses 180 days. There were 245 days between June 1, 1984 and February 1, 1985.
3. Using 76 million documents, and 245 days, we get 979 records reviewed per hour, per reviewer, not 2,179.
4. We aren’t told whether “records” are referring to files, or, more likely, individual pages within files.
5. A review I was working on had 5 reviewers coding 5 million pages of documents. We did it in a little under 1 year, but since we all had other projects going at the same time, it amounted to, approximately, 2 attorney-years – 4,000 hours. That’s 1,250 pages per hour. We didn’t just sort the documents into two heaps – keep and trash, we made three separate judgments for each document – privileged/non-privileged, relevant/non-relevant, and, if relevant, which of 8 different topic areas the document fit. The State Department review, by contrast, could have been as much as 78,000 man-hours, or 39.2 man-years! Their review is also much less complex – take those rubber thumbs and flip through the pages, pulling out only the ones you need to keep.
BZ also falls prey to the opposing fallacy – which I will call – “the absence of evidence is absent evidence.” In other words, just because we have no evidence of a State Department coverup – we should not infer that there was no coverup. On the contrary, we should infer that evidence of the coverup does (or did) exist – only that it remains inaccessible to us because the evidence has been lost, withheld or destroyed.
In essence we have two theories presented here to explain the lack of a passport application record. And there is no solid evidence that would disprove one theory or the other. Yet – even though both theories appear to conform to the available evidence – the two theories are not valid – such that a person could just as easily choose either theory over the other.
The test to apply in this situation is usually called “Occam’s Razor.” When two or more theories conform to the available evidence – pick the simplest one. Clearly, taking the State Department at its word is far simpler explanation (yet one that still conforms to the available evidence) than a different theory that requires the complicity of numerous individuals over a period of many years.
After all, inconvertible evidence is a rarity. Most sets of evidence will allow any number of hypotheses – no matter how wild they may be. The fallacy of most accomplished conspiracy theorists (like BZ) – is not necessarily that they present theories that contradict the available evidence (though they often do) – but rather that their theories fail to pass Occam’s Razor. Specifically, an effective conspiracy theory posits a far more complicated explanation to account for a body of evidence – when a much simpler explanation would suffice.
B is a partisan hack who only cares about the law when Democrats allegedly break it, not Republicans.
Put her on a stand facing even a halfwit attorney in a Court of Law and she’s fold like an origami.
That automatically relegates her and everything she writes to the rubbish heap.
Dr. C. are these the types of documents that Butter says she cannot find from the mid 1980’s?
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/departments/department-of-state/rg-0059/nc1-059-79-12_sf115.pdf
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/departments/department-of-state/rg-0059/n1-059-96-005_sf115.pdf
I’ve watched threads with butterdezillion’s twisted logic before.
The closest I can describe it as: a person who plays with a dartboard at night.
She throws things in a general direction and looks to see what stuck afterward.
When provided with a factual impasse, it must all be a conspiracy.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Yes. Those are documents she links to on her site, but she (and I) failed to find the one changing the retention period from 100 years to 15 years for the routine paper passport applications.
There are 245 days between June 1, 1984 and February 1, 1985, but that includes weekends. There about 175 week days. Using your figure of 76 million records, that’s about 2.6 seconds per document.
My impression is that “records” refers to pages and not applications. The GAO talks about separating records that a permanent from records that are disposable (the former being something like a consular birth certificate and the latter the passport application).
In any case, I agree that no superhuman effort is required to process that many records in the time reported.
The main distinction I make in my mind is between someone who is wrong and someone who is lying. I don’t think Butterdezillion is lying. Obviously there is no possibility of useful dialog between me and someone who is lying, but there is with folks who have, in my view, reached the wrong conclusion. I don’t want to ridicule people who I just disagree with and thereby keep the channels of dialog open. Of all the birthers, Butterdezillion is probably the best hope for dialog.
I agree with you. I don’t think she is lying either. I just think she has confirmation bias. I feel she believed that Obama was not born in HI and all of her research is geared towards confirming that idea, which does not allow her to accept any contrary views.
I think it goes beyond confirmation bias. Have you read her introductory page?
My take on this is very simple: if you claim you care about the law, then it shouldn’t matter which party or president is in power. Otherwise you’re nothing but a partisan hack.
Glenn Greenwald, for example, is not a hypocrite because he has criticized both the Bush and Obama administration for the same illegal actions.
B. on the other hand only targets Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, all the while sanctimoniously claiming to care only about the Law, while in fact ignoring GW Bush’s illegal actions.
How can you take someone like that even half seriously is beyond me.
I wholeheartedly agree. There is a big problem in first establishing conclusions that are undeniable in your mind and then desperately searching for thousands of hours to justify your conclusion, then coming up with no credible evidence and then repeatedly declaring that lack of evidence must justify your initial suspicions and somehow it is clear and obvious evidence of a vast, enormously complex conspiracy and cover up on a global scale involving tens of thousands of people over nearly fifty years. I’ll take Occam’s Razor over that kind of hundreds of miles deep, rabbit hole insanity.
Here’s the famous article about the phenomenon of the conspiratorial mindset in politics. Conspiracy has been a part of American politics since our founding.
any dialog with nutterdee is obviously going to be kept strictly corralled within certain parameters. she is certainly not your run-of-the-mill birfer who’s reached the wrong conclusion because he’s idly swallowed entertaining smears and rumors after a purely superficial consideration of the question. worse, she’s zealously dug through all the evidence but just as zealously discarded everything that contradicts what she wants to believe.
she’s invested months of time and sweat to build and fortify an edifice that is nothing more than a house of cards and she knows that outside her echo chamber she’s considered a joke, which in her own mind only makes her a martyr. a person who becomes this personally invested in her peculiar stance, after having built herself a monument to her own willful ignorance, is going to have a devil of a time climbing back down even if she eventually wants to, since people always build these things without fire escapes.
If many documents are still at the State Department (1976-present) is it possible that a copy of the authorization for changing the retention period can only be obtained through FOIA requests.
Have you seen this document:
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/departments/department-of-state/rg-0059/n1-059-97-006_sf115.pdf
While it seems to apply to documents created after 1993, on page 3 and 4, item 6 CPAS – Passport and Citizenship and mentions a 12 year limit and it references (NC1-059-79-12) for permanent records.
I also wonder if, since the documents were being housed by the GSA if the change in records retention was filed under the GSA’s heading. The decision about record retention was made in cooperation between the State Department and the GAO, according to the memo.
No. It was too new for me to select. Still looking for the smoking torch.
I don’t know about that – she seems to have bought into the Race Bannon story – hook, line and sinker.
Being a research scientist I know that results are everything, reproducible results.
I used to work with a Pakistani woman who would write down her results first, before doing the analysis of the product and of course, magically, her formulation ALWAYS produced the exact same results, no matter what lot of reagents she was using at the time.
Anyone with any chemistry background can tell you that the odds are so astronomical that you would EVER get the exact same results, yet she did every time, until she went on vacation and her responsibilities were put on me.
Of course I followed SOP to test her formulation and every batch failed on potency.
When she came back to work she was pounced on immediately by Management and she fessed up about fudging her results to her liking.
She was immediately fired and escorted out of the lab.
Because of her fake results the company had Retooled the bottle molds at the factory, at a cost of $18 million dollars, for their main NEW product that was a failure before it was launched.
This brings us to BZ who, in her mind, knows the results that she wants and will not look at anything to the contrary.
I am currently debating with Butterdezillion on the FreeRepublic.com website. She is rehashing the Pelosi/DNC two Hawaii certificates issue.
She is under the impression that the US government has outlawed Grand Juries.
What BZ is doing, in what passes for her, mind is confusing
The 5th Amendment
The Doctrine of Selective Incorporation of the Bill of Rights
ACTUAL Grand Juries
The1946 implementation the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the move to prosecuter indictments
The removal of the grand jury running it’s own little investigator/prosecutor activities
As “Da Grand Jury”
Ask her to please provide you with a detailed breakdown of the historical basis of all of the above and you should be rid of her for a while.
I think she’s confused by the reaction to the pretend “American Grand Jury” and the Reverend Manning “grand jury.”
I think we have outlawed outlaw grand juries.
if bz didn’t swallow these rumors, she wouldn’t be a birfer. what makes her such an odd duck among birfers is that she doesn’t do so idly; she is clearly captive to a compulsive need to exhaustively research these rumors before swallowing them, perhaps to convince herself that she’s more well-informed than anyone else in the room. if nothing else, bz is living proof that being well-informed means absolutely nothing without good judgment.
Yeah doc, that’s what I wrote back to her, that she was confusing the American Grand Jury with real, authentic Grand Juries. That launched a discussion of why can’t average citizens form their own grand juries. I reminded the right wingers that ordinary people ARE the members of real, authentic Grand Juries.
I threw in that their position was dangerously close to advocating “pure democracy” over our constitutionally mandated “republican form of government.” Right wingers tend to heat anything that begins with the prefix “demo”! 😉
.
Has not even one of these people who have wasted their time with these “common law” grand juries even bothered to research on how grand juries were formed at common law? They, of course, would find that there has never been a right to form one’s own grand jury. At common law, at the begining of each term of the court, a writ or precept in the name of the king or two or more justices of the peace was sent to the sheriff directing him to summon 24 or more men to be impaneled by the court as grand jurors. See can read all about common law and early American statutes regarding grand juries here:
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http://books.google.com/books?id=2VcEAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA1314&lpg=PA1314&dq=%22grand+jury%22+precept+sheriff+%22common+law%22&source=bl&ots=aomh6xVmzK&sig=Hv0OXu0Lz_FYADneLs42QCSCY3U&hl=en&ei=cnWKTJW2NISdlged3_mqCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22grand%20jury%22%20precept%20sheriff%20%22common%20law%22&f=false
Doing as you suggest would require intelligence and common sense.
But its much more fun to set up a kangaroo court and call it a “Super Dooper Patriotic American Patriot not Communist or Muslim Grand Jury”
Besides the legal barrier, the essential problem is that a real grand jury is supposed to represent a cross section of the community, while a bunch of birther who volunteer to tar and feather the president do not.
You mean that you really believe that a person can be an average American and not hate that “communist,” “illegal alien,” “Muslim,” “radical,” “black racist,” “half-rican” masquerading as President of the United States??? Who knew? 😉
Can you imagine what a f’ed up country this would be if any ol Tom, Dick and Harry can form their own Grand Jury?
Well, as I too have been to BZ’s site and have debated her at length in the past, I’ll weigh in.
Sure, I think she’s “sincere” in her convictions – if you don’t count that she has to “lie to herself” to maintain her illusions and consistently discount or scramble to find irrelevant things to nitpick which contradict her worldview. So, I guess that is sincerity in terms of a self-built wall of denial and need to corroborate her preconceived conclusions. Me, I consider that a form of madness.
She’s obviously obsessive-compulsive to some extent. I think that’s fairly clear.
She’s also a full-blown conspiracy nutter of the NWO and Black Helicopters variety. So, that has a strong influence on the strands she follows and how she views everything as some vast sinister conspiracy.
What I think stands out the most though is how often her own conclusions and links she will point you to are not even close to being supported by her own information. She totally lacks proper logical and deductive reasoning skills and not only tries to connect dots that don’t connect, but sees dots that don’t even exist.
So while she may be someone you can “carry on a conversation with”…I think she is hopelessly beyond being able to be rationally reasoned with. The conversation might be fairly pleasant, but still pointless.