The NSIS (National Security Intelligence Service) is sort of the Kenyan equivalent of the US CIA, used by conspiracy theorists as sources for rumors that cannot be verified by the public. Recall various claims about the CIA collecting DNA from the Dunham family.
Of course we have learned that sometimes government secrets are leaked. How can one tell whether a report from one of these secret organizations is real or just made up? Actually, we can get a great deal of help from the website WorldNetDaily. When WND reports on one of these sources they use code words to indicate whether the source is legitimate or a fake. A case in point is their May 30 article, Kenya probed claim Obama born in Africa: Internal intelligence reports indicate government investigation.
How to read WorldNetDaily
When reading WorldNetDaily, one should immediately disregard the article title. Titles correlate rather poorly with story content at WND, and appear to be designed throw the uninitiated reader off the track (or perhaps for marketing purposes). If anything of value is to be found, one must look into the article, and often at the very end.
In this article we are discussing three documents with Kenyan sources written on them. Two contain the name of Kenya’s immigration secretary as the author. These are, of course, confidential documents and cannot be verified by the source. In order to see if they are genuine, one needs to look at each and every reference to the documents in the article looking for the code word that indicates whether they are genuine. Among the many references in the article, we see one saying “purportedly written by” and that is the key phrase by which WND tells the initiated reader that WND believes them to be fakes.
I cannot stress enough that every reference to a document must be checked for the key words. If the reader just looked at:
Emmanuel Kisombe, the permanent secretary in the Ministry for Immigration and Registration of Persons, wrote a letter in July 2008 in reply to a letter from the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi that raised the possibility with Kenyan officials that Obama was born in their country.
they would think that WND was endorsing the letter; however, that would be a mistake as we have shown. To further hide the details, there is actually a photo of Kisombe next to this paragraph in the WND article to further distract from the coded content.
It’s also important to notice that anything that follows from a purported document is itself purported and fake, even if not explicitly labeled. An example is the clownish “interim report” only a birther could have written that WND says is from the NSIS (but not really because of the chain of “purported”). The text of the memo says:
Memo/Intercommunication 03OCT2008 FRM: Marcharia M.M., ASDD TO: Machage T.N., SDD /// We are on BRAMA 4 Team. We believe Mama Sarah Obama is a very important witness to the BRAMA case and the missing link in this matter. On more than one occasion Mama Sarah Obama has been a hostile witness in our investigations. She is either a pathological liar or trying to hide something from us because she says one thing now and retracts it the next day. In particular on the birth certificate issue she has deliberately given us very conflicting answers. We therefore ask you to consider subpoenaing her to swear under oath before we embark on the next phase of the investigations. ///
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to pick out the mistakes and implausibilities in the memo. It is rather comical that the NSIS memo uses the correct date format for Kenya: day, month, year while the fake letters use the American format: month, day, year.
Some thoughts about the BRAMA Team memo.
1) The memo is purported written by Macharia, M. M., ASDD to Machage T.N., SDD. According to Google, the character strings ASDD and SDD do not occur together on any web site in Kenya.
2) A general report would cover more than just Sarah Obama, and a specific report about her would include some details, the number of interviews, transcripts and the like. In either case a real report would be much longer.
3) BRAMA 4 Team is overly dramatic
4) A real Kenyan government report would have used Sarah Obama’s real name, not a family nickname.
5) Nowhere in the report does the writer explain to the reader who Momma Sarah Obama is (e.g., a relative of President Obama).
6) The report is vague. What did she say? What did she retract?
7) There is no explanation why Sarah Obama is the “missing link” or an “important witness”. What is she a witness of? What is she a link between?
8) It uses the phrase “birth certificate issue” but it wasn’t much of an “issue” in early October 2008 and not one in Kenya at all. It could be “question,” “inquiry” or “project” but not “issue.”
You do realize that Vladimir Putin’s experts declared the BC a forgery two days after its release? Implication- do you have a firm enough grasp upon geo-politics to know, hmm?
There’s no statement as to provenance of any of the documents. Not even a claim of an anonymous source. Just suddenly documents which appear out of nowhere. (Well, we kind of know where they came from….but the point is that the article doesn’t tell us whose ass produced it.)
So wnd makes stuff up, what else is new?
despite then never having seen the actual birth certificate?
wow! those russians are clever (i knew it was a mistake giving them chess sets)
Your source?
No, I hadn’t actually heard that rumor.
Right. This is where the code word “purportedly” comes in.
You do realize that the state of Hawaii’s officials in charge of vital records said the BC is genuine immediately after it’s release?
Please provide a source to your claim. Then provide the name of these experts. Then provide their qualifications. For each qualification, please provide confirmation from the institution (school, workplace, professional certifying organization) that they issued whatever certificate of qualification (diploma, aware, certificate etc.,) to the expert.
Do that, then we can talk
Why would any birther unflinchingly give credence to a rumored foreign opinion without any credible source or evidence over the established provenance of a certified document of the domestic authority of the state of Hawaii under the sovereignty of the United States of America?
Explain.
Because Vladimir Putin is a real American (He does martial arts!) and Hawai’ins aren’t?
Putin’s “experts”? How many Hawaiian birth certioicates have they issued? In his thirty year career, it’s safe to say that Alvin Onaka, PhD has issued well over 100,000 Hawaiian birth certificates. It would be no exaggeration to say he knows more about Hawaiian birth certificates than anyone on the planet, and by a wide margin. He is also a leader in the field of vital records generally.
http://hawaii.gov/health/about/pr/2002/02-43onaka.html
Even assuming Putin’s “experts” said what is claimed (doubtful) and even assuming that one of them is knowledgable in Russian vital records (unknown) there is simply no way they could possibly claim to rival Dr. Onaka’s knowledge when it comes to Hawaiian vital records.
here’s an honest review of WND by world of crap:
http://world-o-crap.blogspot.com/2011/05/wnd-you-idiots-should-give-us-money-to.html
And the Birthers have already arrived there…
Can you say…. de Vattel?
“Sure. I knew you could.” – Fred Rogers
Even though Ive been to the Kremlin, I dont have the sort of precision info you asked for. I think one factor was phrasing.
i wouldn’t put much credence into what 2-3 Hawaiian officials say or do, whether or not they are backed up by a governor from a (ahem) ‘different’ party. To do so denies the probable Nixonian aspects of this presidency.
Implication – do you have a firm enough grasp on reality to know you spend too much time believing what you read on birther sites, hmm?
Pure B.S.
You mean every Hawaiian official that has access to the records covering 2 separate administrations, one Democrat, the other Republican, led by a governor that actively campaigned for the guy President Obama beat, and in an absolute absence of any evidence either actual tampering with the documents of the system to produce the documents, or any evidence to support birth anywhere but Hawaii, and even a reasonably probably story of HOW he could have been born outside the US?
Yeah….I could see how this supposedly Nixonian presidency would make you question….and how exactly is this President remotely Nixonian? Oh yeah….birther don’t need no facts…..they can spew B.S. without fear of consequence. I mean it’s like we’re really expecting anything lucid from you anyway.
Yet you put great credence in what an unknown number of unnamed Russians who haven’t seen the documents and work for a man who has jailed or forced into exile most of his opponents have puportedly said.
While I give credence to Hawaiian officials, my #1 reason for believing before I ever saw a single document that Obama was born in Hawaii is that his parents lived there. Since the vast majoriity of babies are born where their parents live, right away I have the laws of probablility strongly on my side. Now add in the presence of excellent medical facilities and stable social climate in Hawaii vs inadequate medical facilities and an ongoing independence struggle in Kenya and the odds against a Kenyan birth get even longer. While extremely improbable events do occasionally happen,.a wise person doesn’t base his life on expecting that they will. Furthermore, claims for such events must meet a very high standard. The presenemce of curvature in a pdf is grossly inadequate to make me believe in a <1,000,000 chance. If you want me to believe in a birth Kenya rather than Hawaii you will have to do many orders of magnitude better than that.
In fact, let me issue a challenge to the birthers. Let’s stop wasting time looking at curlicues in a document and cut to the chase. Barack Obama exists, therefore he was born somewhere. If you honestly think he wasn’t born in Hawaii, then tell me the story of where he was born. Provide motivation, details and a narrative that, if it were in a book I bought at the airport for a long flight, would be sufficiently credible that I wouldn;t put the book down and pick up the InFlight catalogue of items I never imagined I needed instead.
In 3 years not one birther has been able to do even that. This is so basic that the lack of such a story speaks volumes. But before you attack the official story, which is perfectly credible, a sane person would expect that ylou would at least have an alternative narrative.
The problem for folks like Marshal is that one of those Hawaiian officials is the non-partisan civil servant whose job it is to record, store, issue authentic vital records for the state of Hawaii. That official is Dr. Alvin T. Onaka, Registrar of Vital Statistics for the state. He is not a political appointee, he’s a civil servant who has been in his position through Republican and Democratic administrations. Dr., Onaka’s official stamp is on the Obama short form and the Obama long form. ANY court of law will accept his authentification as being legitimat4e.
Of course he can be called to testify under oath, if need be.
“Nixonian aspects of this presidency”
now that was really funny! what a jokester!
1. Big whoop. The Prime Minister of Russia has no say in American government.
2. Yes. You, on the other hand, clearly don’t.