The obvious error is that the name is wrong. The person on the list of graduates from Columbia is Barack Hussein Obama, not Barry Soetoro (photo courtesy or Breitbart News).
Also, Columbia ID cards like that didn’t start being used until 1996, and the student ID on the card belongs to somebody else, whose card is on the Internet, and from which Obama’s was faked. Note that this foreign student (German) doesn’t have “Foreign Student” on his ID.
The Obama photo used in the fake it was taken in 1991-1992, and in higher resolution.
Fake, fake, fake.
See also:
- “Obama’s ‘Foreign Student’ ID Found?” at About.com
according to snopes, the format of that ID was not introduced at columbia until 1996
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/studentid.asp
Its funny how often this one comes up when its such an obvious fake. The photo of Obama is too recent to be him from 1983
This is just one of a whole series of old crap being dredged up by Birthers on Twitter. Of course, when I tried to correct a couple of people by pointing them to Snopes, I ran straight into the “Snopes is funded by Soros” meme…..
Just by coincidink, here’s at long last a possibly novel OCT: some birfoon recently inserted “Barack Soetoro” with Columbia University address to the commercial crap database Axciom, which of course is as easy as mailing in a credit card application with the fake data, and now it’s earth shattering evidence:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2993040/posts
Sadly, the birfoon’s imagination and energy stopped short of finding a plausible residential address and it used instead the address of some theater on the campus.
(I wonder how many SSNs and addresses Mr. Heywood Jablome has in these commercial databases…)
And why would a college ID card identify a person as a “foreign” student?
I had a high school friend who was a citizen of Ireland and who was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Even his military ID didn’t identify him as a foreigner
regardless of any other debunking angle …. a barcode on an ID in the early 80s?
The correct term in all facets of higher education is “international student”.
International Student Services, etc.
The school I attended had a very diverse student body. I met people from all over the world. They didn’t have special IDs.
Or scarlet letters on any clothing.
Yep — I rambled about this earlier on the open thread. The “Columbia University address” is that of a campus theater. Nice touch, really.
The angle of that Breitbart photo of the Columbia graduation ceremony is strange. I wonder what point they were trying to make–or what information they were trying to hide–when they chose that angle instead of a straight-on shot or a scan.
Here’s the image that was the source of the ID number and bar code:
http://www.lugert-online.de/Columbia_University/studentID.jpg
Posted at http://www.lugert-online.de/Columbia_University/columbia_university.html
Note that the former student who opted to post his 1998 CUID card is German — see:
http://www.lugert-online.de/My_education/my_education.html
So not only do we know the source of the template, we also know definitively that a non-US citizen student had a card that said “STUDENT” on it, without the word “foreign”.
The letters SU 98 in the box in the middle of the CUID card appear to refer to the session that the student was enrolled: “Summer 1998” – that corresponds to the card owner’s statement that he was enrolled for an intensive ESL (English as a second language) course from July-August 1998.
http://www.lugert-online.de/Columbia_University/columbia_university.html
I don’t believe that a full time (full year) student would have such a box — rather, they would probably have been issued a card that displayed an expiration date like the one here: http://www.wikicu.com/File:CUID1996.gif
(unfortunately I have no way to verify that point. One of my offspring attended Columbia in the last decade, but the CUID’s have been changed so that would be no help).
I assume that whoever created the fake Obama ID chose the letters “AA” to stand for either “African American” or “Affirmative Action” — but given the evidence from Mr. Lugert’s ID, any box would have had to contain information related to the term enrolled.
See also: http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/ss/Obama-Student-Id.htm
Al-Anon.
“AA”
anti-alias
I was talking to a birther on Twitter the other day who ran the “SCOTUS judge Kagan represented Obama in eligibility challenges before, therefore Snopes is lying” meme. Of course the very article on Snopes addresses this (Kagan represented Obama, but none of the cases had to do with his eligibility or birth). I told that birther that she had the unique opportunity now to prove Snopes wrong by pointing to such a case on the docket she had referred to and show that it was about eligibility. Of course she immediately changed the subject…
Unlikely, but not impossible. What I find more implausible is singling out “FOREIGN STUDENT” in an ID.
No not impossible, barcodes had been around quite awhile, proliferated throughout the 70s, but it’s my recollection IDs and store cards began turning up with them in the mid- to late- 80s. By the mid-90s, campus IDs were already credit cards tied to ‘campus cash’ accounts. At least they weren’t silly enough to go with at format.
Ultimately, this fake is just too good from the ODS perspective. It has everything a birther from 2007 would want to find in a supposedly ~1983 item. History is rarely so agreeable.
I swaqpped emails with Mr. Lugert, and he confirmed that the image purporting to be his ID is just that in fact. So a little math: Noice that the ID number is in the hundreds of trillions. Even if Columbia did not take care to see that no student is issued an ID card number previously owned by a former student, the odds are astronomical against t Mr. Lugert and Mr. Obama being legitimately issued the same ID number. Given all the fakeries that have been pulled by the birthers, the rational person would suspect one is a photoshop of the other.
My communcation with Mr. Lugert wqs private, though I was able to search and find his website. If he hasn’t taken in down or put it behind a firewall, otherws can do the same.
Actually, that would be the “go to” challenge to the anti-Snopes crowd (the “yoknapatawphers” ? :-)): Can you find any example of where the Mikkelsons are wrong, or have not provided citations to back up their position?
Not that they, like your antagonist, wouldn’t just immediately stop listening when presented with this challenge. It’s like trying to explain to a birther why “Annenberg” is really as far from a synonym for “Marxist” as you can get.
At least into the early 1990’s my school was using validation stickers such as the SU 98 sticker. Every semester you would have to go her your new one if you were enrolled. After a while, it was helpful to pull off the old ones while waiting in line for a new one.
My college ID card was so completely useless I ended up using it as a lockpick. We had such a small college most people knew you on campus.
My old college ID from 1998 is not as sophisticated as the one that purports to come from the 1980s. And the “Foreign Student” should be a pretty obvious sign that it’s a fake – probably actually created as a prank that someone did not “get”.
Mine from the mid-90s was about on par with the supposedly early-80s model.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that thermal-printed digital photos weren’t happening in 1983 or prior. Drivers licences here didn’t get that current until 2002 or so, prior to that, the good old laminated jobs, with the photos that were easily lifted and replaced *cough, cough*
Mentioning that reminds me that the college IDs from the class a year prior to mine were also of the laminated type. As the source of the fake (revealed by Doc) confirms, de birfers are falling for an ID at least a decade too advanced!