No birth certificate among passport documents

Posted: August 08, 2010, 10:13 pm Eastern

Passport documents for Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro recently released by the State Department did not include any birth-certificate documentation for Barack Obama, despite a memorandum in the file claiming he was born in Honolulu.

The released documents indicate Dunham's husband, Lolo Soetoro, petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the State Department in 1967 to obtain a waiver to return to the United States to rejoin his wife and her infant son, Barack Obama Jr.

A WND timeline drawn from the State Department's July 29 Freedom of Information Act release of passport documents indicates Lolo Soetoro returned to Indonesia July 20, 1966, after completing his studies at the University of Hawaii. Soetoro was required to complete a mandatory two-year residence requirement in Indonesia before he could be granted a visa to return to the U.S.

In an apparent attempt to establish the nationality of Barack Obama Jr., a person named Mix submitted a poorly typed and difficult-to-decipher memo to the file, dated Sept. 14, 1967, without identifying any official position he or she may have held with State Department at that time.

The memo is written pursuant "to inquiry from Central office regarding the status of the applicants' spouses' child by a former marriage." (sic)

The next paragraph reads:

    "The person in question [Barack Obama, Jr.] is a united states citizen by virtue of his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii Aug. 4, 1961. He is living with the applicants' spouse in Honolulu. He is considered the applicants step-chil d, within the meaning of Sec. 101(b)(1)(B), of the act, by virtue of the marriage of the applicant to the childs' mother on March 15, 1965."

The person writing the document does not reference having examined any birth-certificate document to establish the citizenship of Barack Obama Jr.

Instead, the memorandum suggests it's written as a result of a conversation, possibly with Obama's mother, in which the information was conveyed by her and simply accepted as offered, without documentary verification.

In contrast, various forms in the Freedom of Information Act release clearly indicate when corroborating documents have been presented. For instance, an examining Immigration and Naturalization Service and State Department official filing a particular report had examined the divorce decree between Barack Obama's mother and his father, Barack Obama Sr., to establish that the parents were legally divorced.

In the two separate releases of Freedom of Information Act documents July 29, what should have been a clear opportunity to see a birth certificate for Barack Obama Jr. was lost when the State Department destroyed any and all passport documents that may have existed for Dunham prior to 1968.

The released State Department documents make clear that Barack Obama Jr. was listed on his mother's passport.

However, as WND has previously reported, the State Department claims Dunham's application for her 1965 U.S. Passport No. 777788, issued July 19, 1965, was destroyed at some unspecified time in the 1980s, apparently pursuant to a General Services Administration directive.

Lacking Dunham's application for her 1965 U.S. passport, it is impossible to determine what documentation, if any, she submitted to the State Department to establish her son was a U.S. citizen.

WND has reported that in a passport amendment submitted Aug. 13, 1968, Obama's mother identified her son with an Indonesian surname and asked the State Department to drop him from her U.S. passport, bolstering evidence Barack Obama Jr. became a citizen of Indonesia when he moved to the Southeast Asian nation with his mother and stepfather in the late 1960s.

Since 1961, the Obama family has always maintained that Barack Obama Jr. was born in Hawaii. However, as WND has reported, the family has changed its story about his hospital of birth, first claiming it was Honolulu's Queens Medical Center then changing it to Kapi'olani Medical Center.

What has yet to be produced is a long-form certificate of birth that lists the hospital where Obama was born and the doctor that attended the birth.

In June, WND reported Tim Adams, a senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu in 2008, made the claim that Barack Obama Jr. was definitely not born in Hawaii and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not exist in the Aloha State.

WND has reported that the birth address reported in the Honolulu newspapers in 1961 announcing the birth of Barack Obama Jr. was the address where his grandparents lived, suggesting the grandparents may simply have applied at the Hawaii Department of Health for a short-form Certificate of Live Birth.

WND has also reported that newspaper birth announcements in Hawaiian newspapers in 1961 did not necessarily indicate a baby was born in the state. Hawaiian law in 1961 allowed "an adult or legal parent of a minor child" to apply to the health department and, upon unspecified proof, be given a birth document in the form that is known as a short-form Certification of Live Birth.

Under Hawaiian law at that time, a family wishing to register the birth of a baby outside Hawaii was permitted by the Hawaii Department of Health to list a family residence in Hawaii as the birth address, even if the mother was residing outside Hawaii at the time the baby was born.

Moreover, WND has reported that being a U.S. citizen does not by itself fulfill the requirement under Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution that the president be a "natural born citizen."