Purported birth certificate signed by "U K L Lee" may play Obama's swan song

As a publication that was early into the analysis of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama II and the debate over his eligibility to be President of the United States in the summer and fall of 2008, Israel Insider naturally was intrigued when the POTUS, after years of delay and mounting criticism, and millions of dollars for legal stonewalling, finally seemed to give in and officially, ceremonially, release what purported to be the so-called "original long form birth certificate." In a press conference, and later on Oprah, he added insult to injury to those tens of millions of Americans who have dared, in some cases at great personal sacrifice, to suggest that he might be concealing something over all these years, and that his refusal to be forthcoming might suggest he has something to hide.

There's an old joke about  a teacher handing back a composition to a student, telling him: "Your work is good and original. Unfortunately, what's original is not good and what's good is not original."

The same may be said for the piece of paper Barack Hussein Obama II passed off yesterday as his long-form birth certificate.  Even a cursory examination of the document exposes it as a copy, not an original. One can clearly see the shadows and curvature indicating that the image was scanned from a bound document, not a standalone certificate. Not for this the birthers waited. Not for this the Obama lawyers stonewalled for nearly three years.

But  more: there is strong evidence of intentional tampering with the photocopy, which subsequently was manipulated with the addition and modification of elements on the page. In the coming days we will examine these images in detail to show the places in which changes were made and perhaps to discern the methods and motives of these manipulations. In the meantime, many others are pointing out some of the anomalies. Not every claim is correct, but what is clear is that the documented presented is a copy that has been subjected to digital manipulation.

The evidence leaves no doubt that what Obama attempted to pass of as an original long-form birth certificate is a computer generated composition with numerous traces that doesn't even conceal the methods used to digitally assemble and photoedit the document.

One would think that the President of the United States would have made a more professional attempt to hide the traces of manipulation.  Perhaps it sufficed to him and his legal team that it appears on first glance to contain nothing contradictory to his previous claims and statements and appeared to vindicate his claims that he has not lied or concealed the truth of his origins.

But leave the document analysis to one side. One tiny telling detail in the "certificate" – hidden in plain sight -- may expose the forgery: the name of the signing registrar.

The "Signature of the Attendant" was taken care of nicely: a local ob-gyn named David A. Sinclair who conveniently died in 2003 and whose widow happens to be a Democratic party operative and, as Aaron Klein reports today in World Net Daily, an advisor to none other than the Hawaii Health Department. Oddly, the checkbox appears smudged, with evidence of a clumsy change, as if there was at some stage uncertainty as to whether the attendant was an MD.

But the Signature of the Local Registrar? Somehow, All the President's Lawyers may have overlooked the significance what was written there: U K L Lee.

Ukulele!

The ukulele is the distinctive traditional musical instrument of Hawaii. Guitar-like, with four strings, it literally means "jumping flea," likely because of the finger action that playing the instrument demands.

More respectably, Queen Lili'uokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch, claimed that the name means “the gift that came here”, from the Hawaiian words uku (gift or reward) and lele (to come). With delicious irony, the uke is commonly thought to be a Hawaiian "native" but actually came from abroad, "an adopted son."

Wikipedia notes that Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo'ole helped popularize the instrument, in particular due to his 1993 ukulele medley of "Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World."

Whatever the origins of the word, it seems dubious that the person who signed Barack Obama's wannabe birth certificate was a "local registrar" named U K L Lee.

Lee is probably a common family, but "U K L" is almost certainly not a common sequence of initials.

This improbability suggests that the one who signed as "U K L Lee" -- or who modified another signature to make it pronounceable as "ukulele," was by this act of invention or alteration taking credit for the deed with an in-joke that presumably would escape the attention of the masses and the mainstream media cowed into submission by an imperious Presidential statement that he had "more important things" to worry about.

It is also possible that the forger may have been uncomfortable with the criminal task imposed on him or her, and therefore left tell-traces, together with the artifacts of photoshopping and document assembly, as clues.

Israel Insider is familiar with all this because we encountered it before, in our detailed analysis of the original publication of the short-form "Certification of Live Birth" originally published on the White House's behalf in the Daily Kos. There a skilled document-manipulator named Jay McKinnon produced knockoffs of that document with the whimsical signature "Haye I.B. Aphorgerie" in examples showing how it's done.

Insider readers will recall that McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.  

In our original series, we explored this series of admitted forgeries and the motivations behind them,  discussing the "unbearable ease" with which digital technology allows the re-creation of documents from templates based on authentic originals.

So why would OpenDNA, later revealed as McKinnon, post this self-incriminating evidence? What explains his suggestion that Kos "print one up" with a "blank template"? Is he just trying to be funny? Is he trying to impress the other commenters? For this did he go through the trouble of removing all the text and the reverse date-stamp? Or was the blank template "just lying around somewhere" on his computer or in some corner of the Internet, just happening to have the identical information as the purported Obama birth certificate? 

A hint may be found here in another fake COLB that opendna posted:

Of course, the almost-blank "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" certification is not a particularly useful counterfeit. But, as McKinnon suggests, the unbearable ease of digital manipulation speaks for itself through the document itself: "Hey, I be a forgery!" 

"U K L Lee" is a slightly more subtle signature than Haye I.B Ahphorgerie, but the idea is identical. Forgers, like all artists, invariably find ways, directly or indirectly, of claiming credit for their creations.  Whoever added the ukulele signature either was arrogant enough to believe that his in-joke would be overlooked, or arrogant enough not to care. Or even, consciously or unconsciously, he wanted to be discovered.

One would hope that, if this confession was done without direction from the president, the forger knows how to conceal him or herself better than the evidence of his or her forgery!

One cannot even discount the possibility, unlikely as it may seem, that Barack Obama himself, with characteristic hubris, added the ultimate final touch by his signing his own "birth certificate" with the humorous pseudonym, brazenly thumbing his nose or, as is his wont, upraised-middle-fingering his cheek, to indicate that what he appears to be saying is not what he really thinks, as he did famously in his bittersweet "tributes" to Hillary Clinton (video) and John McCain (video), figurative telling the birthers what they can do to themselves. 

However, in this case, regardless of the source of the signature of the "local registrar," it appears that the current resident of the Oval Office overplayed his hand, or perhaps his handwriting.  It is one thing to have endless technical arguments about digital document manipulation. It is quite another to have a supposed Hawaiian birth certificate signed by a three-initialed registrar pronounced Ukulele!

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It may turn out that there is, or was, a local registrar by that name. The identity of a local registrar must be a matter of public record that can be readily ascertained with some research.  It's even possible that there is an authentic registrar named Lee whose signature a possible forger may have altered to become a more pleasing "ukulele."

If it turns out that a person by that name exists, and was just doing his or her job, all concerned can have a hearty laugh that Obama's birth was approved by a U K L Lee.

But it is also possible that the signature will  turn out to be what the good Queen Lili'uokalani said it was: a gift and a reward that has come to the "birthers" and all others who question the legitimacy and honest of Obama from none other than he who claims to be the legitimate President of the United States.

In that case, this ukulele would be the "smoking instrument" that suddenly appear in Act 3 to play the swan song for Obama. After his performance before the press corps yesterday, he had better find somewhere over the rainbow a local registrar – living or dead -- by the name of Ulysses Kamakawiwo'ole Luau Lee and have good ol' U K L sign some more contemporaneous birth certificates.

They say it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but this Ballad of a Thin Man ends very badly for Obama:

"You walk into the room, with a pencil in your hand, you see someone naked and you say: who is that man?"

A man in Oval Office can survive many affronts but howling ridicule, ignominious undressing, and a case of Haye I.B Ahphorgerie may not be among them.

The fat man may be singing for Obama, chuckling at the possibility that the world's most powerful man has contributed to his ridiculous undoing to the tune of a lowly uke.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump, accompanied by tens of millions of unsung and ridiculed "birthers," may be humming, no doubt with U K L Lee backing them: "What a Wonderful World!"