Quote:
Originally Posted by claudhopper
I do hope you are right, and he will share how he got one over on Orly with us. Goes to show that just about anybody can make up a fake that may look legit on the surface, before being thoroughly examined. She even had the hard copy, as opposed to a picture on a computer monitor.
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Actually not true. She never possessed a "hard copy" of anything unless she printed it herself.
Here's the whole story:
The Bomford Hoax was not even meant for Orly at all. It was meant for the first of the fake Birther "image experts" who at the time was going by the pseudonym "Polarik." We later found out who he actually was, and that outing proved he was a liar and a fake. But at the time he was still an anonymous guy on-line who, even though completely incompetent, had developed a large Birther following. The objective was to get a provable fake in his hands and, if he declared it authentic, expose him as the buffoon we knew him to be.
The hoax was designed to be easily debunkable. The certificate was modeled on an Australian birth certificate found on a genealogy website (belonging to a man named David Bomford, hence the nick-name of the hoax). Many of the details were tweaked a tiny bit (such as the first initials of the registrars) while others were left untouched such as the certificate number. The form blank was created on a computer and then printed onto a piece of paper. The details were then typed in using an old manual typewriter and of course signatures were simply added with a fountain pen. A foreign coin was used to fake the seal (A South African one, IIRC), and the document was then folded and refolded countless times in a pattern similar to that seen on the Bomford original. When a typo was discovered later (the word "Maiden" was misspelled), it was covered up with a piece of tobacco when photos were taken.
A single photo was placed on a digital camera memory card, as taken directly from the camera itself... all metadata intact, with no processing by intermediate software. A series of other photographs that could be used to prove it was a hoax were held back. The problem then was... how could it be placed in the hands of "Polarik"; an anonymous blogger who was going through such great pains to keep his real identity a complete secret?
This (by the way) is the point at which I first became aware of the hoax. I had not been involved in conceiving it or creating it, but I fully admit to being a participant from this point on. As an amusing aside, it had by that point also picked up a humorous code name. We called it "The Kraken."
Now, "Polarik" had provided an anonymous affidavit in support of the litigation by the first of the Birther lawyers, Phil Berg... so we knew that if anybody knew how to get in touch with "Polarik" it had to be Berg and his law office. That gave us an avenue to get it to him. Two efforts were initiated. First, Berg's "paralegal" was contacted anonymously with a tale about someone having found an interesting document and who (both conscience stricken and a little afraid) wanted to get into the hands of somebody who could verify it or debunk it. Remember... no claim was
ever made that it was authentic. The claim was that we wanted somebody with expertise to look at it and tell us one way or the other. At the same time, "Polarik" was contacted through his blog, told the same story, and asked if he would be able to take a look at it if we got the image to Berg's assistant. He agreed. We decided that it was time to "Release the Kraken."
The digital data card was mailed to somebody who could re-mail it from a post office that might conceivably have been used by somebody in Washington, and then sent to Berg's office. We then sat back and waited with great anticipation for "Polarik's" verdict, which of course we hoped would be an assertion of authenticity that we would then publicly eviscerate.
And then...
nothing. Days turned into weeks, and we
never heard a peep about from Berg, his assistant, or "Polarik" himself. It had fallen into a complete black hole. For whatever reason, they decided to keep completely secret that the image existed and was in their possession. To this day, none of them have ever acknowledged it... not even to claim they identified it as a fake. We pretty much accepted that the hoax had fizzled and come to nothing.
Now, we would never have anticipated the Birther Wars that were already brewing between Taitz and Berg (or, frankly, between Taitz and every other Birther lawyer in the universe). Remember, this was July of 2009 and Orly was not yet the "Birther Queen." But she was already starting to expand her repertoire with a series of Birther spin-off theories such as those surrounding Obama's Social Security Number, and thus raising her profile significantly. And her primary partner in what was at that time still a fuzzy set of objections was Neal Sankey... an expatriate British cop now private investigator working for Orly.
As the Kraken lay unrequited and unacknowledged, we decided that if "Polarik" wouldn't bite, maybe Sankey would. But since this was pretty much an afterthought, none of the more careful preparations used with "Polarik" were followed. There was no prep work to create a careful back-story, no special mailings from particular post offices, not even a digital data card to make it look like it was right out of the camera. A flash drive with the image was mailed to Sankey by Foggy of The Fogbow, along with a note saying, hey, we don't know if this is real or not, but you're a private investigator, maybe you can figure it out.
We were completely unprepared for what happened next.
Sankey apparently made no effort whatsoever to authenticate the thing, he simply ran with it to Orly. Within days she was on her blog tasking her flying monkeys to do what her talented PI apparently could not; research whether or not a man named "E. F. Lavender was British colonial registrar in Mombasa, Kenya in 1961." That single request on her blog appears to comprise
her entire investigation into the authenticity of the image.
We immediately began feeding her hints that it was fake. That very night we posted on her blog:
Quote:
pip says:
August 1, 2009 at 12:16 am
Do you have any other info on this guy.
Is his name Eric or Edward? Have found something relating to an Eric Lavender (Registrar) on a Aussie site.
Was he american. Did he move from Mombassa and go to Australia do you think? Any other info???
Will keep looking…….
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But before we could give her any more hints (and we were getting ready to offer her several), and without even trying to follow up on the rather in-your-face lead we had already provided, she filed a
Motion in her case
Keyes v. Obama introducing the unverified, unauthenticated image as evidence that Obama was born in Kenya.
We were flabbergasted! Understand, we had not yet had the chance to grasp the complete depth of Orly's legal incompetence. No lawyer in his or her right mind would
ever have taken an image received anonymously from who knows who and introduced it as evidence in a court of law... without making any effort whatsoever to authenticate the thing. And of course... Orly apparently could not settle for merely introducing it in court. She or Sankey then leaked a copy of the image to the right-wing forum
FreeRepublic, where it was being hailed as authentic within four posts. The thread eventually ended up with almost 11,000.
The Kraken had made a splash no one expected or anticipated. We knew not just that we had to kill it, but we had to kill it fast. August 3 we posted online the Google image of an Australian birth certificate belonging to David Jeffrey Bomford, born in 1964, which had been posted in 2006 to a Bomford family history site. It was clearly the template used in creating the Bomford FKBC. One of us was interviewed by
Salon the next day to put as fine a point as possible on the fact that the Obama certificate was not authentic. Then we stepped back again to let the obvious sink in.
It did not sink in.
Sometime that day, the genealogy website where the original Bomford Certificate was found crashed because the server could not handle the traffic, so the certificate was taken down. Birthers of course began to then insist that the original was the fake, and the fake was the authentic original... this in spite of the fact that the real David Bomford was found and interviewed on Australian news and verified that the original was his. Orly not only refused to acknowledge the fake, she gave interviews declaring her belief that it was real, and kept prodding the court to accept it as evidence.
We then tried to put a stake though the Kraken's heart with the series of photos taken to prove the forgery. One showed the certificate along with the tools used to make the forgery; an old typewriter, the foreign coin, the paper... all on the same unfakeable background used in the Orly image. Another showed most of the same with a current USA Today newspaper. The others showed the certificate crumpled into a ball, and then tattered and destroyed with the handwritten addition "You've Been Punked."
On August 20, more than two weeks after it had proven fake, Taitz filed a
First Amended Motion for Issuance of Letters Rogatory and
refiled the hoax certificate... something for which the court eventually took her to great task. As far as I know, to this day she has never admitted it was a hoax.
Over a year later, the actual creator of the Kraken joined the FreeRepublic forum and offered to answer any questions the Freepers had regarding they hoax. They declared him a fake, and refused to believe anything he had to say and then banned him.
Believe it or not, just last week (more than three years after the hoax was revealed) a Birther added
this comment to the almost 11,000 post FreeRepublic thread:
Quote:
To: rxsid
It is a govt. birth registration. Was NEVER proven to be false. AFAIK, its still good to go!
thanks rxsid
10,838 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:50:50 PM by urtax$@work (The only kind of memorial is a Burning memorial !)
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You just can't make this stuff up.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by claudhopper
Some could call that impeding an investigation, forgery or a whole host of crimes that aren't likely to be pursued. The scales of justice are lopsided these days.
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Only an idiot still butt-hurt after three years believes any of those things.
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