Obviously it could be a fake; it would be easy to do. Scan your own birth certificate in using the same software and see what results you get.

However, according to the letters* that were sent back and forth, somebody stopped in and picked up the documents in person. So if it is a fake, that means that:

• The Hawaiian officials gave Obama's people a fake document

• Obama's people scanned in that fake document and then faked it again.

Thus, you'd be dealing with a fake of a fake. Does that make any sense?

So then you'd have to reason that the Hawaiian officials gave Obama the PDF as well as the hard copy. Which means that Obama had nothing to do with the forgery, but only the state did.

Or maybe Obama and the Hawaiians are both completely in on this. Then we get into a big conspiracy where it took the government three years to produce a fake document that was debunked in five minutes by some redneck with an iMac.

(* I wonder if anybody analyzed those letters to make sure they weren't faked too.)

Obama's birth certificate has become a very big issue, shadowing the real problems the world has. It's just a shame.

That looks pretty convincing to me. Lets not start up the bullshit machine and start saying that Obama didn't know... he had to know this is a fake, it's a modern forgery, they didn't have adobe illustrator back in 1961 (or whatever the real date it).

Can we apply the same standards to all presidents? They wanted to impeach Clinton for lieing, they wanted to impeach Bush.... this is proof positive that Obama is lieing about his birthdate, he has supplied a forgery. He is responsible for supplying an original document, nobody else.

No matter if you feel this is important or not, apparently Obama does because he supplied a forgery. Seems to me that lieing about such things should be impeachable.

It is blatantly obvious that the PDF copy of the birth certificate has been significantly altered. No scanning software will do that to an image.

The possibilities that come to my mind are:

• The certificate is genuine, but someone thought it couldn't be scanned properly so they (or perhaps another person) tidied it up in Illustrator (or similar);

• Someone in Obama's camp doctored the certificate beyond just tidying it up, which could have been done for a variety of reasons and may or may not have been done with Obama's knowledge; or

• Someone wanted to make his long form certificate look like a obvious forgery.

You have to ask yourself, why not just scan the image at high resolution and publish the image? If you're not forging it, why add fuel to the birther fire unnecessarily?

I can be fairly objective about this because I don't care one way or the other. For one thing, I'm not a US citizen. And to be honest, I don't mind Barack Obama as a US president and don't think that there should be two permanent classes of citizenship for any purpose. If he actually was born overseas and the law allowed overseas-born citizens become president, then all the better for the country, because he would then be the ultimate role model for immigrants and that sort of inspiration can only be a good thing.

That's not the "official" document. Do you understand that the PDF is a scan of the certified copy that Obama was given? The federal government does not own the official (original) document.

To be clear, this is the timeline:

• Obama's lawyers writes the Hawaiian officials for an exemption to their policy of not releasing the full certificate, asking for two certified hardcopies of the original.

• Hawaiian official says okay.

• Obama's lawyers pick them up.

• Somebody in the White House scans them.

• Those PDFs become available on the website.

My question remains... Why in the world would Obama forge a forgery? It doesn't make any sense.

Correct.

Now you're just extrapolating the facts until you reach what seem to be the most obvious conclusion. If you just stick to the facts that you know, then you can't honestly come to any conclusion yet.

Why not just scan them at high resolution with a high quality scanner and release the raw images? Surely that would settle the debate to the extent that it would be quite a stretch to still cry foul (which some birthers will no matter what).

Because I doubt a computer expert made the scans. e.g., When I ask my mom to scan something for me (I don't have a scanner), she emails me a PDF ... even if it's a photograph.

My point remains: you cannot claim the PDF is forged without believing that the state of Hawaii is in on this. i.e., It must be a conspiracy issue.

It's laughable to think that Obama took one of the certified hard copies, scanned it in, forged it, forgot to flatten the layers, and then the Hawaiian official never piped up to say "wait a minute, those aren't the documents I gave them."

No. I've never seen my original birth certificate either.

So are you saying that the Hawaiian official who said she certified the copies is lying? i.e., A conspiracy.

Never thought of it that way. If the certificate that Hawaiian officials gave him were genuine, why edit them? If they were forged, why fake a fake? It makes no sense.

Anyway, good thread guys, keep it up.

EDIT:

@Neil: How do you know its forged? You know because others say so or because you know your forged documents so well?

I'am dazzled, unbelievable, but I'm not surprised, I'm just truly wondering do the people of the US care about anything anymore, how can they ignore the criminality of the last ten years?

This a bad question to ask, because you've just diverted away from the core issue of why it doesn't make any sense.

You should go more like this: Let's assume the document is forged. Now tell me: who forged it? And then work your way backward to the source.

Neil is unwilling to reason that out because he doesn't want to jeopardize his belief that it is a forgery. And he doesn't want to come out looking like a conspiracy nut. So he sits tight at "it's a fake, and I don't care about anything else."

Somebody took Trump's certificate and ended up with layers too. But again, that will never prove anything to anybody. I prefer to point out the logical inconsistencies of how a forged document makes no sense unless there is a conspiracy at hand.

I don't really understand what you're saying, to be honest.

I'm just arguing that there's only two scenarios here that have any sort of logical consistency:

1. The state of Hawaii supplied Obama with a forged PDF and a forged certified copy. i.e., A conspiracy.

   
   

2. The PDF was a result of scanning and optimizing a legitimate certified copy.

If somebody wants to take scenario 1, then I'm fine with that. I completely disagree with them, but I cannot discount them on logical fallacies.