by Jack Kelly // The Pittsburgh Press
Onyango “Omar” Obama, 69, half-brother of Barack Obama Sr., came to the United States on a student visa in 1963, remained here illegally after it expired, was ordered to leave the U.S. in 1986, 1989 and 1992, but ignored the deportation orders.
After Onyango Obama was arrested for drunken driving in 2011, President Barack Obama said he’d never met “Uncle Omar.”
At a deportation hearing this month, Onyango Obama told the judge young Barack Obama lived with him for a few weeks while he was attending Harvard Law School. His landlord recalled seeing the future president in the Cambridge apartment.
Compared to Mr. Obama’s frequent assertion that his mother, dying of cancer, had been denied health insurance, or his oft-repeated promise that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it, period” — this was just an itty bitty lie.
But it reminds us how little we really know about Barack Obama, and how much of what we think we know depends on what he’s told us.
“Many of the details that Obama has related about his parents, his former girlfriends, his life in college, and his legal and legislative career are not just inexact but cannot be true,” said the military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Genuine documents confirm Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, said document expert Nick Chase. But the “long form” birth certificate the White House posted on the Internet April 27, 2011, is an obvious forgery, he said. Other document experts agree.
(Barack Obama Sr. arrived in Hawaii in 1959. There is no record of his having returned to Kenya before being deported in 1964. It is wildly improbable his pregnant 18-year-old wife would have traveled there alone. There is no record of Stanley Ann Dunham ever having been in Kenya.)
So why the forgery?
Mr. Chase thinks it’s because under Hawaiian law, when a child is adopted, the original birth certificate is sealed and a new one is issued. If Barack had been adopted by his mother’s second husband, he would be “Barry Soetoro” on the birth certificate Hawaii sent to the White House.
Barack was known as “Barry Obama” after returning to Hawaii in 1971. But he might not have gotten around to legally changing his name back. If he hadn’t, perhaps that could shed some light on why he’s used a Social Security number issued in Connecticut, a state in which he has never lived.
Unlike other recent presidential candidates, Mr. Obama has refused to permit release of his academic records from Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.
He was asked by Khalid al-Mansour, an adviser to Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, to write a letter of recommendation for Barack Obama to Harvard, former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton told an interviewer on a New York television show in March 2008.
During that year’s presidential campaign, Mr. al-Mansour (formerly Donald Warden), a black radical attorney convert to Islam, denied this, but he no longer does.
Donald Warden told him wealthy Arabs planned to spend $20 million a year for 10 years to aid minority students, and to encourage them to support Arab causes, Chicago Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett wrote in a 1979 column.
Vernon Jarrett was the father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, de facto White House chief of staff, a close friend of Frank Marshall Davis, a communist who was a mentor to Barack Obama as a teenager in Hawaii, noted Frank Miele, the Montana newspaper editor who unearthed the Jarrett column last year.
Three contract employees improperly accessed the passport records of presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the State Department revealed in March 2008. Mr. Obama’s file was breached three times; Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. McCain’s once each.
The chief suspect worked for a firm headed by CIA Director John Brennan, then an adviser to the Obama campaign. No motive has been made public. The heavily redacted report issued by State’s inspector general doesn’t indicate whether any files were altered.
There could be an innocent reason for Mr. Obama’s reluctance to make public his college records. That it was an employee of a top adviser who fished around in his passport files may be a coincidence. But what innocent explanations might there be for the forged birth certificate and the Connecticut Social Security number?
There’s nothing to see here, the president says. So far, the “mainstream” media have taken him at his word. But now that it’s clear what Mr. Obama’s word is worth, perhaps some will do the vetting they should have done long ago.
Jack Kelly writes for the Blade of Toledo and The Pittsburgh Press. He can be reached at jkelly@post-gazette.com.
