Personally, I thought the rumors circulating about Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate were put to bed when Daily Kos posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate which the Obama campaign promptly acknowledged was genuine.

Now, however, some serious questions are being raised about the provenance of the birth certificate image posted at the Daily Kos.  An apparently government-trained documents expert named Jay Mckinnon has posted faked images of Hawaiian birth certificates on the internet, and those fakes share a lot of similarities to the image of the birth certificate purporting to belong to Obama:

One image created and posted by opendna is what he describes as a “blank template” of a State of Hawaii Certification of Live Birth. Only two data fields are filled in: the ISLAND OF BIRTH ("Oahu") and the HOUR OF BIRTH (7:24 PM). Neither of the images have a posted date stamp, but embedded EXIF information contains the time stamp of June 12 at 8:24am, the same day and time Daily Kos posted the purported Obama birth certificate.

Both images lack two salient characteristics present in the Barack Obama birth certificate images claimed by the Daily Kos blog and Obama’s “Fight the Smears” site. The Field under CERTIFICATE NO is blank whereas on the purported “Obama birth certificate” that area is blacked out as if to conceal a real number. In addition, the two documents posted to the opendna account lack the reversed date (June 6, 2007) that appears at the bottom of the purported “Obama birth certificate.”

However, the ISLAND OF BIRTH and the HOUR OF BIRTH is identical on the “Haye I.B Ahphorgerie” and blank certificates as well as the purported “Obama birth certificate,” which also claims 7:24 pm as the HOUR OF BIRTH and Oahu as the ISLAND OF BIRTH. The odds of an identical time occurring by chance in two certificates is 1440 to 1. Either the former is derived from the latter, or the latter is derived from the former.

If “Haye I.B Ahphorgerie” were derivative of the purported “Obama birth certificate,” it would have meant that—in a matter of minutes on the morning of June 12, 2008, opendna would have had to tracelessly erase all fields (save ISLAND OF BIRTH and the HOUR OF BIRTH), and to painstakingly remove the blacked out area near CERTIFICATE NO and the reversed date that appears at the bottom of the purported “Obama birth certificate.” Given the complexity of the background pattern, it would have been difficult to do this without leaving behind traces of the extractions. For what motive would one want to do this?

At first blush I thought the birth certificate controversy was rather silly.  Just another derivative of the constant furor over Obama’s funny-sounding name.  Like maybe some of the people demanding to see the birth certificate were thinking that if Obama’s real middle name turned out to be “Mohammed” his campaign might be sunk.

But this issue has serious consequences attached to it.  If it turns out that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, for instance, he may not be eligible to run for the Presidency.  The Obama campaign has been less than forthcoming about this birth certificate, despite rumors circulating about it for months now, and that’s only added to the controversy.  Why is the Daily Kos the only place where Obama’s birth certificate has ever appeared?  Why hasn’t Obama just issued his birth certificate, something that would both stop the rumor mills and make his critics look foolish for taking up the issue?

The questions deserve answers from Obama himself, I think, and until he provides them this controversy is only going to grow.