Claim: Hawaii Officials Destroyed Obama's Birth Certificate

You'll notice I put this as a "claim" because there appears to be a great deal of confusion about this. Google "Dobbs Obama birth certificate destroyed" and then stand back.

For reference, this is the link I'll be referring to: http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/07/29/cnn-provides-cover-for-obama-birth-certificate-scam/

Now you'll notice, I hope, the URL of 'intellectualconservative.com' which means it's from a Conservative point of view. But you'll also notice, again I hope, the word at the end - 'scam.'

Quoting a bit: "After CNN's Lou Dobbs last week demanded Obama's original birth certificate, CNN/U.S. President Jon Klein apparently has told staffers of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" that the issue is a "dead" story.

" Any such public announcement would of course have the effect of making the conspiracists even more certain that the truth is being suppressed by the media . . . but it gets worse.
According to Media Bistro's TVNewser webblog:

" Klein asked CNN researchers to dig into the question of why Obama couldn't produce the original birth certificate. The researchers contacted the Hawaii Health Dept. and confirmed that paper documents were discarded in 2001 when the department went paperless. That reportedly includes Pres. Obama's original birth certificate. " (links are theirs and have been left intact.)

Granted, there's a lot there, so let's distill this down:

The US President of CNN, Joe Klein, asked his researchers to find out why Obama couldn't produce his original birth certificate. For reference, this is also referred to as the "long form" or "vault copy" of his birth certificate. (You'll also notice that I've referred to them both as long form and/or vault copy. I've used these terms interchangeably, and in this instance at least this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do since they are the same thing.)

It turns out that officials there in Hawaii confirmed that paper documents were "...discarded..." in 2001 when the department went paperless. And, reportedly, it included the "president's" birth certificate.

My next question is this: discarded how? We've all heard by now about how documents that were supposedly "shredded" later turn up mysteriously whole and none the worse for wear. So "discarded" how? Burned? Ecologically very unwise.

Shredded? Makes sense from a privacy standpoint, assuming the shredder is a fairly good model and makes really really small bits of paper - if not powder. (Don't laugh. I've actually seen shredders that made powder out of what they shredded. These were all classified documents so I can't say where I saw them or what they were, but after going through the shredder, they literally were powder. You can purchase these models of shredders, but they are very expensive.)

Granted, this particular site then states that " "any paper data prior to that still exists," Health Department spokeswoman Okubo said.

" Okubo would not say where Obama's original birth certificate is, but said "we have backups for all of our backups." "

And, truth be told, I've also seen this too. I've seen various buildings with paper copies of older documents all kept in a climate-controlled area; since it turns out that heat, cold and humidity are natural enemies of paper documents. These paper (or "legacy") documents are left in paper form and are only converted to "paperless" (electronic) form as the personnel have the time to convert them. Some of them are so degraded that they can't be converted. Scan these particular documents all you want, but you won't get much readable out of each particular scan. Granted, you can post a composite image from each "good" scan, but that won't satisfy those with an agenda - because it could literally take 15 different "good" scans to get a readable document in electronic form.

And yes, I know where quite a few people's minds just went: "...15 different "good" scans..." Well, time for that full disclosure thing again: Yes, it COULD take up to 15 "good" scans to get a "readable" document in electronic form - and this would be a composite image. No 'conspiracy theorist' would ever accept that as truth.

So the question remains: Where is the vault copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate? If they have backups of backups (which makes sense from a security point of view) why not simply produce that?

After all, the vault copy/long form of a birth certificate is an important thing, and it seems to me that you'd be very careful to preserve that. After all, you never know if a child that's born on a certain day will turn out to be Adolf Hitler, or Barack Hussein Obama.