Hawaiian officials admit withholding Obama's original Birth Certificate

This is a rather bizarre story that has been percolating in the background, primarily among the tin-foil-hat crowd. but now it's beginning to get some legitimacy. It's been referred to obliquely by Rush Limbaugh and some on the Internet.

Now it's pretty apparent why Barack Obama made his sudden, last minute visit to Honolulu. It wasn't Granny's health problems that interested him but Hawaii's Health Department.

The strategy may have backfired. A statement by Hawaiian officials Friday that they have seen but won't release an "original" birth certificate that has never been released raises more questions than it answers. It undercuts the indignant claims of Obama spokesmen and supporters that the "birth certificate" has been published for months, and the ridicule and claims of "smear" that the Obama camp has made against anyone claiming otherwise.

So, is there a difference between a "certificate of live birth" and a "birth certificate?"

According to an AP report, Hawaii Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said Friday that she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.

But they won't say one word about what's on it.

Conspicuously, Hawaiian officials refuse to confirm that the information on the "original" certificate conforms to what has appeared on the "Certification of Live Birth" produced in 2007 that has so far been passed off as original by the Obama "Fight the Smears" site (here) and the Annenberg-backed site FactCheck.org (here). The latter dedicated a photoshoot to examining in pornographic detail a computer-generated facsimile that may bear no relation to the original document that the State of Hawaii now admits holding.

Can anyone smell "red herring"?

All of the obfuscation, which has been going on for more than four months, begs the question that the Obama campaign and its media supporters have steadfastly refused to answer: why won't the original birth certificate be released?

Why can't the Obama campaign do as the McCain campaign did, and release the original, typewritten document that the State of Hawaii, finally and in the last days before the election, admits exists in its "vaults"? What could be so damaging or contradictory that Obama has felt the need to keep hidden all these years and has created elaborate cover-ups to put forward computer-abstracted certification of live certificate instead of the original birth certificate?

Fukino says that no state official, including Governor Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's birth certificate be handled differently. But state officials, including Lingle's office, have consistently refused media requests for the release of the document, saying that only Obama himself, or a close family number, was authorized to have access to the "original" certificate. She says state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest.

Now I'm curious.