The Crossbow

Millions of American citizens — regardless of political party affiliation — are concerned that Barack Hussein Obama is disqualified from becoming president because he is not a "natural born citizen", as the Constitution requires (Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5).  But, even if he were a citizen, there is a strong possibility that the next commander-in-chief of our military violated the law regarding the military draft.  And, new evidence suggests that there could have been a cover-up effort to prevent the public from learning about the draft irregularities.

The newly-formed America's Independent Party, which endorsed Dr. Alan Keyes in the recent presidential election, has led the way by filing lawsuits to block Obama from becoming our next president.  (In 2004, Keyes ran against Obama for the US Senate seat that the latter now occupies.  If conservatives had supported Keyes in 2004, or during this recent election, then we wouldn't be fretting about a President-elect Obama now.)  The legal actions are based upon a growing body of evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as his campaign has claimed.  Foreign birth would automatically disqualify any candidate for president.  Despite months of inquiries from multiple sources, which come from across the political spectrum, the Obama campaign refuses to produce a valid Hawaii birth certificate.

During an interview with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, 07 September 2008, then-candidate Obama said that he had considered joining the military when he "had to" register for the draft when he graduated from high school in 1979.  But, as was reported the following morning by the premiere edition of The Crossbow, that statement was not correct.  There was no mandatory draft registration in 1979.  (Voluntary registrations were accepted then, but those were scant.)

In order to practice journalistic fairness, The Crossbow e-mailed the Obama campaign's media department for a clarification.  Despite having used the "media form" on their Web site, no reply was ever received.  (However, this writer's e-mail address was added to an Obama fundraising e-mail database, without even asking permission.  Those fundraising e-mails have come in two or three times per week ever since.  Given that the "media form" contained no mention of being added to such a database, that practice would seem to be a violation of "anti-spam" laws.  But, if the campaign has no compulsion about trampling the Constitution — or worse — then why would they care about anti-spam laws?)

Despite the lack of a direct reply to the direct request for a copy of Obama's draft registration, it seems that the Obama campaign did take some action as a result of that request.  A few days ago, blogger Debbie Schlussel revealed a copy of Obama's draft registration.  She had a trusted source, retired Federal agent Stephen Coffman, obtain and examine the registration form.  That form, which should have answered the lingering questions, raised more questions of its own.

Some of those questions were also raised by the follow-up column in The Crossbow, which documents the extant request for the Obama draft registration.  In her blog, Schlussel questions why the Selective Service System's own computer data log shows that the Obama draft registration form was requested from their Data Management Center in Chicago on the 9^th of September, when Schlussel's FOIA request was not written until the 13^th of October, and was not mailed until the 25^th of October.  The timing of that access of the file on the 9^th seems to indicate that the Obama campaign took seriously the allegations made on the 8^th by The Crossbow.  Although they took the allegations seriously, the reaction seems to have been "spin control" instead of forthrightness.  That, of course, leads to other questions, including the question of a cover-up.

The follow-up column in The Crossbow pointed out that it would've been impossible for Barack Obama to register for the draft in Hawaii, because he was attending college in Los Angeles at that time.  That assertion was based on the inquiry results published on 12 August 2008 by Pajamas Media blogger Bob Owens.  Those results stated that Obama had registered on 04 September 1980.  But, he had been required by law to register during the last week of July, after President Carter had revived mandatory draft registration retroactively.

In the wake of Ms. Schlussel's blog revelations, via an e-mail exchange, Mr. Owens told The Crossbow that the Selective Service System had not provided him with a copy of the registration form.  (Ms. Schlussel has not replied to a separate e-mail inquiry from The Crossbow.)  Oddly, the Selective Service System in Washington, DC, had previously told Mr. Owens that Obama's draft registration form could not be accessed.  He had to make several information requests before getting an e-mail reply.  And, that reply was only a summary, which did not include the actual form.  Retired ICE agent Coffman also had to make several FOIA requests, over the course of a year, before obtaining the form.  But, in the wake of The Crossbow's allegation that Obama lied, somebody accessed that "inaccessible" record.  The Selective Service computer printout shows that the form was accessed on 09 September, one day after the original allegations by The Crossbow and the request for an Obama response.

That same computer printout shows the last "action" with the record to have been on 04 September 1980.  That was the date that the Selective Service spokesman told Mr. Owens was when Obama registered for the draft.  The form shows that Obama signed the registration on the 30^th of July, which was during the week required for him to register.  But, the official stamp on the form was dated the day before.  Having worked in a Post Office on two separate occasions, I know that the routine is for the clerks to change the dates on all the stamps before opening the locked window at the customer counter.  So, even if young Barack Obama had been the first person in line that morning (not likely for a college student on summer break), the dates still should have matched between the signature and the stamp.  Retired ICE agent Coffman pointed out that anomaly via the Schlussel blog.

Here, the tale takes another strange twist.  As pointed out in the previous editions of The Crossbow, Obama claimed to have been actively considering military service at the time that he registered for the draft.  But, on the registration form, the box is not checked for the military recruiters to contact Obama.  If he were truly considering an "ennobling" service in the Armed Forces, then wouldn't he have taken that opportunity to be contacted by the recruiters?  This aspect of the examination is exclusive to The Crossbow.

Another exclusive angle is the fact the Selective Service laws require that even illegal aliens must register for the draft.  Really.  (Of course, if they broke the law to get here in the first place...)  The real irony here is that, given that Obama's draft registration form states that he showed "no ID", it is possible that the reason for the lack of ID is his lack of American citizenship.  I'd much prefer to see Obama deported to Kenya than imported to the White House.

The Schlussel blog points out irregularities with the postal date validation stamp.  And, readers of that blog have posted comments similar to my assertion above.  Some of those readers went into detail about the fact that the "round dater" stamps come with a four-digit block for the year.  The stamp on the Obama draft form shows only two digits, and the digits seem to be damaged.  A comment from Schlussel reader "Vicki551", who claims to be a retired Postal Service clerk, goes into detail about the format of the date stamp.  That sparked independent research by The Crossbow, which agrees that the date stamp on the Obama draft form does not seem genuine.

Searches of several philatelic Web sites showed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the United States postal system (whether as the "Post Office" or the "Postal Service") has used four-digit year blocks for at least a hundred years.  It was not a recent "Y2K" change, as some Obama supporters have claimed on various political Web sites.  The four-digit year block remains consistent regardless of the location of the postmark, and regardless of whether it was civilian or military.  Some examples are shown here.

The Crossbow also researched the Web site of a company that manufactures the "round dater" stamps, and found that the blocks for the year are, in fact, a separate and removable unit of the stamping device.  Therefore, it is possible that someone could have removed the four-digit block "2008" from a round dater, cut off the first two digits, turned the block upside-down, and then inserted it back into the date stamp to produce the two-digit "80" year stamped on the Obama form.  The condition of the numerals is consistent with such tampering.  And, the numeral "8" does appear to be upside-down.  A normal "8" in a rubber-stamp machine has a bottom loop that is larger than the top loop.  The "8" on the Obama form has a top loop that is larger than the bottom loop would be, were it not for the fact that part of the bottom loop has apparently been cut away.  This portion of the analysis moves the situation away from merely tinkering with the filing system and into the possibility of an outright forgery of the source document itself.

The timing of the FOIA-initiated computer printout also inspires questions.  If any other blogger had been pursuing this same story, and had obtained the Obama registration form, then they would've posted it as Schlussel did.  But, no one else posted it until Schlussel's blog in mid-November.  The Crossbow raised the questions in early September, and made a request to the Obama campaign on the 8^th, but did not make a FOIA request to the Selective Service System.  So, who did make such a request on the 9^th of September?  And, if the request was made by the Obama campaign, then is the document given to Schlussel by SSS the same document that was originally placed into their file 28 years ago?  Or, did someone remove the original, forge a backdated copy, and then place that one into the Selective Service System file?

What difference do the dates make?  Plenty!  If the signature date on the published form is correct, then Obama is in the clear.  But, if Obama did not register until the 4^th of September, as the official Selective Service System spokesman told Pajamas Media back in August, then there is plenty wrong.  First, it would mean that Obama was in violation of the law for not registering in July when he was required.  Second, it would raise the question of who actually filed the original SSS registration in Hawaii, because Obama was attending college in Los Angeles at that time.  (If he was poor enough to need student loans, then he could not have afforded to jet-set over to Hawaii just to sign a form.)  Thirdly, the form specifies Obama's "current address" as being in Honolulu while he was living in Los Angeles.  Did he give the SSS his former address as a way to avoid being drafted if a war had started in the Middle East?  (The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the main reason that President Carter revived the draft, although the Iran hostage crisis was certainly another factor on Carter's mind.)  Could it be that Obama was dodging even the possibility of going to war against his "Muslim brothers"?

The hinge pin in this story is now the postal date stamp.  It is a felony to falsely postmark any document with any date other than the current date.  That would be the case if a Postal Service employee had done the date stamping in a Postal Service office.  If the stamp were created for the purpose of producing a forged document, then that would be an additional felony offense.

Were it not for the apparent forgery of the document, logic could have given Obama a way out of this mess.  The draft had been curtailed for five years.  Then, President Carter revived it.  There must have been a backlog of data entry as large numbers of young men registered in a short period of time.  Thus, an argument could have been made that the date on the SSS computer printout is the date that the registration was entered into their database, versus the date that Obama signed the form.  (And, several Obama supporters have already tried to use that scenario to explain away these questions.)  The problem is:  If the discrepancy was caused by a data backlog, then how does one explain the forgery of the date stamp?  And, how does one explain the documented access to the file at a time when there was no FOIA request for Obama's information?

It does appear to this writer that the date stamp is a phony creation.  Besides the problem of the two-digit year versus a four-digit year, the stamp also specifies the abbreviation "USPO", for United States Post Office.  The problem is that President Nixon in 1971 changed the name to United States Postal Service, or "USPS".  Below is a postmark from 1980 that clearly shows a USPS on the round postmark.  It is highly unlikely that the post office in Honolulu — a state capital, and home to several military bases — would have still been using an obsolete round dater nine years after the name change.  One questionable aspect of a date stamp could be a mistake.  Three such aspects on the same date stamp, on a questionable form, in a case that is so politically sensitive, is no mere mistake and no mere coincidence.

Dodging the draft, or forging a document to make it appear that one did not dodge the draft, might be considered a case of "misguided youth" for the average hard drinking, dope-smoking, coke-snorting college ne'er-do-well.  (There is no slander here, because Obama admits in his memoir to being such.)  But, when that intoxicated college kid has been raised by politically-active parents, and has trotted around the globe at a young age, and has been mentored by a Communist Party organizer during his adolescence, then the situation cannot be overlooked as some mere faux pas.  This point is now exacerbated by the fact the college kid in question has gone on to (ostensibly) win an election to become the next president of the United States.  Thus, the fake draft registration form must be considered an intentional act.  The key question becomes:  Who committed the act?

That, sadly, is not the only question.  Given the obviously Socialist nature of Obama's presidential policies, and given his apparent goal of bringing America down economically in order to accept Socialism, and given the fractured nature of military organizations in Socialist countries, and given the polarizing effect that Obama has on the population, one must wonder how the election of such a man will affect our military.  President Bill Clinton also dodged the draft.  But, he at least went through some of the motions of trying to comply with the law before finding a way to pass through the eye of a legal needle.  And, rightly or wrongly, Clinton dodged the draft during the height of an unpopular war.  If it is proven that Obama dodged the draft when there was no war at all, then what does that say about the man's courage to face our nation's enemies — even if it is only from across the conference table?  The fact that such a man could get elected president brings a new level of meaning to the word "audacity", while simultaneously draining American patriots of much "hope".

Will the United States soon become like many countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East — where the military has entire bases and units that are described as "loyal to the president" or "disloyal to the president"?  Will it come down to the point where a military commander, or entire unit, might refuse a presidential order to prove a political point?  If that happens, would a President Obama dispatch his "loyal" troops to somehow corral the "disloyal" troops?  And, if he would send American troops en masse against other American troops, then would he also send American troops against American civilians?  And, if he would not send American troops, then is this the intended function of his proposed new "civilian national security force"?  If those questions don't get answered now, then it might become illegal to ask them later.  That is, if the people prone to ask such questions are still alive and free during an Obama regime.

Regardless of whether a court proves that Barack Hussein Obama is unqualified to become our next president, this writer asserts that Obama has already proven himself unfit.