Topic: WorldNetDaily
Buried within a July 28 WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi on Barack Obama's birth certificate is this interesting claim:
Without access to the original document, dozens of traditionally trained court-authorized forensic document examiners approached by WND have refused to render an opinion.
Corsi seems to be conceding that WND's small army of people opining on the PDF of the birth certificate are not "traditionally trained court-authorized forensic document examiners" and, thus, don't really know what they're talking about. Indeed, as the Obama Conspiracy blog points out, the only two "experts" with forensics experience to have been quoted by WND both never claimed the document is a fake.
The most recent expert WND cites bears this out. In a July 26 article, Corsi touts the supposed expertise of Tom Harrison, whom Corsi describes as "a software designer with more than 30 years experience in graphic design" and "a 58 year-old Dartmouth graduate with a background in mathematics, physics and computer science." No expertise in forensic document analysis is cited. Harrison's analysis is apparently based on how it looks in Adobe Illustrator -- which is meaningless since Illustrator was not used to create the PDF being examined.
Here's one sample of Harrison's "expert" analysis: "Grabbed and moved around as objects, the two groups of dots can be placed at the top of the document, giving the appearance of a large butterfly chasing a smaller butterfly, as seen in Exhibit 14." Uh, sure.
Corsi's admission that no trained forensic document expert will rule the PDF to be a fake pretty much destroys WND's credibility on this issue. Adding another to the parade of so-called experts who can't even be bothered to do something so simple as to examine the PDF in the program in which it was created does nothing to counter that lack of credibility.
