The former British police officer who wants to bring down Barack Obama: Conspiracist prominent in movement claiming president is an imposter

[Hetty ter Haar]

The former British police officer who wants to bring down Barack Obama

Conspiracist prominent in movement claiming president is an imposter

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday November 23 2009
The Guardian


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/barack-obama-british-conspiracist

Neil Sankey has spent his life investigating organised crimes. As a
former British police officer with almost 20 years experience, he was
seconded to elite units of Scotland Yard through most of the 1970s and
now runs his own private detective agency in California.

Over the years he has been involved in some big investigations. As
part of the Special Branch and Bomb Squad he monitored British
leftwing groups and the IRA, and in America his clients have included
several big car companies.

But never has he handled anything quite as monumental as the
investigation that is absorbing his energies today.

Sankey is pursuing what he believes to be fraud on a gigantic scale ?
a conspiracy, no less, to infiltrate and destroy the free world by
putting a foreign imposter into the White House.

Sankey is a member of the fringe alliance known widely as the Birthers
(he dislikes the expression, considering it pejorative). Together with
other activists, he seeks to prove that Barack Obama is not a true
American and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Over the past year Sankey has been at the centre of some of the most
aggressive efforts by the Birthers to unseat the president. At the end
of last year he tried to block Obama's inauguration by contacting all
538 electoral college representatives who formally elect the
president. More recently, he has carried out his own probe into
Obama's personal identification history which has revealed, he
believes, a suspicious multiplicity of social security numbers.

Sankey says his fascination began with the realisation "that this man
wasn't what he said he was. He wasn't an ordinary Democrat ? he was
far more extreme than that." So about a year ago he began reading
blogs and websites that claimed to expose Obama's foreign roots, his
spurious Hawaiian birth certificate and the $2m White House cover-up
that has prevented the public finding out about the plot.

His travels put him in touch with Orly Taitz, one of the most
energetic and flamboyant of the Birther leaders. Of Moldovan
extraction, she emigrated via Israel to California where she works as
a dentist and lawyer. She has filed numerous legal suits around the
country on behalf of serving US military personnel attempting to
prevent their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan on the grounds that
they should not be taking orders from an illegally serving commander-
in-chief.

Sankey's journey from having worked in some of the most elite police
units in Britain to taking part in a movement dedicated to the pursuit
of a paranoid conspiracy theory may seem bizarre. But he insists it
has been a natural progression. He joined the Hampshire force in 1961,
and was seconded as a detective sergeant to Scotland Yard where he
developed a specialism tracking leftwing political groups and the IRA.

"We created an operation into what we called revolutionary
criminality ? monitoring leftwing bookshops and extremist literature,
following the leftist fringe and the Marxist links of the IRA."

In 1980 he moved to California, set up his agency, and became a
naturalised American in 1985.

Sankey contends that his police experience in England now informs his
fight against Obama. "It's quite obvious to me ? America is heading
towards a socialised state just as has happened in Europe. Socialised
medicine, everyone on the dole, and when everything collapses you tip
the scales into Marxism."

He also believes his training in Scotland Yard is now reaping benefits
for the Birthers. The same techniques he used to analyse the IRA's
associations he is now applying to Obama. Most recently, he carried
out an exhaustive search of databases that he claims threw up 140
different identification numbers and addresses for "Barack Obama". He
admits the findings prove nothing - there is nothing to link the
entries to the president - but he believes it raises further doubts
that need investigating.

Taitz says Sankey's UK police expertise has been invaluable. "He has
had superb training. I have the greatest respect for Scotland Yard."

The Birther movement is not a unique phenomenon within US politics.
Bill Clinton was accused by conspiracy theorists of having murdered
his friend and White House legal adviser Vince Foster; George Bush had
to contend with the Truthers who believe he was the mastermind behind
the 9/11 attacks.

But the Birthers are unlike previous movements in that they are
focused on who Obama is rather than what he does.

"There is no other president who has had his citizenship questioned in
this way," says Patricia Turner, an expert in folklore at the
University of California, Davis. Turner says that the popular Birther
theories that Obama has used fake Hawaiian documents to disguise the
fact he was born in Kenya or Indonesia are retellings of an old story.
"This is just a proxy for old-fashioned racism. They are driven by
hostility towards anything they see as foreign or exotic."

Although the Birthers are on the fringe of American politics, they are
part of a wider surge of rightwing anger towards Obama's perceived
socialist policies that is sweeping the country.

As such they can command considerable support. An internet petition
demanding an official inquiry into Obama's origins has been signed by
almost 500,000; critics say the number is inflated by multiple clicks.

Like any virulent conspiracy theory, that of Obama's birth has proved
immune to the intervention of fact. When Obama's birth certificate in
Hawaii was digitally scanned for all to see, it was denounced as a
forgery. The birth notices printed by two Hawaii newspapers announcing
his birth in August 1961 were similarly dismissed.

Dozens of legal actions have been brought before the courts by Taitz
and other Birther leaders, and so far every one has been thrown out.
Last month a federal judge dismissed Taitz's lawsuit seeking to
challenge the chain of military command up to Obama as commander-in-
chief. In a devastating ruling, the judge accused Taitz of trying to
"emasculate the military" in a way that would "leave this country
defenceless".

None of these setbacks have dissuaded Sankey. He says accusations of
racism are smears that he has come to expect. "The objection is not
Obama's colour but his politics. I like him as a person, I just wish
he was genuine."

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009
Registered in England and Wales No. 908396

[Tony Agbali]

This is another Brit whose racist bias cannot be hidden no matter how hard he tires. Thse Brits cannot understand, and so is ill at ease and disturbed at soul, as to how the kind of people they colonized can now rise to the top, and even possess power especially within the greatest nation of the Free World.   In deed,  this is what quintessentially differentiates American from the royal, class, and racist hierarchies of priviledges that characterize British society. It is that attraction that makes Brits like Neil Sankey fall for American even becoming "birther" Americans; though palpably still arrograntly warped with an undying sense of White supremacist cultural superiority. The very nature of American free society should bother their conscience and threaten their sense of misplaced superiority.   It is ironic that Neil Sankey can talk about leading a birther movement against Obama, when he, in deed, is the prime birther, a naturalized American born in a nation that despised the formation of American freedom and independence. It is ironic how he cannot see himself in a mirror! I think that folks like Neil Sankey are angry that in spite of their racial pedigree, as naturalized American they cannot ascend to the White House.  The fact that a member of the Black and colored race they so despised and harrassed through different stages of imperialism and colonialism can so easily become the President of the Free World cannot be so easily dealt within their screwed imaginations.     Sankey, understands that though white, he remains foreign when it comes to issues of seeking the highest office in the land he now calls home. Yet, he cannot mask his disgust, and though a naturalized American citizen not native born, he feels a certain sense of superiority over a black person, a native born American. Any wonder that sometimes ago Californian governator, Arnold, wants the law changed in his favor to allow folks like himself contest for the White House, though foreign born and a birther leading one of the largest economy in the United States! The outcry is louder it seems, when the other, defined by race, is the one involved.   This British sense of Americanism resonates that of another Brit, Peter Brimelow, a journalist, who is the arrowhead of the American anti-immigrants movement, that recasts the posture of another sweltering racist Brit.  Yet, it is amazing that these Brits are gaining consistent attention and widespread support, when in fact, Britain during many stages of the consolidation of the American democracy fought to scuttle this democracy hinged upon the anti-thesis of British life of deprivation of freedom and tyranny.   The very fact of Sankey's tenacious talk of Obama as a birther, when he, in fact represents the foremost emblem of a birther, simply predicates that the real intention of his birther movement remain masked in the imagination of race and color. Beyond the issue of birthing is an underlining one that though not so easily cast and political correctly masked remains a critical underlying issue of race and color that vest such imaginations with potency and their greatest selling salience.   This Brimelowean syndrome is all too apparent but its underlining reasons and politics continue to be subtly masked, caliberated along the texture lines of political correctness. It seems to me that this Brits who cannot foster any kind of positive conscientious voice within Britain, would become the vocal arrowheads of American political conscience. Those who will not decry British excesses, would attempt to sprint a view of a sane representative of civilized values.   Yet, their voices would be hugely silent when British military forces are accused of raping innocent women for their pleasant pleasures. It seems they would have loved the kind of conditions of the "White Mischief" (a 1987 film) depicting British attrocious living in Kenya. It is no secret that during British colonialism in places like Kenya white Brits shot at any Black persons at will merely for their fun (Ngugi Wa Thing'o, The Detained (Prison Memoir) alludes to this).  Even as recently as some years ago as highlighted by the case of Thomas Cholmondeley, the great grandson of the third Baron of Delamere and trained at Eton who twice in 2005 and 2006, shot black mens intentionally has continued to show the character of a civilized race .   How can folks like Sankey, be comfortable that a descendant of one of those that his British pedigree shot at at will and killed for sports and fun, be at the head of the world's greatest democracy. The case of the "stone rejected by the builder" becoming the "corner" or "head stone" is not often an easy one. In deed, understanding Sankey's psychology is all too easy. People like Sankey would rather be proud that members of the British army were raping Kenya women for their pleasure and sport!   Like Brimelow, Sankey is give the opportunity of being a naturalized American citizen, it is amazing that these bigots overwhelmingly think that they can do for native-born Americans what they cannot do for themselves, provide them a voice and a template because they have a more superior vision. What an arrogance?   The same kind of British arrogance that led Americans to wriggle themselves free from King George's tyranny through the Boston Tea Party! These Georgean boys should be making amend for the sins of their fathers rather than arrogantly assuming their superiority over the conscience of a nation their forebears almost sunk in destruction.   These Brits have forgotten that their ancestors burnt down the citadel of democracy, the Capitol in Washington, D.C on August 24th,1814, and among those that worked tireless toward its eventual restoration where both Blacks and Whites, Obama ancestors on both aisles of American society, and an acute expression of the foundational statement of what the American society can, and has proven to become; inclusive rather than exclusive.   The Brits leading of pejorative movements against the ideals of America is a subtle idea of undermining the ideals of America, which evident within the Boston Tea Party, long informed the British that there is no room for tyranny and divisiveness within the formation of the American nation and democracy.   These Brits' anti-Americanism is as lucidly evident in the kinds of campaigns masterminded by folks like Sankey and Brimelow.  The Brits would be better if they can only salvage their own society and apologize for their misdeeds in America, Asia, Africa, Faulkland Islands, and the rest of the world through their colonialism and acts of anti-democracy of the past.   Like Brimelow, an immigrant arguing for an immigrant-less America for his children, though he too would have become an illegal immigrant except for the benevolence of his employers who salvaged him, Sankey seemingly is hiding his real racist intentionality while stoking the redoundant argument that he, Sankey, actually loves Obama. As one Irish physician once told me when I first arrived in the U.S., one should always beware of those who say "I am not racist," and "I have friends among people of color" for according to him these epithets simply masks the real intention and face of a real racist. I was shocked to hear this from a white person, and at the time even doubted it, but the benefit of hindsights can offer better insights.   Yes, in deed, Sankey loves Obama, who can say no to his assertion, only he knows the truth of the reasons for his action. But beyond it all, Sankey would try all that he can but history would not bail him out on this infactuated aspiration to bring down America's first acknowledged and self-identified Black, and or even interracial, President. In deed, you can love Obama by not loving Obama- at least by portraying publicly which side of the aisle you stand! --- On Sun, 11/22/09, Hetty ter Haar <olda...@googlemail.com> wrote: