April Fool!
The Occidental Tourist
Claim: Recently released records document that Barack Obama received college financial aid in the U.S. as a "foreign student from Indonesia."
FALSE
Origins: One of the avenues of approach taken by "birthers" in their quest to demonstrate that Barack Obama is not eligible to hold the office of President of the United States is to try to demonstrate that, even if he was born in the United States, he gave up his U.S. citizenship somewhere along the way ... and if he's not a U.S. citizen, then he can't legitimately be President of the United States. Therefore, many birthers have gleefully seized onto the above-cited news report from April 2009, which purports that Barack Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles under a scholarship granted only to students of "foreign citizenship." However, this item isn't a news report at all — it's a hoax whose elements are all demonstrably false:
* The article is datelined "April 1, 2009" and tagged "AP," signifying it came from the Associated Press news agency. The date is a giveaway to the hoax (it's April Fool's Day), and the text of the article does not at all fit the standard Associated Press stylebook guidelines.
* There was no such group as "Americans for Freedom of Information" at the time this article began circulating (although someone has since registered a site using that domain name); in fact, a web site for the then-faux organization was established to poke fun at those who believed it did:
Read these tiny words very closely: the group Americans for Freedom of Information does not exist, just like the supposed "AP article" you keep cutting and pasting into e-mails to your irritated family does not exist, just like the "Daily Mail article" referenced in the fake "AP article" does not exist. They're all fabrications. Fakes. Hoaxes. Ask yourself why you're so eager to believe these obvious fakes. No, really. Really, really ask yourself.
* Barack Obama attended Occidental College in California for two years as an undergraduate from 1979-81 under the name Obama, not Soetoro (the latter is the surname of his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro):
Jim Tranquada, Occidental's Director of Communications, said: "Contemporary public documents, such as the 1979-80 freshman 'Lookbook' [a guide distributed to incoming freshman] published at the beginning of President Obama's first year at Occidental, list him as Barack Obama. All of the Occidental alumni I have spoken to from that era (1979-81) who knew him, knew him as Barry Obama."
* Fulbright scholarships for foreign students are coordinated through the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation (AMINEF), which does not fund Indonesians for undergraduate study in the United States (only for master's or doctorate programs).
* Barack Obama's student records from Occidental College remain unreleased. He has not chosen to make them public, nor has any court ordered the school to release them.
* Searches of newspaper archives and electronic news databases shown that neither Britain's Daily Mail nor any other major UK newspaper published a front-page article entitled "Obama Eligibility Questioned" in 2009, nor did any such newspaper published an article consisting of the text reproduced above.
* Leo Donofrio's lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency was denied a hearing by the Supreme Court of New Jersey back in December 2008. It has not been taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
* The web site of the United States Justice Foundation includes no report of an "investigation of Obama's campaign spending," and the executive director of that organization who is referenced in the e-mail, Gary Kreep, said in response to an inquiry that the e-mail was a hoax.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/occidental.asp