Who is Reed Hayes? Mike Zullo hired Reed Hayes after 212 experts turned down his requests to opine on the validity of the President’s long form birth certificate. That fact alone should raise a warning flag about Mr. Hayes. Reed Hayes is a member of the National Association of Document Examiners, NADE for short. NADE is one of several organizations that certifies document and handwriting analysts.
The most well known and respected organization for document analysts is the American Association of Questioned Document Examiners ASQDE. ASQDE and several other organizations require that their members pass a certification examination given by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, ABFDE. ABFDE requires that candidates train for two years at a recognized document laboratory before they are allowed to even attempt the certification examination.
These are the requirements for training and certification from the ABFDE web page:
3.0 Professional Experience Qualifications
3.1 Applicants are required to complete and document a full-time training period of at
least two years in duration, in a forensic laboratory recognized by the ABFDE.
3.1.1“Recognized” means that the applicant’s training program met the basic requirements for a training program described in ASTM E-2388 (Standard Guide for Minimum Training Requirements for Forensic Document Examiners). The key requirements are outlined below; please refer to Standard E-2388 for full details.
3.1.2 The ABFDE Credentialing Committee will consider whether the applicant’s training curriculum includes the following basic requirements.
3.1.2.1 Full-time training for a minimum of 24 months under the supervision of a principal trainer. The maximum period of training should not exceed four years.
3.1.2.3 Training that includes the topics addressed in the ABFDE Study Guide.
3.1.2.4 Training from a principal trainer who must also meet these requirements and have a minimum of five years of full-time experience following his/her training as a forensic document examine NADE on the other hand self certifies its members.
Contrast that with NADE’s certification requirements:
Members of NADE may participate in a certification program. In order to become certified, the candidate must:
- Submit an application which includes specifics related to various aspects of the candidate’s work as a document examiner.
- Pass a proctored, written examination given at the annual conference.
- Submit case files from a number of cases in which the candidate has testified as an expert witness in document examination.
- Submit a complete work-up of an assigned case.
- Pass an oral examination in the form of a mock trial based on a case that the applicant was assigned earlier in the certification process.
If you see quite a difference in the two you are not imagining things.
That brings me to the main point of the article. I looked at the NADE Code of Ethics, which is posted on their web site. It is really very good. I then compared the actions of Reed Hayes in the matter of President Obama’s Birth certificate with the tenets of the NADE Code of Ethics. I believe that I identified several sections that Mr. Hayes might have violated from what little we know about his analysis. After I gave it some thought I composed a letter to the President of NADE, Heidi Harralson.
I sent the following letter via email to Ms. Harralson and copied Mr. Hayes. I asked for their comments and gave them both the opportunity to send a response to my open letter to include with this article. Ms Harralson did not respond to either emails or phone calls. Although I gave Mr. Hayes a chance to respond I told him that I understood that his client Mike Zullo has requested that he not comment on his analysis.
I will report any response that I receive to my complaint. If you would like to use my letter as a template for your own complaint to NADE please feel free to do so.
thatMerriam-Webster: that definition: the person, thing, or idea indicated, mentioned, or understood from the situation. →
RC Radio Blog 
I hear the wingnuts are going ape over your letter. Yay. Screw ’em.
Apparently it made Freep. Let me clarify something. I am not out to destroy Reed Hayes career. I just want him and his organization to take responsibility for his work. I only need to look at his conclusion to know he did a shoddy job. Any expert who is about to accuse the Commander in Chief of perpetrating a fraud should think about it not once, not twice, but three times and should consult his peers before issuing such an opinion. It is clear that Hayes did not.
I believe that my request to have his report independently reviewed by real experts in image analysis like Neal Krawetz was perfectly reasonable.
Reality Check says:I believe that my request to have his report independently reviewed by real experts in image analysis like Neal Krawetz was perfectly reasonable.
Which is why they’re going ape-sh*t…birthers and reasonable just do no go well together! 😀
As we have seen, any person who questions Obama’s eligibility, it immediately destroyed. Therefore, it is not surprising that any expert including the one’s RC cites will not want to give an opinion on Obama’s BC other than – Obama’s BC is legit. It took great courage on the part of Reed to render his objective analysis on Obama’s BC. Given Reed is Democrat, it helps with his credibility. It would appear the Reed is more concerned about the validity of Obama’s BC rather being called a “birther”. I would hazard to guess that the other opinions of RC’s expert no where want get near the issue. Is Neal Krawetz worried about being labeled a birther. A good question to ask of Dr. Krawetz. Apparently this not a problem from Reed.
I don’t trust Neal Krawetz. I would certainly want the CCP and Reed to weigh any bias Krawetz may have. Does Krawetz have the courage to render a negative opinion about Obama’s BC and the fall out it may have? Apparently, we know Hays doesn’t seem to have a problem. Does Krawetz?
How do you know that Hayes rendered an objective analysis? You haven’t seen his report. I am saying that he has no credentials or experience to opine on the whether a PDF file is the result of compression or manipulation. I can determine that from his CV without seeing his report. I suggested Krawetz and Professor de Queiroz because of their expertise in the areas of image analysis and file compression algorithms respectively. I also mentioned Ivan Zatkovich. I am sure there are other experts who would be qualified to evaluate Hayes’ work.
The only people who’ve been “destroyed” are the ones who’ve persisted in making obviously-false claims.
As for his “objective analysis”, the fact that he didn’t walk away calls that into question. Look at the Clueless Clown Posse’s major claims:
1. “African” Anachronism. Possibly an innocent mistake, but should have been dismissed with any non-cursory examination.
2. Coding errors. A deliberate and immediately-obvious fraud.
3. PDF doesn’t match “control document”. Could be incompetence, could be fraud. But any competent person who’s ever done any forensic analysis of anything would immediately spot the fact that the CCP made NO effort to reproduce the conditions under which the online PDF was produced. Their claim is equivalent to saying “I took snapshots on vacation, and they don’t match Ansel Adams’ pictures, so ‘Yosemite and the Range of Light’ is an obvious forgery”, and even someone who got his forensic training from watch CSI reruns should have caught it.
A much more credible theory is that Hayes hoped the publicity would move him up from 212th to 112th on the “Who Ya Gonna Call?” list.
Someone asked at the Fogbow if I had contacted Reed Hayes with details about new evidence that a Xerox WorkCentre was the source for the LFBC PDF. The answer is no. I thought about including some of those details in the open letter but decided against that. There was already ample evidence that the PDF was not assembled by a person. All Hayes had to do was perform a rudimentary search. The Xerox evidence is the nail in the coffin to forgery theories. I included a link to my blog with my email to Mr. Hayes.
I would suggest that any reader is free to contact Mr. Hayes and Ms Harralson with your own complaint and include the latest findings. If you wish to use mine as a basis I freely give permission.
RC: ” The Xerox evidence is the nail in the coffin to forgery theories.”
Hardly. The Xerox evidence is not yet unquestionable evidence since it did not reproduce what is seem in Obama’s pdf. It only produced something similar in nature. That is not good enough for any rational person when it comes to an issue of such immense significance. We need to see a similar result from a Xerox, -not identical but more than merely something in the same ball park.
But the pdf, even if reproducible via device, is only the clothing of a deep suspicion. The corpus of counterfeiting wouldn’t even be evident in the pdf even if it were the output of a Xerox machine. The layers themselves don’t reveal what would have to have been done in order to produce a counterfeit. The work of placing Obama’s information, taken from the affidavit his mother or grandparent filled out, onto a birth certificate with falsified text and signature from another birth certificate, would have to have been accomplished at an earlier stage that is undetectable and unprovable. It would be so because the earlier result had been flattened before the pdf stage. Only examination of original files could reveal the truth one way or another, -not examination of the pdf.
But the pdf does have a few inexplicable anomalies, such as the green-gray color / density of the added layers seen in the pdf, which rationally would have been rendered by machine as pure black.
Along with the smiling face seen in the “A” of the name Alvin. If that is not the secret signature of a proud forger, then it is totally inexplicable. And worst of all, for purposes of certification, is the absence of the official embossing seal of the Hawaiian Dept. of Health. Only the very faintest ring is barely visible on the WH pdf background. That is not what an embossed image looks like as is demonstrated by other birth certificates and examples of what the real thing should look like.
It’s like a forger got a hold of a sheet of security paper that had been stamped in the embossing machine along with several other pages, with the one used having been on the very bottom, or maybe the center sheet. And with no visible seal image, there’s no telling what state it even came from, if it even came from a state.
Adrien Nash obama–nation.com
The State of Hawaii has certified, repeatedly, that the information in the PDF matches what’s on the original birth certificate.
Your spy-thriller speculation about how someone might have manufactured an accurate duplicate is pointless.
The State of Hawaii has certified nothing. I won’t expound here. You can read my reponse to Dr. Conspiracy’s 1000 word challenge. Meanwhile, if you want to find out just how wrong your conception is about Hawaii, read my exposition on the subject of the letters. It will learn you all about reality then your ignorance will melt away.
http://h2ooflife.wordpress.com/bastardization-of-certification/mendacious-fabricated-verification-letters/
“read my exposition on the subject of the letters”
You mean your “mendacious & fabricated” screed?
I pretty much stopped reading when I saw that you deliberately misquoted the letter to Bennett.
So perhaps I missed the ACTUAL $%*&ING EVIDENCE that Hawaii doesn’t have original birth certificates stashed away somewhere.
But I doubt it.
I guess that’s better that your ignorance, which wouldn’t melt away at any temperature.
Well, that last sentence sure is a doozy. If that is not the overt self-affirmation of a proud ignoramus, then it is totally inexplicable.
Love those moving goal posts…
So sad… When confronted with the evidence, they do not rebut, they want more details. Even though much of the evidence all supports a Xerox workflow…
The embedded comment in the jpeg, the multiple layers which were claimed to be evidence of forgery…
It’s ignorance that continues to drive some people… And why? It seems obvious to me: They have become too invested in a forgery hypothesis that they can no longer accept the evidence.
That’s sad…. In science this is known as the “God of the Gaps” argument combined with confirmation bias… And the results are invariably hilarious…
RC wrote: “I only need to look at his conclusion [Hayes] to know he did a shoddy job.”
That would be a totally baseless assumption without access to his report. He could have done an excellent job but based his results on one disputable assumption. You need to not jump the gun on judgement until you see his report.
“Any expert who is about to accuse the Commander in Chief of perpetrating a fraud should think about it not once, not twice, but three times…”
Actually, that’s about the opposite of what one should do. One should give no consideration whatsoever as to who is the subject of the inquiry. Only the facts matter, not who set things in motion and may fall as a result of fraud.
It’s not the place of an examiner to consider socio-political ramifications. Only the indisputable evidence should be focused on and made the determinant of one’s conclusion. Otherwise one is guilty of playing politics.
As for consulting with others, he wasn’t hired as a member of a team or think tank, but as an independent examiner of evidence. That being said, consultation wouldn’t be out of place if he had questions that he couldn’t answer to his own satisfaction. But we don’t know that he had any such questions so it’s premature to assert that he should not have relied on his own knowledge alone.
That being said, I’m at a loss to understand how his expertise applies to a digital image and how it was produced, other than questionable letter sizes that do not seem to be the logical consequence of compression or processing. A lack of uniformity of size of letters, with an occasional one being too big or two wide or too narrow should raise flags of suspicion, but answering the questions they raise would require knowledge that the rest of us are unfamiliar with.
Adrien Nash said
I can judge Reed Hayes’ report the same way I could judge any expert who said the moon landing was faked by examining only a grainy copy of the low resolution image transmitted back to earth Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking around on the moon and nothing else. I would not need to see the details of the analysis to know it was deeply flawed.
There is another possibility that I should point out. Hayes might just be incredibly stupid. He should never have signed a non-disclosure agreement with Zullo. For all we know Zullo is lying his ass off about what Hayes really said and Hayes feels bound by a confidentiality agreement and will not speak out. I suspect that helps explain why the first 212 analysts Zullo contacted turned him down. 212 must actually be a pretty good fraction of the number document analysts in the entire country one would think.
“He could have done an excellent job but based his results on one disputable assumption”
Said assumption being that he’s an ethical and competent professional.
The man did a “forensic analysis” of a document that not only hasn’t seen and touched, but hasn’t even seen a photocopy of. Instead, he examined a highly-optimized PDF (and possibly a JPEG). That’s roughly equivalent to “authenticating” a Monet by watching a DVD of it being pushed past the camera on a cart with a wobbly wheel.
He chose to base his judgement on data that he KNEW was noisy and inaccurate. If you’re, say, an astronomer or sub-atomic physicist, you have to live with that as best you can: you can’t move a supernova in for a closer look, or count electrons to determine whether a particular atom is an ion.
Not so for QD examiners: if you can’t get what’s needed to do a “professional grade” analysis, don’t act as though you did.
He who builds his house on a foundation of sand will soon find it a pile of ruble. If he based his report on a faulty assumption, no excellent job could overcome a weak foundation.
Ran Talbott says: I pretty much stopped reading [http://h2ooflife.wordpress.com/bastardization-of-certification/mendacious-fabricated-verification-letters/] when I saw that you deliberately misquoted the letter to Bennett.
A TYPICAL DRIVE-BY, UNSUBSTANTIATED, UNQUOTED FALSE CLAIM.
You say you “pretty much stopped reading”, which can be interpreted to mean “I pretty much stopped thinking”, which is a typical defensive response when encountering something that you can not counter. Hence the need to resort to tactics of dismissal rather than refutation. Obviously it is not the truth that you are interested in uncovering but simply the facts that support your bias.
“So perhaps I missed the ACTUAL $%*&ING EVIDENCE that Hawaii doesn’t have original birth certificates stashed away somewhere. But I doubt it.”
SO WHAT YOU ARE SAYING IS THAT “I REMAIN IGNORANT AND UNINFORMED AND AM QUITE HAPPY BEING SUCH SINCE I’M PROTECTED FROM THE TRUTH THAT WAY.”
not much of an attempt at self-enlightenment…
“A TYPICAL DRIVE-BY, UNSUBSTANTIATED, UNQUOTED FALSE CLAIM.”
Um, no. You wrote “They begin with the very first statement: ‘I certify the following:’”. Then you go into a long whine about how terrible it is that governments won’t bow to your desire to have them sign certifications with a quill pen and a wax seal.
Except that the first statement is actually “I verify the following”. Which someone with a penchant for drawn-out, nit-picking arguments that would bore a Jesuit should know is not the same thing.
“SO WHAT YOU ARE SAYING IS”
No. I said what I said.
And I’ll infer from your response that you don’t have any actual evidence to back up your claim that Hawaiian officials lied when they swore that they actually do have bound original birth certificates.
On a related note: Did the CCP violate Arizona state law?
AZ statue 13-2310 says “A. Any person who, pursuant to a scheme or artifice to defraud, knowingly obtains any benefit by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, promises or material omissions is guilty of a class 2 felony.”
While the “control document” BS might be defended on the grounds that the clowns were too ignorant to know that their claims were bogus, the “coding error” claims can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to contain multiple knowing misrepresentations. There may also be other such deliberate false claims: there are so many, I can’t keep track.
The CCP non-profit has received donations based, in part, upon its claim that it’s “proven” fraud and forgery. It’s also been _alleged_ on the never-ever-wrong interwebs that CCP personnel have gotten perks from the MCSO (usually claimed to be official cars and/or use of MCSO credit cards for expenses), but I’m not aware of anyone actually proving that. Those seem to me to be “benefits”.
ARS 13-2311 also bans such misrepresentations by public agencies, without any requirement for material benefit. It’s hard for a lay person to tell, though, whether the CCP could legally be called a “public agency”, given the way that they blur their official relationship with the MCSO.
I know there are some lawyers in the house. Have I misunderstood the above laws?
Ran
Thank God that “obama” is going to clear this whole mess up by quickly releasing the documents he received and by waiving his privacy rights to the vault copies.
Thank God.
Jesus
Since you are like all knowing I am surprised that you forgot that the courts in Hawaii ruled that an individual does not own the records, the Department of Health does.
He thought he was Moses and was going to part the HDOH doors.
One of my favorite moments in Birther history was when Orly Taitz hauled the two idiots Paul Irey and Doug Vogt over to Honolulu and expected the DoH to let them right into the vault to inspect their original records. They even carried microscopes and cameras with them. Needless to say the guards stopped them at the door. What a circus that was.
that I don’t understand. Why not let them examine ? You yourself are doing
this examination – should you be denied access to Xerox machines
because of circuslike behaviour ?
Zullo did the same thing…only he brought his own armed guard. Hawaii’s won.
Ownership is about possession, -not disclosure. Wake up.
“Orly Taitz hauled the two idiots Paul Irey and Doug Vogt over to Honolulu…” Good Lord! She truly needed a reality check. Did she bring one of her self-written subpenas?
Check out my latest exposition at obama–nation.com: OBAMA’S UNBELIEVABLE NEWSPAPER BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENTS
See if I got any facts wrong. I, unlike you and Obama, would rather be proven wrong so I can ascertain the truth rather than to continue on in error and delusion.
Ron Talbott wrote: “you go into a long whine about how terrible it is that governments won’t bow to your desire to have them sign certifications with a quill pen and a wax seal.”
The full magnitude of your Alinskyite bent is seen in your deliberate use of deceitful exaggeration. Are you so stupid as to think that no one can see through your obvious attempt at obfuscation? For those with an honest brain in their head, they will see a glimpse of the real world by simply looking at the DNC Certification of Nomination for Obama in 2008. Just try to find one single rubber-stamped signature. I’ll give you a million dollars if you succeed.
“And I’ll infer from your response that you don’t have any actual evidence to back up your claim that Hawaiian officials lied when they swore that they actually do have bound original birth certificates.
If I swear that I have an IQ of 300, do you have any evidence that I am lying? Prove that I’m lying because my IQ is over 300! and you can take my word on it because you know me so well and what my loyal, god-fearing political integrity is, right? -Grow up you sycophantic, true believing Pollyanna. (actually, I’m not naive enough to think that you actually believe in the smoke that you are blowing.)
btw, questions about the non-profit status of the CCP are fully legitimate, and Dr. Conspiracy has requested the evidence to find the answers. “Let Justice be done though they sky fall.”
I think if you were on trial for having an IQ of 300, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to get you acquitted. I think a good lawyer could get you off on a charge of having an IQ of 100.
“If I swear that I have an IQ of 300, do you have any evidence that I am lying?”
I’d say what you’ve written on this thread makes a good prima facie case.
It would be a great help to him and all of us of he would not be a witness against himself. The 5th amendment is your friend.
That 300 was his IQ in dog years!
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> 3.0 Professional Experience Qualifications
> …
it makes me smile when I see the common picture of Hayes with a
magnifying glass, that makes him look like some modern Sherlock Holmes.
But we are talking about an electronic document here, you would zoom
it instead of using the magnifying glass.
This his hilarious…Mr. Hayes used his professional expertise to determine that the electronic version of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery/fake…and you’re only concern is that he may have violated some portion of the code of ethics for NADE. The stench of irony and hypocrisy could choke a horse. You’re obviously doing this to somehow discredit Mr. Hayes…all in the name of diverting attention from the obvious conclusion Mr. Hayes has come to. Your president submitted a forgery/fake as evidence of his eligibility to be president and your only argument is that Mr. Hayes may have violated the NADE code of ethics. You’re utterly pathetic.
Well, yes, it is hilarious; graphologist Reed Hayes can look at your signature and tell if you’ve stopped wetting your bed yet, or how much you hate your father. That’s the kind of “professional expertise” we’re talking about here.
And you’re right about the “irony and hypocrisy” too. Plenty of that here; it’s just coming from closer than you think.
I can tell you what IS pathetic. Thinking any expert can determine a forged document by looking at a .pdf of it. Only absolute clods with a serious mental deficiency and an endless supply of gullibility could believe that, or that Reed Hayes is an actual expert.
“Mr. Hayes used his professional expertise to determine that the electronic version of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery/fake”
And your evidence for that would be?
So far, the only tiny snippet of his report made available to the public suggests that he did nothing of the sort. But we can only guess, because he and Corporal Zullo refuse to allow his findings to be subjected to public scrutiny.
“all in the name of diverting attention from the obvious conclusion Mr. Hayes has come to”
There are online reference sources that will teach you the meaning of idioms like “in the name of” so you can avoid embarrassing yourself by misusing them.
“and your only argument is that Mr. Hayes may have violated the NADE code of ethics”
Otoh, if you lack the ability to observe that this very page contains references to multiple other arguments, you may not be able to avail yourself of the benefit of those sources…
Don’t forget that Hayes was number 213 on Zullo the Clown’s list of “experts” after the first 213 said they wouldn’t opine on a PDF of a document that had been verified nine ways to Sunday by the issuing authority. Hayes CV lists no expertise that would qualify him to examine computer files than any layman.
I see this entire thing as a hoax and a conspiracy that has taken this “fake” into the White House. Why has his original birth certificate not been put forth for all to see? It would be so simple to end this mess by simply producing the original document. Furthermore, why have his records at Occidental College and Harvard not been made public, but remain “sealed” and away from public scrutiny? Why has his application for financial aid to these schools been hidden. It goes on and on. He was raised as a muslim, raised as a socialist, and I believe was secretly financially supported by Arab muslims from the time he was in high school, with the hope that he could be boosted into his present position as President of the US. Can anyone imagine the consequences if it is proven that he is actually an “ineligible” President? All documents signed by him would be invalid. All appointments made by him would be invalid. All documents signed by his illegal appointees would be invalid. This nation is experiencing the biggest hoax of all time, and there is a huge number of people who want to keep the cover on it in order to protect their own positions.
You new to this whole birther thing, Larry?
Larry H. must be hitting the sauce early this fine Saturday. LOL
All I can say is that if those A-rab Mooselums were clever enough to pick a guy in high school in Hawaii in the late 70’s and get him elected president in 2008 those smart bastards deserve to be running the country. More power to them.
He must be. He’s swallowed all the dumber, more easily-bebunked hogwash. Hey Larry: google “De Facto Officer Doctrine.” Oh, and “Full Faith & Credit.” God loves Barack Obama, Larry. He must… Look where He put Obama, and look where He put you.
We have similar problems with self-appointed handwriting charlatan experts here in Czech Republic, Europe. We, FDEs who underwent handwriting examination training in specialised police labs have to face interference of such individuals in the field of individual identification. These are mainly graphologists but I also know about a guy who made up his own pseudo methods based on psychology, intuition and what not and through his friends at the ministry of justice he succeeded to be appointed a forensic expert despite the huge protests of FDEs community. Everytime a person claiming to be a handwriting expert capable of individual identificaton and evaluation of signature genuineness is also involved in graphology c**p, it should work as automatic warning. Unfortunately the general public is very naive and incapable of applying common sense and critical thinking so these swindlers keep thriving.