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After her divorce, President Obama's mother married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta. From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta. Young Barack returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from the fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year, before dying of ovarian cancer.
Some Conservative groups have claimed that Obama was not born on US soil and therefore is ineligible to serve as president. Several lawsuits have been brought asking President Obama to make his official birth certificate public. The US Constitution Article II, Section 1 requires the following for any persons to be eligible to be President of the United States:
“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
In total, at least11 lawsuits were brought to compel Obama to prove his birthplace and US Citizenship. The lawsuits include those by Democrat former-Assistant Attorney General of Pennsylvania Philip Berg, American Independent Party founder and former-Republican Party Presidential Primary candidate Alan Keyes, and independent author Andy Martin. In one interesting case, on April 13, 2010, the U.S. Army announced that it would court-martial Army doctor Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin for refusing to report to duty and be deployed to Afghanistan. Lakin asserted that due to citizenship issues, Barack Obama was not legally the Commander in Chief, and therefore lacked the authority to send him to Afghanistan. The military revoked Lakin's Pentagon building pass, and confiscated his government laptop computer. Lakin was placed on assignment at the Walter Reed Medical Center while awaiting trial.
Obama campaign website published a scanned image of Obama's Certification of Live Birth issued by the State of Hawaii's Department of Health in June 2007. The website declared:
"Smears claiming Barack Obama doesn't have a birth certificate aren't actually about that piece of paper — they're about manipulating people into thinking Barack is not an American citizen. The truth is, Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, a native citizen of the United States of America."
The release of the certificate did not resolve the issue. Conspiracy theorists asserted that the certificate had been digitally forged with Adobe Photoshop and lacked a stamped seal of the state, which led them to demand that Obama release his "original" 1961 birth certificate. Jerome Corsi, author of the book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, told Fox News that "the campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website... it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce."
This view was rejected by the state authorities, the media and independent factchecking organizations. FactCheck.org was invited to view the Obama campaign's hard copy of the candidate's Certification of Live Birth and concluded as follows:
"FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said."
A more thorough discussion of this issue can be found here. Factcheck's reports on this issue can be found here and here.