Army Officer Imprisoned For Challenging Obama

Lt. Col. Terry Lakin is the author of Officer’s Oath: Why my Vow to Defend the Constitution Demanded that I Sacrifice my Career,
a tell all first hand account of his faith and patriotism which ended
up resulting in a court-martial, imprisonment and the stripping of all
military rank and privileges, including his Army pension all because he
challenged Barack Obama’s eligibility. In reading this one has to ask
the question, why would Barack Obama allow a fine military man like this
to go to jail, when he could have simply provided the documentation and
that soldier would have done his duty.

Lakin refused to obey deployment orders, arguing that Obama had not
documented his eligibility for the presidency under Article 2, Section 1
of the U.S. Constitution.

“What I do not understand and still don’t,” he writes, “is why Obama
did not just come forward with his key documents and be done with it.
Instead, he ordered all of his important records to be kept under seal.”

He also pointed out that the documents released by the White House
were digital scans and not official documents that would be acceptable
as evidence in a court proceeding.

“So tell me: Who has something to hide?” Lakin asks. “It would seem
to be President Obama, and sooner or later the voters of this country
are going to make it clear that his stonewalling cannot continue.”

WND reports,

Lakin has explained that he was compelled by his
officer’s oath to uphold and defend the Constitution when he was ordered
to deploy to Afghanistan. Along with questions about the authenticity
of the Obama birth documents, some constitutional scholars argue Obama
is not a natural born citizen because his father was not an American
citizen.

Ironically, Lakin’s deployment orders required him to bring five copies of his birth certificate.

“I had read the orders several times and had glossed over a detail
that had previously seemed routine, but this time I felt like Wile E.
Coyote getting smacked by an anvil,” he writes. “I needed a birth
certificate to deploy, but the president did not need one to order my
deployment. This was nuts.”

Lakin’s day of decision was April 12, 2010.

Though he was ready to be deployed, even taking a photo of himself at
the Pentagon with his bags, should Obama validate his eligibility,
Lakin could not bring himself to follow the orders without validation.

Thus he was court-martialed. He writes of the event of being there
in the court-martial as he stared at the portraits of men who have gone
before him:

As fate would have it, these were portraits of various
Founding Fathers, and I wondered what they would be thinking. I strongly
suspected they would be seeking the truth, about Obama’s citizenship
status, about his Connecticut Social Security number (there is no reason
why Obama would have a Connecticut number), about the multitude of
unanswered questions surrounding this man. Here, however, to emphasize
the real issues would likely have resulted in a reprimand from the judge
and a harsher sentence from the jury. How, I wondered, had our country
descended to this level of apathy?

Some will laugh and mock him for trying to take a stand and say he
should have just followed orders. Yet many of those same people would
berate soldiers of Nazi Germany for obeying orders. One must do what is
right without and not violate their conscience. Martin Luther is one
that comes to mind in this regard as he stood at the Diet of Worms upon
his belief that faith alone in Jesus Christ alone is what justified
sinners before God and declared:

“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against
conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other,
so help me God. Amen.”

Jack Cashill writes of his arrival at Ft. Leavenworth’s Joint Regional Correctional Facility:

Now, Lakin was on his way to Fort Leavenworth’s Joint
Regional Correctional Facility. Of all his hardship deployments, Bosnia
included, this would be the hardest. After he bid a tearful farewell
to his wife and three young children, his military minders chained his
hands together and attached those chains to a band around his waist.
They chained his legs and attached those, too. They then loaded him
into a van and drove him to Reagan National.

There, Lakin endured his ultimate humiliation: a seemingly endless
perp walk — a shuffle really — through a concourse filled with flags and
patriotic bunting and the happy sight of returning soldiers. None of
the display had lost its appeal, but Lakin could not overlook the irony
of his being chained and bound amidst it all.

The civilian psychologist who did intake assessments at Fort
Leavenworth claimed to know why the soft-spoken doctor refused
deployment, or at least he thought he did. As he put it, Lakin did not
believe Obama to have been born in the United States or to be
constitutionally eligible to be president.

Lakin corrected him. As he explained, he did not know where the
president was born or whether the president was eligible. The problem
was that no one did. As Lakin saw it, the oath that he took as an
officer in the U.S. Army — “I, Terrence Lee Lakin, do solemnly swear
that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies, foreign and domestic” — all but dictated that he
seek the truth.

Lakin, ironically was bound and incarcerated all for seeking the
truth remembering his oath, “I, Terrence Lee Lakin, do solemnly swear
that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

May there be others in position of leadership that will count the cost and stand up as Lt. Col. Terry Lakin did.

Lt. Col. Lakin, I salute you!