Around June 28, 2010: Obama Visited Pakistan in 1981; Claim that Visit ‘Proves’ Lack of US Citizenship Debunked

A chain email circulating on the Internet claims that because Barack Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, he cannot be a US citizen. The argument, according to the email, is: “Pakistan was on the US State Department’s ‘no travel’ list in 1981. [Therefore,] when Obama went to Pakistan in 1981 he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport.” Had Pakistan actually been on the “no travel” list in 1981, Obama would have had to either travel there illegally, or use the passport of a foreign national. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, investigates the claim. It is true that Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, during a summer vacation; he went to Indonesia to visit his mother and then to Pakistan with a college friend. But in 1981, according to the State Department, Pakistan was perfectly accessible to US citizens. State Department public affairs officer Ivna Giauque says, “According to our Pakistan experts, there was no travel ban to Pakistan in 1981.” PolitiFact notes that in August 1981, the State Department issued a “travel advisory” for Pakistan, but that would not have precluded any American from visiting Pakistan had he or she chosen to do so. In August 1981, the US consul general in Lahore wrote a letter to the New York Times encouraging Americans to visit the country. And a March 1981 New York Times featured an advertisement listing Karachi and Lahore as two destinations in their travel package. PolitiFact concludes that in the case of the email, “[s]omebody was just looking for an excuse to promote the birther conspiracy.” [St. Petersburg Times, 6/28/2010] The “travel ban” was advanced as an argument against Obama’s citizenship in a 2008 lawsuit which was summarily thrown out of court (see August 21-24, 2008).