Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician and the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the United States presidential election of 2008.

Controversies

False claim about Auschwitz

On Memorial Day in 2008 Obama claimed, "I had an uncle who was one of the — who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in our family was that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months". But the fact is that the US military never liberated Auschwitz, the Red Army of the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz in January, 1945. This comment by Obama ignited a huge controversy in the blogosphere. Later the Obama campaign said he had confused Auschwitz with another concentration camp, he actually meant to say Buchenwald, which was liberated by U.S. troops in April of 1945.

Claim in his memoir

In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama claimed he read a Life magazine article about an African-American man who made attempt to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The consequence was a disaster and the man was physically and mentally scarred. But Life magazine's own historians said the magazine never published such an article.

Iraq War

Obama said that he always opposed the Iraq War since 2002, a claim that former US President Bill Clinton described as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."