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Quote of the Month

“At any moment of the day or night, two thirds of the world’s people are awake, and some of them are up to no good."

- Dean Rusk

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Message in the Bottle

State 097431, hot off the presses last week, is a welcome update to the FAM, and a handy reminder of what DNA testing can and can't do, what we can and should expect it to do, and what we can't, and shouldn't. Readers who can't access State cables might have to ask their usual sources, or look for a 9 FAM update at State.Gov.

DNA testing is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. It is extremely difficult to get done without error or fraud. It is absolutely certain, in many kinds of cases. But as the cable reminds us, there cases when it isn't, so let's not - as we used to sometimes when it was the hottest, sexiest new fraud detection tool in the tool box - use it indiscriminately, or in cases (such as siblings) where it won't work well enough to matter.

Madam remembers a report of birth case from years ago in which there was an elusive American father, a foreign mother, and a child. The case dragged on for months with the purported father rarely around and the mother not especially cooperative, either. Suspecting some undefined hanky-panky, a former ACS officer had eventually sent the mother and child for DNA testing. The results came back saying - guess what - that the mother was the child's mother, and the child was the mother's child. Which left the case not far from where it had started, since it was transmission of citizenship that mattered, and the father had been out of town. The father was often out of town. And a chain officers couldn't decide what to do next, and the file lay around gathering dust and shuffling from desk to desk without resolution.

The case turned out to have a classic Asian twist: one day while the newest ACS JO was shuffling through the papers, trying to make sense of prior officers' thought processes, a totally different American man walked in with the child and a long but very solid story of an on-off relationship with the woman who ran to the Other Man, Mr. Elusive, whenever they had a fight. Unlike the Other Man, this new father was happy to provide solid proof of physical presence in the country during the time the child would have been conceived. He handled the child as if it were his, the child looked as much like him as any half-foreign child possibly could without being a clone, and the child called him by the local term for 'Daddy' without affectation. There were other pieces of documentary evidence, as well, and Daddy said he'd be happy to take a DNA test if necessary. But the CROBA was issued without the test, and with the complete certainty that it was correct.

Which might go to prove that sometimes bureaucratic foot-dragging is a good thing. Not that Madam would ever openly support such behavior.

BTW, paragraph 5 of the cable is a gem. Pure poetry. Madam strongly recommends that all consular officers pay special heed to its very specific semantics.

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