FALSE: Nobel Committee Regrets Obama Peace Prize

Claim:   The Nobel Committee has expressed regret for awarding the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama.

FALSE

Example:   [Collected via e-mail, September 2014]

Origins:   Even some of President Obama's most ardent supporters were shocked when on 9 October 2009 the Norwegian Nobel Committee made the surprise announcement that he was being awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" despite his having occupied the White House for a mere eight months at the time. The announcement prompted various persons and groups to call

upon the Nobel Committee to revoke the honor over such as issues as the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the continued holding of detainees without charge at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and the expanded use by the U.S. of drones for remote killing.

That controversy was spoofed by the satirical web site The Final Edition in October 2011 with a fictional article positing that Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, had said that President Obama "really ought to consider" returning his Nobel Peace Prize Medal because "Guantanamo's still open. There's bombing Libya. There's blowing bin Laden away rather than putting him on trial. Now a few US troops go home, but the US will be occupying Afghanistan until 2014 and beyond. Don't even get me started on Yemen!"

In September 2014 that subject was spoofed in again in a letter posted to the Scribd digital library, ostensibly issued by chairman Thorbjørn Jagland and expressing regret in the Nobel Committee's choice of 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (i.e., President Obama):

A number of non-credible web sites took the Scribd-posted letter to be on the level and reported it as straight news, failing to recognize that it was just as much a work of fiction as the earlier Final Edition piece:

Dear Internet: The Nobel committee "regrets" giving Obama the 2009 peace prize story is bogus. I just spoke with the head of the institute

— David Jolly (@davjolly) September 12, 2014

In fact, in a December 2013 interview, Thorbjørn Jagland said the opposite of what is claimed here — he specifically stated that he did not regret the awarding of the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama:

In September 2015, a number of news outlets reported on the recent publication of Secretary of Peace: 25 years with the Nobel Prize — the memoirs of Geir Lundestad, who was the non-voting Director of the Nobel Institute until 2014 — and quoted a brief passage from that book in which Lundestad stated that the awarding of the Peace Prize "did not achieve what the committee had hoped for":

These excerpts led numerous readers to proclaim that our article should now be labeled as "true," but nowhere in his memoir did Lundestad say that he (much less the entire Nobel Peace Prize Committee) felt that President Obama should return the 2009 Peace Prize, or that he "regretted" the decision to award it. In fact, he stated just the opposite: