are perhaps of more interest.
http://mediastudy.com/ http://mediastudy.com/articles/av12-11-03.htmlhttp://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:s_0dLhrC-_8J:mediastudy.com/articles/av12-11-03.html+White+House+%2B+robot.txt&hl=enThe biggest “eat-my-words” quote of this war, however, came from George W. Bush himself on May 1st (May Day), 2003, when he unilaterally declared the ongoing Iraq war to be “over.” His words, uttered on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as he made history by being the first standing American president to don a military uniform while serving in civilian office, were posted on the White House website. The web page explained that Bush announced “Combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
This statement became a horrific sort of joke in the ensuing months as both Americans and Iraqis continued to die by the score in what was clearly an ongoing war. With far more US service personnel killed and wounded since the supposed end of the war, than during the war, Americans began to question Bush’s “war is over” myth. In October, however, Bush seems to have changed his speech post-facto. The new version of the old speech now reads that “major” combat operations have ended. The original speech, declaring by inference that all combat operations have ended, seems to have gone down the memory hole, unceremoniously deleted by a real-life Winston.
The Google Internet search engine, however, creates snapshots of all the web pages that its crawlers scan, including the White House site. Hence, there was an embarrassing anomaly, with the Google cache of the site having the original speech, and the actual White House site having the doctored “archive.” The White House shot back with a response beyond the technological vision of Orwell’s days. They embedded search robot control instructions (robot.txt) into their websites to “disallow” Google and other Internet search engines from archiving many pages pertaining to Iraq . Critics claim this gives the White House more of a free hand to rewrite their own history. The White House techies counter that they just wanted to eliminate the possibility of confusing duplicate results appearing on search engine result pages.
The problem, however, of embarrassing words disappearing from government websites appears to be growing. Take the case of US Agency for International Development (AID) administrator, Andrew Natsios. During an April, 2003 interview with ABC News’ Nightline, Natsios predicted that the reconstruction of Iraq would cost American taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion. AID subsequently posted a transcript of the interview on their website. History, however, has proven that Natsios was either intentionally misleading the nation, or he was rather clueless about Iraq . Either interpretation would be embarrassing to Natsios and the Bush administration. Hence, it should come as no surprise that transcripts of the interview, and all references to it, have recently disappeared from AID’s website.
Cleansing Time Magazine
As paper libraries and archives give way to electronic data collections, history is becoming ever more frail. A composition instructor at the University of California at Irvine got a disturbing email from a friend who was searching Time magazine’s digital archives looking for a certain article written by George Bush Senior and his Defense Secretary, Brent Scowcroft. In that article, the two men purportedly explained why they decided not to occupy Iraq in 1991. Their reason was that such an action would have exceeded the UN’s mandate to remove Iraq from Kuwait , and would have destroyed the precedent of an international response to aggression. They went on to argue, in the March 2, 1998 article, had they chosen to occupy Iraq in 1991, the US would probably still be occupying a bitterly hostile land.
The article, in today’s light, seems like a clear rebuff to junior’s invasion. But the article is gone. It’s no longer in Time’s digital archives – as if it never existed. The Irvine instructor decided to charge her students with the task of verifying the existence or nonexistence of the article. As it turned out, the article was in fact real, and was still archived by a number of subscription-accessed library research databases – but it was no longer in the Time archives. Interestingly, none of her digital-age students thought to look for the paper copy of the magazine in the library. The instructor did, finding not only the missing article, but also finding that editors changed the titles on many of the articles remaining in the Time archives.
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