Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: MemoryBlog Fights the Good Fight

October 19, 2004

MemoryBlog Fights the Good Fight

I'll stop calling the Bush administration "Orwellian" when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual:

MemoryBlog: White House Removes Page & Link From Website: Immediately after the VP debate, when the question of which countries comprise the "Coalition" to invade Iraq became an issue, the White House removed the webpage listing members of the Coalition. When people wrote the webmaster to point out that the page had gone 404, the White House reponded--not by putting the page back online--but by removing the link to the now-missing page.

The page used to be located at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030327-10.html

As has happened before during inept website-scrubbing, a webmaster had removed a page but had forgotten to erase the link to that page. The link (titled "Who are the Coalition members?") to the list remained for a while in the sidebar on this page, directly under the heading "DOCUMENTS." As you can see, it's now gone as well. (For now, the original version of the page with the link remains in Google's cache here. Since that will eventually be written over, we're mirroring the cached page here.)

But again, as with other incompetent attempts to erase webpages, different versions of the page escaped the webmaster's notice and, thus, still exist on the site. They can be found with a Google search. In a classic type of screw-up, the "text only" version of the page remains on the White House website here. The Memory Hole has created a mirror just in case this page disappears, too.

Also, a press release with a slightly earlier version of the list (March 21 as compared to the missing March 27) can still be found here. (The Memory Hole mirror is here.)

For more info about this, including before-and-after screenshots of the missing link, see "White House Scrubs Website" at the Brad Blog.

Thanks to TF and anonymous

Posted by DeLong at October 19, 2004 11:06 AM | TrackBack

Comments

We really need to get a crawler/archiver on whitehouse.org and other gov web sites that ignores the robots.txt directives that Google and other engines are honoring. Just an analysis of the deltas from day to day would likely yield a wealth of information about what they are trying to suppress/promote on any particular day.

That would be very handy.

Posted by: Gryn at October 19, 2004 11:30 AM

Interesting http://whitehouse.org/robots.txt

--------

User-agent: *
Disallow: /bulletin/
Disallow: /press/
Disallow: /transfer/

User-agent: asterias
Disallow: /

Posted by: Gryn at October 19, 2004 11:35 AM

On a lark, I opened up "memoryhole.com." Up popped the message telling me that, "The page cannot be found. The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."

So, in cyberspace even the memory hole has gone down the memory hole.

Posted by: joe at October 19, 2004 11:52 AM

maybe you meant memoryhole.org?

Posted by: Carol at October 19, 2004 12:07 PM

How long till they remove this one?

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 28, 2003
President Delivers "State of the Union"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html

Oh, right. Just as "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." according to Cheney, Bush has proved that being exactly wrong about nearly everything doesn't matter.

Posted by: Paul Callahan at October 19, 2004 12:09 PM

By the way, the Internet Wayback Machine has this too: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030327-10.html

Provided the site is fairly important and is not blocking the wayback archive, there should be a complete record of its pages over time.

Posted by: Paul Callahan at October 19, 2004 12:15 PM

Paul,

Yeah the wayback machine is actually what I was thinking of. Unfortunately it honors robots.txt so it will exclude large sections of gov websites and it doesn't update nearly as frequently as I'd like.

Basically we need a wayback that archives everything on gov websites to keep an eye on them and gives one more meta-information to do analysis on changes made.

Posted by: Gryn at October 19, 2004 12:25 PM

i think it might be a database reorg

this link works fine

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/text/20030327-10.html

ref google

http://www.google.com/search?f&q="who+are+the+coalition+members"+site:whitehouse.gov

Posted by: david s at October 19, 2004 12:44 PM

Rove also uses Lincoln's famous statement as an operations manual:

"51% of the people, all of the time".

Posted by: Zizka at October 19, 2004 01:36 PM

April 3, 2003

Who are the current coalition members?

President Bush is assembling a Coalition that has already begun military operations to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, and enforce 17 UNSC resolutions.

The Coalition will also liberate the Iraqi people from one of the worst tyrants and most brutal regimes on earth.

Contributions from Coalition member nations range from: direct military participation, logistical and intelligence support, specialized chemical/biological response teams, over-flight rights, humanitarian and reconstruction aid, to political support.

Forty-nine countries are publicly committed to the Coalition, including:

Afghanistan
Albania
Angola
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Costa Rica
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
Italy
Japan
Kuwait
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Marshall Islands
Micronesia
Mongolia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Palau
Panama
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Rwanda
Singapore
Slovakia
Solomon Islands
South Korea
Spain
Tonga
Turkey
Uganda
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
Uzbekistan

This number is still growing, and it is no accident that many member nations of the Coalition recently escaped from the boot of a tyrant or have felt the scourge of terrorism. All Coalition member nations understand the threat Saddam Hussein's weapons pose to the world and the devastation his regime has wreaked on the Iraqi people.
The population of Coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people.
Coalition countries have a combined GDP of approximately $22 trillion.
Every major race, religion, ethnicity in the world is represented.
The Coalition includes nations from every continent on the globe.

Posted by: pd at October 19, 2004 06:06 PM

from the invaluable Wayback Machine for this url
------

April 3, 2003

Who are the current coalition members?

President Bush is assembling a Coalition that has already begun military operations to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, and enforce 17 UNSC resolutions.

The Coalition will also liberate the Iraqi people from one of the worst tyrants and most brutal regimes on earth.

Forty-nine countries are publicly committed to the Coalition, including:

Posted by: pd at October 19, 2004 06:09 PM

If you look for the index in the directory of that link -- in other words, starting with

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030327-10.html

Trim the filename off the url to get
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news

You get a list of news items WHICH INCLUDE ANOTHER LINK TO THE MISSING PAGE.

Orwellian? Yes. Competent? No.

Posted by: That Tall Guy at October 20, 2004 12:21 PM

having countries like Tonga and Micronesia makes me feel more rounded out now with this coalition.
Besides Great Britain...this is comparable fire-power and resources than the WW11 coalition of
US, Great Britain, France, Russia, Canada

Those were the days when men were men; and countries were countries.
We no longer need supply ships, these countries got fax machines now. Maybe we can get that country "Doctors without Borders" to add in the fray.
With this line-up, no wonder we are kicking some real ass in this war on terror; and war on Iraq.

Posted by: Dave S. at October 20, 2004 12:48 PM