Paging the “Liberal” Media! Paging the “Liberal” Media! Hello? Anybody out there?
As reported previously here, here and here, it looks like the scrubbing of various historical documents and other elements of the White House Website is continuing! And may be wider and more systematic than previously known. The BRAD BLOG has discovered a boat-load of audio and video that has been removed from the website!
It’s more than just Bush’s “I’m not that concerned about Bin Laden” Audio and Video (reported here previously) that’s been taken down. And more than the White House’s “List of Coalition Members” as reported here.
After reviewing scores of pages of White House transcribed Press Conferences by George Bush, it seems that the removal of certain audio and video clips has perhaps been strategically or systematically orchestrated. Here’s a few examples of some of the pages that have had their linked Audio and/or Video clips removed, along with some of the notable Bush quotes — that “notability” is mere conjecture on my part — from their transcripts that perhaps the White House would prefer not be easily available to folks anymore (NOTE: The Audio and Video links are still on the following pages, but the content for them, when those links are clicked upon, is no longer available.)
Notable Quotes:
“Mis-underestimate” and more.
UPDATE 10/25/04: WH seems to have restored this one since we originally published. The others below, as of 7:29pm PT are still missing their Audio/Video.
Notable Quotes:
“And I assured them that from a fiscal perspective, one, we’re going to hold the line on spending.”
“I said my administration has had a full-scale review of the climate issue; that we’re in the process of developing a strategy as quickly as we possibly can and one that we look forward to sharing with our friends and allies. A strategy that begins with the notion that we want to reduce greenhouse gasses in America.”
“And they’re going to find out that when I say we’re interested in reducing greenhouse gasses that we mean it.”
Notable Quotes:
“it is an issue [stem cell research] that, on the one hand, deals with so much hope, hope that perhaps through research and development we’ll be able to save lives. It’s also an issue that has got serious moral implications. And our nation must think carefully before we proceed. And, therefore, my process has been, frankly, unusually deliberative for my administration. I’m taking my time.”
Notable Quotes:
“He is a dangerous man who possesses the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
“I hope that, of course, he allows inspectors to go into his country, like he promised he would do. Not for he sake of letting inspectors in, but to showing the world that he has no weapons of mass destruction.”
Notable Quotes:
“We both recognize the danger of a man who’s willing to kill his own people harboring and developing weapons of mass destruction. “
“Maybe I should be a little less direct and be a little more nuanced, and say we support regime change. “
Discussion about “direct linkage” between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
Those are just a few of the examples I’ve been able to find and just some of the quotes that jumped out at me as items the White House may not like their opposition to be able to use against them during this campaign. I’m sure you may find other now-uncomfortable Bush quotes in some of those transcripts.
I don’t pretend to know for certain precisely what they are hoping to accomplish by doing this, other than an attempt to make it less convenient for folks opposed to Bush to use his own words against him in various ways (via homegrown audio and video ads, etc.). Much of the Audio and Video they’ve removed, no doubt, is publically available via C-SPAN.org and the Broadcast/Cable News operations certainly have their own versions. None the less, it’s a lot harder for a guy like me to get a copy of say, Bush’s March 22, 2002 Press Conference with Vicente Fox from the internal video tape libraries at CNN than it would be to merely grab it off the White House site where it had previously been available for all Americans.
The idea that the White House may be using their governmental website (which is owned by the People, not by George Bush or the Republicans) for potential partisan advantage is troubling at best and strictly illegal at worst. There is a strict legal line drawn that disallows the use of such public facilities (White House phone lines, etc) for blatant partisan/campaign activities.
It seems clear that the use of the White House website for this purpose would fall under that strict statute and monkeying with it — and the historical documents it had previously provided — for political/partisan/campaign gains, I’d think, would be strictly off-limits. I welcome the input from any political legal eagles on this.
I’ll note the cautious words of Josh Marshall when he picked up on our earlier coverage of this story last week, “I can’t say myself whether there’s not some more innocent or more technical-snafu type explanation. But it does strike me as suspicious.”
A “technical-snafu” might explain why some of this audio and video is no longer there when it once was, but that benefit-of-the-doubt was removed in at least this one instance when a graphical link to a “Who are the Coalition Members?” document on their special report called “RENEWAL IN IRAQ: The Coalition” was changed to no longer even exist in that report. The document linked from that clickable graphic first disappeared after Cheney accused Edwards of not counting Iraqis amongst the coalition casualties during the V.P. Debate, and after we had informed the webmaster of the problem, the graphic element that linked to that document was removed completely. That could only have been done purposefully by the White House webmaster as opposed to an incorrectly specified link.
Isn’t it time someone from the national media asked the Bush White House about this? This has been reported here for about three weeks, and the various broken links reported so far are either still broken or removed entirely.
I’m sure you remember the hue and cry from the Right over Al Gore, back in 2000, making some potential phone-calls to donors that may have occurred on White House phone lines. Isn’t the possible systematic removal of archival White House documents from their website for political purposes at least as notable?
Not to mention the continuing question of what else has been removed from the historical record there that is not quite as easy to notice?! Isn’t it time the White House was asked about this? If there’s an innocent explanation, I’m sure they can give it, and restore those links immediately. Otherwise…what’s this all about?
UPDATE 10/22/04: Hooray! Mainstream media finally picks up on this story!
UPDATE 10/24/04: BRAD BLOG reports on more Scrubbing and evidence of violations of the “Presidential Records Act of 1978”! Right Here!
UPDATE 10/25/04: The Washington Post finally picks up the story today! Twice!
UPDATE 10/29/04: BRAD BLOG SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing…
Here’s the neat thing. It’s almost all archived on the Wayback machine — including the campaign site all the way back to 1999.
Check out http://www.archive.org
This is what make the Internet Way Back Machine so great:
http://www.archive.org/
I’ve looked for audio/video clips more than a year old on the whitehouse site, and they are almost always not there. I believe this to not be a conspiracy, just a policy to delete large media files after a year.
The two Andrews are uninformed. None of the audio/video items removed from the White House Web site have been archived by the Wayback Machine; it does not archive streaming media. Even for HTML files (such as the list of Coalition members) it would be a simple matter for the White House to instruct the Wayback Machine to remove them from its archive using
robots.txt, like it has already done for most Iraq-related documents.Which is why, as I said before, a P2P software tool should be developed that will steadily create and share an archive of the White House Web site (or any Government Web site, come to that) while ignoring its
robots.txt. (Ignoringrobots.txtis bad manners, but deceiving people who elected you is worse.)don’t forget, he can run, but he can’t hide:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/ht...hitehouse.gov/
I’d tend to agree with mpt. There’s plenty of embarrassing stuff in html format, which is easily searchable, and therefore probably more likely to be an embarrassment. One example is the banner on this page: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/...0030317-7.html – looking back, who was doing the deceiving?
btw, anon, it’s ok for this president to deceive us since we didn’t elect him.
I went through 3 months of White House photos and found one in which the outline of the Bulge is visible (although not totally clear)
http://www.bushbulge.com/bulgepic.html
I bet this picture too will soon be lost to history.
Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past.
Brad, thanks for staying on this.
And thanks for pointing out that archive.org is NOT a solution.
See http://shock-awe.info/archive/000965.php for example — my post from nearly a year ago explaining why this is so.
–Kynn
One more little detail: Until Aug 19th, Condi Rice’s appearances and speeches were noted on the WH site, with transcripts of speeches. Now she’s been sent off as a full-time partisan hack, her appearances and speechs go entirely unmentioned on the WH site. Oh, well, maybe the person who was updating this stuff just forgot to do it! Yeah, right.
Hmmm….remember the main character in Orwell’s 1984? His job was to change history–get rid of inconvenient "facts." The parallels to this book are eerie! 😥 :confused:
Henry,
No. Impeachment is a process to remove someone for office. The US constitution outlaws something called "bills of attainder" which means that legislatures cannot act as courts. As a result, no criminal charges result from impeachment.
The President /can/ be charged with a crime after he leaves office, whether he left because of impeachment or resignation or end of term. Clinton lost his law license for 5 years as a result of such criminal proceedings.
spinfire, thanks for the info. 🙂
Henry,
You are a bit off on the description of the Clinton issue. The legal issue proceeding from the Jones lawsuit was a court fine for civil, not criminal, contempt. His law license was not surrendered as a result of any legal proceeding. The Arkansas Bar Association is not a juridical entity and it was as a result of an ethics panel hearing that Clinton’s license was surrendered. This is not to say that a law license cannot be lost as a result of legal proceedings but that is not the issue in this case.
Some funny entries in the robots.txt file there. The most telling, I thought, was this line:
Disallow: /vote/iraq
More on this in my blog entry
pra
Can we impeech Bush after he is out of office?
Congrats! It looks like AFP/Yahoo picked up your story…
Yahoo! News – Iraq coalition vanishes from White House website
Wow! Thanks, Pam. Purdy kewl. Though, of course, no credit to the BRAD BLOG in their story 🙁
Ain’t that always the way. Good catch, though!
We are working different angles of the bush bulge story
We need some help…
Can you contact me please?
:)hey i woud like if you could update me on changes in the vlt act currently taking place.. for a school project I am in favour of getting rid of video lottery terminals in Nova Scotia
why does Bush and Chaney continue to lie to the American people about this war. Folk wake-up, we were lied to. Bush and Chaney are two of the worst officials that have ever occupied 5the White House.
t bone is dead right, BUTTTTTTTTT he forgot rumsfeld rice rove libby and wolfy