First of all, what I did find. The White House has a mirrored site to whitehouse.gov and it is run by FEMA. While whitehouse.gov has been completely redesigned in the last year, this mirrored site and its archives have not. If there were any files scrubbed by whitehouse.gov this would be the place to find proof of it. I have looked for a week and found nary a one. It can be found here: crispexi.net
On the 25th of February there was a spectacular diary by smintheus called "The White House website is getting scrubbed." (original) (diary with four updates) It starts with the claim that a 2003 interview with Dick Cheney by Tim Russert had been removed. Problem is, the interview was never there to begin with.
The author, in four updates concedes that the basis for his diary is undone; the author says:
- So far I've located no evidence that the foregoing interviews were ever linked at the WH website
- Unless the Wayback archives were scrubbed as well, therefore, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that my memory about the pre-2004 links was faulty.
- the absence of links to interviews, even major interviews, does not by itself prove that the links were posted and then removed
- Either they've been expunged from Wayback, or my memory is faulty
- Playing around with the Wayback Machine, however, has not turned up much so far to support the argument I advanced in this diary.
But this was not in time for the diary to make its way through la Blogosphera and the unverified claims be taken as fact, i.e. such as this
What follows is a point by point rebuttal of that spectacular diary. Please don't waste your valuable time with it, unless detail is your thing.
It's not the first time I have written about keeping diaries accurate:
Breaking, Raw and Unverified is a meta from December when there was a flood of speculation diaries about Sen. Tim Johnson, with my suggestions as to how diarists should handle news that can't be verified. Speculation diaries always hover too close to the edge of compromised credibility, and are a whole different kettle of fish.
Why did I bother? Because I am still a member of the Daily Kos community where the standard is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
That the White House would be scrubbing files from its websites is a matter of record, but that it is now being done at this particular website whitehouse.gov is a matter of speculation, for which I could find no proof in this February 25th diary.
Further, and more importantly, when you write a diary it is like offering a product for shipment. Daily Kos diaries get read and linked to, sometimes used as source documents. Quality control is the diarist's responsibility. When you publish a diary it should be ready to roll, with all the facts checked and ready to be verified by your readers. It should not take a reader hours to check your facts for you. If you make claims that cannot be backed up, it diminishes our credibility, not just your own. That is what I was told when I first got here, and it holds true today.
Here goes:
Sorry if it reads like a dialogue, but there wasn't any other way I could do it. The author's text is in plain, my rebuttal is in bold.
Facts:
Recently all radio interviews from 2004, though nominally linked on the Radio page, became inaccessible. Only interviews from 2005 and 2006 remain accessible on that page.
They’re not inaccessible. They’re here
www.whitehouse.gov/radio/archive2004.html
The WHW stopped adding any new radio interview links to the Radio page after August 2006. I wrote about that in January at Unbossed. The very next day a single new interview was added. And the day after this post, the WHW added a "December" tab to follow the "August 2006" tab (as if to conceal that radio interviews were no longer being linked). A short time later, after I'd commented on this sleight-of-hand, the "December" tab was scrubbed. The following day, the Radio page had lost all its monthly tabs.
There have been no radio interviews added since August 2006. This is not proof that the website has been scrubbed. The radio page, like the rest of the website has been redesigned, those monthly tabs are no longer a part of whitehouse.gov.
Various publicity pages of the WHW show signs of links having been edited long after they were added. For example, the link for Rumsfeld's April 30, 2004 interview with Laura Ingraham no longer works. Entries for Jan. 2002 on Cheney's "Speeches and News" page were edited in recent months. The old address for the transcript of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was altered, rendering old links to it non-functional.
The Rumsfeld interview is a dead link. The editing on Speeches and News, as with the whole website, as part of the redesign. The old links to Mission Accomplished are still working.
Until yesterday, the President's "News" page had a pull-down search bar. But recently it has been non-functioning (so you could no longer use it to search for news about "Iraq", say). To put it another way, the page "www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/iraq" now brings up an error message.
This is due to redesign and robots.txt.
For most of 2002 and 2003 there are no interviews of Cheney linked on the WHW, and for 2004 and 2005 only a handful. All of them are banal interviews that avoid the topic of Iraq. For 2002 and 2003, there are few interviews by any administration officials at the WHW.
Is there any evidence that interviews that were once part of whitehouse.gov have been removed?
Speculation:
For the period 2002-2005 there are many important interviews of Cheney that have no link on the WHW. Were they never linked, or were links scrubbed at some stage?
There is no proof that they were ever there.
Just before the links to the 2004 radio interviews went missing, whenever that was, the earliest linked radio interviews on the Radio page dated from March 2004. I was pretty certain when I wrote this post that in January 2007 I had reviewed the radio interviews under the years 2003 and 2002. Therefore I concluded that those links had been scrubbed.
You drew this conclusion on a false premise backed up only by your memory, not by evidence, not by archive, and not by the mirrored site of whitehouse.gov which has undergone no recent design changes.
After posting this, I was made aware of the Wayback Machine. It's archives haven't revealed any traces so far of radio interviews before 2004. Unless the Wayback archives were scrubbed as well, therefore, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that my memory about the pre-2004 links was faulty.
You got it. The Wayback archives for the "Major Combat" alteration are still there... the White House was caught in the act of altering one of its web pages and this is still in the Wayback archive. The archive has not been scrubbed. Your memory about the pre-2004 links is faulty.
However I am certain that the White House did at one time have links to a set of radio interviews that predate March 2004. This page has links to 13 radio interviews given by top officials on Jan. 21, 2004 during a White House "Radio Day". This Radio-Day page is no longer linked at the WHW, and indeed you won't discover it by doing a search on site for "Radio Day". I stumbled across the page only by poking around at the WH Robots site (hat-tip to wmholt in the comments). This is the file that tells Google not to cache certain pages at the WHW. The upshot is that there were many radio interviews from this earlier period, which the WH no longer makes accessible.
This is the point you cannot prove, that at one time whitehouse.gov did have links to radio interviews before March 2004. There’s no evidence, not in the archive, and not in external links. All you need to do is find ONE radio interview from 2003, and find reference in the link www.whitehouse.gov and you’ll have proof that what was once there is no longer. Further, you can take this link to the archive and find if and when the page was no longer included. From there you can get to why.
However, none of those interviews is given by Cheney. I have still not found in Wayback any links to interviews with Cheney that are no longer present at the WHW. The Wayback archives include only very inadequate updates of Cheney's "Speeches and News" page, so it has limited usefulness.
You can’t find what was not there in the first place.
What follows is the original post:
On March 16, 2003 Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press. His absurd claims in that interview have since become politically embarrassing to the White House. For example, he declared...
I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
You won't any longer find a link to this transcript on the White House website—nor, indeed, are there links to most of Cheney's interviews from before 2006. Don't believe me? Just do a search for that infamous sentence at www.whitehouse.gov.
This is your first serious error in the original post. You say "you won’t find any longer." You are telling your readers that the transcript was there and has now been removed, or "scrubbed." There is no evidence that this interview was ever included in whitehouse.gov. None.
The WH website evidently has been busy scrubbing links to interviews and perhaps other public appearances by top officials. The operation has proceeded somewhat unevenly, though aggressively. Pretty clearly the WH wants to make it much harder to research the administration's past pronouncements, especially unscripted ones, and especially those pertaining to Iraq.
Absolutely no proof of this.
How embarrassing now for the White House to get caught in the act of scrubbing its website!
You have not caught them in the act of scrubbing. You have advanced a suspicion with no proof whatsoever.
It's difficult to tell how extensive the operation has been, of course, but clearly it has wide dimensions. The most obvious losses from the White House website have been the transcripts of interviews. A little searching for prominent interviews by the Vice President quickly turned up some striking absences.
At this point you are looking for all those significant interviews that should by rights be there. But if they were never a part of whitehouse.gov, you cannot claim they were removed or scrubbed.
For example, on May 30, 2005 Cheney told several whoppers to Larry King on CNN, in particular this one:
I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
You'll look in vain for any transcript of that interview at the White House website, however. There are several transcripts of subsequent White House briefings in which reporters asked one or another official to comment upon the validity of Cheney's "last throes" statement. But the transcript of the interview in question? AWOL.
There is no evidence that this interview was ever included in whitehouse.gov. None.
Again, on Meet the Press on September 14, 2003 Cheney rejected the calls for an investigation of the pre-war intelligence on so-called WMD, denied that there had been any administration failure in that regard, and predicted that the WH would be vindicated.
I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program.
The White House website nowhere links to a transcript of that interview, either.
There is no evidence that this interview was ever included in whitehouse.gov. None.
When did this scrubbing operation occur and what did it involve? It's a difficult question to answer. So far I've located no evidence that the foregoing interviews were ever linked at the WH website. However it's certain that the WH site was scrubbed in some fashion fairly recently.
No evidence. You have proved no scrubbing at all. Not one solid example. All of this is conjecture without evidence.
Take for example the White House Radio Page. Traditionally it has two groups of links: (a) to all the President's scripted weekly radio addresses; (b) to radio interviews given by top administration officials. The scripted addresses are all archived in good order; nothing unusual there. But you'll notice two peculiar things about section (b) of the page, as it appears now.
(i) First, there are no archived interviews since August 2006. I commented on this curious fact in a post dated January 29, 2007: The White House is talking behind your back. I argued that it looked like the WH had decided sometime about a year ago that it was counterproductive to be offering transcripts to interviews that could in the future be used as ammunition against them. So they gradually cut back on the number of linked interview-transcripts, until finally suspending the practice entirely in summer 2006. The interviews with administration officials continued, of course. In fact, in October 2006 the WH had a "Radio Day" in which dozens of right-wing radio talk-show hosts descended on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to hold a marathon of interviews with WH officials. But none of those was linked on the WH "Radio Page".
(ii) The only person whose interviews were still (more or less) regularly being linked to at the WH website, I discovered, was Dick Cheney...not on the "Radio Page", but on his own Speeches and News Releases page.
I agree with you. The White House considered it potentially compromising to include further radio interviews during that period (run-up to November election) so they just plain didn’t. No proof of scrubbing, though.
Oddly enough, on Jan. 30, 2007—the very day after I posted (and widely crossposted) that assessment of the WH bunker mentality regarding interview-transcripts—a new (if fairly trivial) radio interview was linked at the WH "Radio Page". This was the first link to be posted in half a year! It's equally remarkable that not one interview-link has been added since then. Make of that what you will.
What I make of it is that this is due to the redesign of the entire website which began a year ago and was completed February 27.
"When you're at this as long as I've been, you stop believing in coincidence."
The second strange thing about the WH "Radio Page" is this: No longer are there any radio interviews archived from before March 2004. The entire first three years of transcripts was scrubbed from the site. And I can state with certainty that this occurred sometime after Jan. 29 when I wrote that last analysis of strange doings at the WH "Radio Page". While researching that post, I went through the full range of archives of radio interviews going back to 2001.
Where is the full range of archives of radio interviews going back to 2001? If you can find just one in the batch, with it’s address you’ve got your first piece of proof. Here you are stating with certainty what later you have doubts about. This is a major problem in proving your case. No evidence, just your memory.
So there's no doubt that an extensive scrubbing of the WH website has been carried out in the last few weeks. Whether the rest of what I'm pointing out here also dates to the same operation is not clear.
There is no proof of any scrubbing at all, only re-design.
If we turn our attention now to Dick Cheney's Speeches and News Releases Page, we find another revealing pattern. As I remarked in my foregoing post, it's remarkable that Cheney, alone at the White House, has continued linking to his own interviews throughout last year.
But it's equally remarkable that that pattern of openness holds only for the period from mid December 2005 to the present. For the earlier part of 2005, there are links to only 3 interviews. For 2004, there's a grand total of 5 linked interviews (3 from the same day). And from that point back to late March 2002, there is not a single interview linked on Cheney's website. Thus for more than three and a half years, from March 25, 2002 to December 17, 2005, you'll find links to exactly 8 interviews on Cheney's "Speeches and News Releases Page".
Cheney is not known for his dearth of interviews.
Tuesday, September 16th, 2003
Cheney Justifies Invasion Of Iraq In First Televised Interview in Six Months
Democracy Now
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/1549258
This is of course the most controversial period for the Bush administration. It is a period in which Cheney made frequent appearances to talk up the grounds for attacking Iraq. After the invasion, Cheney continued to be the most vociferous defender of the invasion. His claims about alleged WMD became an object of derision for many Americans. His strident attacks upon administration critics became unusually repellent. His high profile in the outing of a CIA agent, utterly loathsome.
I'd venture that if I were to set about scrubbing the WH website of politically embarrassing interviews, I'd begin with the Vice President's and I'd concentrate on exactly the period for which we now see the fewest interview-links on Cheney's page. In fact I would be particularly thorough in scrubbing any and all interviews by the Great Man during 2002 and 2003—the period in which there are no links whatever now.
Now you are hypothesizing. You do not know how many interviews there were during that time, how many were linked on the VP page, and if any are missing now. You are not proving that the site has been scrubbed.
And what about the occasional links that remain in the vast wilderness of 2004 and 2005, standing like lone trees here and there after a forest fire? I've read the transcripts of those interviews. None of them touches on politically embarrassing material. Mostly they steer clear of Iraq altogether. Unless and until topics like CAFTA become hot political issues, I would anticipate that the transcripts of those interviews can safely remain available to the public on the Vice President's page.
For what it is worth, I've also noticed that not a single radio interview dating before March 2004 is linked on Cheney's "Speeches etc." page; all (surviving) links to earlier Cheney appearances are instead for televised interviews. Thus if Cheney's page has been scrubbed of interviews as described above, then the operation also involved bringing it into line with the President's "Radio Page", which (as noted) has erased its links to all radio interviews that pre-date March 2004.
Pretty striking: Two peculiar patterns of the absence of linked radio interviews, patterns which happen to coincide perfectly with each other. As I've remarked many times before, the most egregious comments from Bush administration officials can often be found in interviews with nutty radio hosts, where the conservative base gets its red-meat. So scrubbing entire years of transcripts to radio interviews makes a good deal of sense politically for a White House that is increasingly under siege
Once again, there are no radio interviews from before 2004. Whether they once were there and have now been removed is the issue here. Where is the evidence?
What about the equivalent page for George Bush, "Presidential News and Speeches"—has that been scrubbed? The answer is less than clear.
The current February 2007 page links to a few of Cheney's interviews from Australia. I immediately noticed, however, that it has no link to the most embarrassing of those interviews, the one I wrote about yesterday in which the VP was (for the first time) pressed by a journalist (Jonathan Karl) to reconcile his 1991 statement that invading Iraq would inevitably lead to a quagmire, with his support for invading Iraq in 2003. Cheney's own page, by contrast, does provide a link to that (second) interview with Jonathan Karl as well as to the other interviews that Bush's page links to. At a minimum, then, I would infer that the White House is being careful to exclude links on the "Presidential News" page to interviews that have the most potential to haunt them.
The interview is there, just not where you expect it to be. This is the work of the web team and the redesign... but no proof of scrubbing.
A little tour of the archives for the "Presidential News and Speeches" page, in any case, turned up surprisingly few links to interviews by administration officials, especially for the period before March 2004. Obviously, none of the three television interviews of Cheney that I began this post with make an appearance. But neither do many other interviews that you might have expected to find linked.
No proof of scrubbing.
Let's take for example the interviews of Condoleeza Rice, an official who unlike Cheney can be counted on to stay on the reservation and to dance around awkward questions. Under normal circumstances, you would suppose that the White House would be perfectly content to let transcripts of her interviews remain available at the WH website. So I've done a search for transcripts of her interviews at CNN, and checked whether the "Presidential News" page provides a link. The results are pretty striking for the first two pages of interviews that Google pulls up. There is (at the moment) not a single link on the "Presidential News" page for any of the interviews given by Rice in this group: Sept. 24, 2001; May 19, 2002; Nov. 15, 2002; Sept. 7, 2003; Oct. 8, 2003; or Sept. 2, 2005. Google thinks these are the most prominent of her interviews on CNN, but the WH website doesn't care to link to any of them. It tends to confirm my sense that Bush's own "Presidential News" page has thinned out the number of archived interviews.
That you think they should be included at whitehouse.gov and they are not is no proof that they have been scrubbed.
A more decisive test, perhaps, would be how the WH website treats the interviews given by somebody who is a little more embarrassing than Rice...such as Harriet Miers. How many interviews with Harriet Miers are now linked at the White House website? Not one, as it turns out.
Once again, you say "how many interviews are now linked" implying that there were some to begin with. There’s no proof of that. The closest you’re going to get is when Miers hosts "Ask the White House" when administration officials conduct online interviews with the public.
www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20041029.html - 30.0KB
www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20041014.html - 39.5KB
www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20040811.html - 21.2KB
www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20040910.html - 27.9KB
I think there's a good deal of evidence that the White House has decided to throw obstacles in the path of any journalist or meddlesome citizen who might wish to investigate the administration's past pronouncements. Bush & Co. has never been eager to let the public scrutinize its words and deeds, so the absence of links to interviews, even major interviews, does not by itself prove that the links were posted and then removed.
Now you’re talking sense.
Yet as I've shown, there is definite evidence for some kind of scrubbing operation in recent weeks, and on a massive scale. It's hard to imagine an innocent explanation for the removal of all radio interviews pre-dating March 2004.
Can you prove they were there to begin with?
Therefore it's legitimate to look for further evidence that might fit into a pattern of concealment. And in fact this administration has an established record of scrubbing politically embarrassing information on line, if not necessarily at the White House website.
The White House has an established record of concealment -- this is true. But you've not laid down evidence for your claims that whitehouse.gov is getting scrubbed. You’ve shown no proof at all. No evidence, all conjecture.
A final note: While looking to see whether any of the President's more embarrassing speeches had been scrubbed as well, I noticed that the original link to his May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech had gone dead. In September 2005 we'd archived that link at the Timeline on the run-up to the Iraq invasion at DowningStreetMemo.com, and we had double-checked to make sure that the link worked properly.
As it happens, the speech is still linked at the WH website, but under a new address. The difference between the old and new addresses for the "Mission Accomplished" speech is simply that the new address omits the string "/iraq/". Something strange was afoot.
This has to do with the infamous disallow strings of robots.txt. This has been going on for years and has been written about extensively.
This led me to check out the topical search function located at the top of the "Presidential News" page. I discovered that it is no longer possible to search for WhiteHouse.gov links on the topic "Iraq". Indeed, none of the search functions on that page work any longer...at all. It's as if the topical search function was just disabled by a site administrator.
Now why would the White House want to do that?
This is the robots.txt of whitehouse.gov
Update [2007-2-25 20:3:35 by smintheus]: Some links pertaining to earlier episodes of scrubbing at the White House website:
In the wake of the Vice Presidential debate and the third Presidential debate, in October 2004 Brad Friedman of BradBlog reported that the WH list of the "coalition of the willing" had been scrubbed, as had some audio/video links—especially the link to Bush's March 13, 2002 Press Conference in which he'd said...
"I truly am not that concerned about him [bin Laden]."
This Oct. 24, 2004 post at BradBlog is particularly relevant. It notes among other things that some of audio links to the President's weekly radio addresses had been scrubbed as well. As far as I can tell, all the radio addresses now have their audio links, so the scrubbing must have been undone at some stage (perhaps after the 2004 election).
The WH claimed at the time that it was removing certain audio links to save space. I don't happen to believe that a government which can afford to ship shrink-wrapped bricks of cash by the C-130 load to Iraq, cannot also afford some web-hosting fees.
Around the same time, Pacific John at dKos showed that the State Dept. website had been scrubbed of a report called Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated.
From 2005, there is this diary by skids that I'm still working through. It concerns various reports of missing or hidden transcripts at the WH website for press gaggles and briefings.
In the first incident, after DUers announced sending the text of the hidden transcript to Fitz's office, the transcript was suddenly linked on whitehouse.gov, resulting in one of those "we are being watched" moments.
In the second incident, there are also ameribloggers noting in the comments about other missing transcripts, or there-but-not-linked transcripts. And, there was one user clever enough to enter the extrapolated URL into the wayback machine at archive.org, and found that there is a record of that URL being extant, suggesting that it was removed from the site (and, this time, thoroughly scrubbed from the site) sometime shortly after Oct 12, 2004
And again from BradBlog just a few weeks ago, we learn that several WH transcripts for press briefings have been altered to expunge the occasions when Scott McClellan said "Go ahead, Jeff". Yes, that Jeff.
They're not altered or expunged. Here are 9 instances of "Go ahead, Jeff" (Gannon) at whitehouse.gov:
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/12/20041203-8.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040809-5.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040219-3.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040401-4.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040715-7.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040615-7.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040429-4.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040506-8.html
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040309-5.html
For further and various examples of WH scrubbing from the first months of his term, see this list.
Several commenters have pointed out that the WayBack Machine has extensive archives from the White House website.
Thanks to all who've provided info and know-how. There may be further updates.
When links go dead and are restored one cannot call that scrubbing. Most times these things can be easily explained, and come under the category of website maintenance, archiving, or, as is the case recently, redesign.
Scrubbing is to remove or erase. Doctoring is to alter original content. The White House has been caught twice doctoring its webfiles. One was the "Mission Accomplished" page, the other was the Coalition of the Willing page.
Just one note about BradBlog. The White House was caught red handed doctoring the "Coalition of the Willing" file in October of 2004. Brad found it and wrote about it, the Washington Post covered it. The coalition of the willing page is there now in all its infamous glory, listing 49 countries, as it did in the beginning. The doctored page that appeared and disappeared in October 2004 is not accessible through the archive. The only hard evidence of that would be if someone took a screen shot or mirrored it. I don’t know that anyone did, but that would be one to show the grandkids.
Update [2007-2-26 1:26:16 by smintheus]: The more I look into this question, the more puzzled I become.
I just noticed moments ago, for example, that on the current White House Radio Page there is now a tab for "December 2006", right after "August 2006". This new tab presumably is meant to plug some of that six-month gap I pointed out, in which no radio interviews were being linked. Except that as of yesterday, there was no tab for "December 2006". This time I don't have to trust my memory. I took a screen shot yesterday afternoon of the Radio Page, and the last month listed for 2006 was August.
Further, there are no interviews from December 2006. What comes up, when you click on that tab, is that single interview from Jan. 30, 2007 I mentioned in the diary. The December tab clearly was slapped together today (Sunday). Notice that when you click on the tab, the term "December" disappears from view. Some kind of coding error, obviously.
From the bizarre history of this one link for Jan. 30, 2007, I think it's very likely that the WH website is trying to cover up or distract from something. What precisely they're doing is open to debate.
This is all due to redesign issues.
While poking around today some more, I discovered several other odd things. For example, there continues to be a link on the WH Radio Page to Donald Rumsfeld's interview with Laura Ingraham on April 30, 2004. But the audio link has gone dead. (There is no transcript.) The other interviews there have intact audio links. It's almost as if this particular interview by Rumsfeld has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration, but it would have been even more embarrassing to be caught scrubbing it entirely. So the audio was disabled quietly, while the link seems to be left as always.
Yep, you got yerself one dead link. There’s also a dead video link to one of the Barney the President’s dog pieces. Not enough to prove a conspiracy. Maybe Barney is about to resign?
Playing around with the Wayback Machine, however, has not turned up much so far to support the argument I advanced in this diary.
This is the point. There is no evidence to support your argument.
There are a few clues that the relevant WH pages were tinkered with long after the initial links were created. For example, some time after the last Wayback archive from Sept. 19, 2006, the order of the entries on Cheney's "Speeches and News" page for January 2002 was altered. Two of the entries were transposed. What is that about? Some kind of editing was involved, but why?
This is all due to redesign issues.
The Wayback archives, several commenters state, can be scrubbed. In fact, to judge by the asterisks by nearly every entry, nearly the entire run of Wayback archives for the WH website have been edited retroactively.
But the Wayback archives have NOT been scrubbed. Case in point the "Mission Accomplished" speech. You can see the original page where it says "President Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended"
Compared to how it has looked for the past 3 years: "President Announces MAJOR Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended."
Please notice that the section on Iraq has been completely redesigned. "Focus on Iraq" is now "Iraq Renewal"
If ever there was cause to erase the archive, this would be it. But the Wayback archive has not been scrubbed.
So far, I've found no signs in the Wayback archives of radio interviews dating from before March 2004. I scarcely know what to make of this. As I said in the original post, I was certain that I had reviewed interviews on the Radio Page that predate the current March 2004 cut-off. Either they've been expunged from Wayback, or my memory is faulty.
Your memory of radio interviews cannot be considered hard evidence. Your diary claims that the White House web site is getting scrubbed. Present tense. You have given no proof of this. Not one solid piece of evidence. You can’t expect your readers to rely on your memory as a substitute for fact. Or maybe you do.
For what little it is worth, I'll note that the moment I saw the new "December 2006" tab mentioned above, I knew that it had not been present yesterday. But only the fact that I took a screen shot allows me to confirm that.
Redesign.
Update [2007-2-26 20:41:33 by smintheus]: Curioser and curioser. In addition to all that I've pointed to that's fishy about the WH website, today the archives for all radio interviews dating from 2004 became inaccessible. Here is the link from the WH Radio Page that is supposed to give you listings for 2004 radio interviews. Instead, it calls up only the interviews from 2006 (as does the link for 2006).
Those 2004 radio interviews are there.
www.whitehouse.gov/radio/archive2004.html
It's possible that some kind of innocent error was made in updating the site. Yet it seems more likely that such an error would have given you listings for 2005 rather than 2006 under the 2004 link.
Redesign. 2004 radio interviews present and accounted for.
Anyway, whether by accident or by intent, the 2004 radio interviews have indeed been scrubbed this very day.
Not scrubbed. Not removed, not erased, not even missing.
========
There you have it. Seventeen cases of no proof, no evidence. Thirteen cases where the explanation is the complete redesign of the website. Three times when you try to prove your case with what your memory tells you but what you cannot document. In this entire diary there is not one piece of documentary evidence to support your claim. Not one.
You say:
• So far I've located no evidence that the foregoing interviews were ever linked at the WH website
• Unless the Wayback archives were scrubbed as well, therefore, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that my memory about the pre-2004 links was faulty.
• the absence of links to interviews, even major interviews, does not by itself prove that the links were posted and then removed
• Either they've been expunged from Wayback, or my memory is faulty
• Playing around with the Wayback Machine, however, has not turned up much so far to support the argument I advanced in this diary.
Acknowleging you have no evidence, how can you make the extraordinary claim that whitehouse.gov is scrubbing its website?
All of this could have been spared if you had titled your diary "Is the White House web site Getting Scrubbed?" and if you changed every assertion that it is to a question.
References:
- Surfing the White House; whitehouse.gov redesign; Peter Meir; CBS News, February 27, 2007;
- Per Andy's Suggestions, The White House Cleans Itself Up; whitehouse.gov redesign; March 1, 2007;
- Robots.txt; "whitehouse.gov" "robots.txt" 2003; "Most, if not all, of the problematic "disallow" statements noted below have been corrected"; October 28, 2003: 2600 Magazine contacted the White House in the process of writing a story about the robots.txt file. The story also notes that the robots.txt file changed in the past day, so that the current robots.txt file is different from the file archived Friday, Oct 24.
- Robots.txt; disallow Iraq; Whitehouse.gov robots.txt disallow "iraq"; this guy is brilliant.
- White House is NOT Scrubbing Its Website informative discussion between Jim Gilliam and Brad Friedman.
- The Mysterious Disappearance of the White House Speech Archive; whitehouse.gov web scrubbing during the Clinton administration.