Tuesday, October 19, 2004

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.
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. [from TheMemoryHole.org

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