Airbrushing History, American Style

AIRBRUSHING HISTORY, AMERICAN STYLE

Legacies are in the air as President Bush prepares to leave the White House. How future historians will judge the president remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: future historians won't have all the facts needed to make that judgment. One legacy at risk of being forgotten is the way the Bush White House has quietly deleted or modified key documents in the public record that are maintained under its direct control.

Remember the "Coalition of the Willing" that sided with the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq? If you search the White House web site today you'll find a press release dated March 27, 2003 listing 49 countries forming the coalition. A key piece of evidence in the historical record, but also a troubling one. It is an impostor.

And although there were only 45 coalition members on the eve of the Iraq invasion, later deletions and revisions to key documents make it seem that there were always 49.

The Bush White House seems to have systematically airbrushed parts of the official record regarding its own history. How extensively White House documents have been rewritten is anyone's guess, but in the case of the coalition list, the evidence is clear that extensive revision of the historical record has occurred.

Deletions of original documents are easy to spot if you know where the originals were supposed to be. But we would never know about the revision history of documents presented by the White House as originals were it not for the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization devoted to documenting the changing face of the Internet. By taking broad snapshots of Web content every few weeks or months and then noting when documents have been modified or deleted, the Internet Archive allows us to retrace the history of revisions and deletions that were made to the various documents purporting to record the official coalition list.

Modifications to the historical record by the Bush White House began in the opening days of the Iraq invasion and continued through at least the end of 2005. Many of these changes involve adding or deleting countries from the coalition list and then presenting the latest change as if it were the original list.

One of the lists issued by the White House on March 21, 2003, identified 46 countries in the coalition, including the United States. At some point between April 7 and April 29, 2003, this list was updated to add Angola and Ukraine, bringing the total number of coalition countries up to 48. But instead of issuing a new list with a new date, the White House took the unusual step of retroactively revising the original March 21 press release, without indicating that the document had been modified from its original form.

The "new" March 21st list of 48 coalition countries was still available on the White House web site as recently as August 2005, but by April 2006 its URL yielded only an empty page. Not a missing page: the document remains in the White House archive. Only its contents have been deleted. Today, no official press release mentioning fewer than 48 coalition countries appears in any publicly-searchable website maintained by the White House.

Another list of 49 coalition countries - which adds the country of Tonga to the previous list of 48 - was issued by the White House at some point on or before April 13, 2003. This list remained unchanged in the White House archive until 2004, when it was temporarily removed from public view. By November 3, 2004 the list had been restored to the archive, but with two important changes. The revised list now included only 48 countries. Costa Rica, which had objected that its original inclusion was a mistake on the part of the Bush White House, no longer appears on this revised coalition list. The revised list also carried a new publication date: March 27, 2003, more than a year and a half before the revisions were made.

At some later point, this revised and backdated list was modified once again by changing the number of coalition countries back to 49, even though the document lists only 48 by name. Two versions of what appear on first glance to be the same document now reside in the White House web archive, both dated March 27, 2003. One version claims 49 countries and names 49, including Costa Rica; the other claims 49 countries but names only 48, omitting any reference to Costa Rica.

Updating lists to keep up with the times is one thing. Deleting original documents from the White House archives is another. Back-dating later documents and using them to replace the originals goes beyond irresponsible stewardship of the public record. It is rewriting history.

The confusion caused by these documents is so great that even popular websites like Wikipedia are now promoting this "revised" history. Wikipedia's discussion of the coalition includes a screen capture of the March 21st, 2003 press release [2] after it had been revised to increase the number of members from 46 to 48. Since the date was not changed when the number of countries was revised, Wikipedia's entry for the document claims it is the original March 21st release. Thus, in many ways the White House's revised version of history has already begun propagating across the Internet.

Our evidence suggests the troubling conclusion that major changes to the public record of the United States were not isolated events. We see instead a pattern of revision and removal from the public record that spans several years, from 2003 through at least 2005 in the case of the coalition lists. More troubling is that these changes were made in secret. Instead of issuing a series of revised lists with new dates, or maintaining an updated master list while preserving copies of the old ones, the White House removed original documents, altered them, and replaced them with backdated modifications that only appear to be originals.

We are not suggesting that these deletions and revisions are the result of official policy decisions by senior officials in the Bush administration. The pattern we uncovered might be evidence of a whitewashing campaign to intentionally alter the documentary record, or of inappropriate archival practices that treat electronic documents as placeholders rather than historically specific elements of the governmental record. But whether by design or neglect, the result is the same: the removals and revisions of White House documents distort the historical record of what our government has said and done.

We cannot tell how extensive was the White House effort to erase traces of recent American history. We cannot know whether changes are being made in these final weeks of the Bush administration that might forever alter the documentary trail of our nation's past. But this much is clear: Key documents for understanding American history have been quietly revised and deleted, at the hand of our own government.

If there is a silver lining, it is how difficult it has become in the digital age to remove traces of what used to be called a "paper trail". The original coalition lists were distributed so widely and stored in so many locations that changing the "originals" housed in White House archives only affects those who rely on the official records.

If the official records prove unreliable, then scholars and journalists may have an increasingly difficult time confirming the government's version of reality. One sad legacy of this outgoing administration is that it may have shifted the public burden of preserving our nation's history onto the shoulders of private citizens.

WHY SMALL CHANGES TO AN OLD LIST ARE IMPORTANT TODAY

One might ask why seemingly minor changes to a five-year-old list are so important: Why does the changing of a few countries and numbers warrant our attention? The list itself is only part of the story. Of greater concern is the extensive effort over a period of years that reshaped the historical record of the Iraq invasion, and removed from public view evidence that might be used to piece together the original facts.

Since the coalition list was originally issued more than five years ago, it is important to clarify its historical importance at the time of the Iraq invasion. Five years ago, the United States found itself facing international resistance to the idea of preemptively invading a sovereign state. By detailing the countries making up the "Coalition of the Willing," this list was an important part of the Bush administration's argument for the invasion. It suggested that there were numerous other nations supporting the American military action: not the United States acting alone, but a coalition of nations from around the globe forming together to defeat an enemy purported to threaten the world. The list of coalition members figured prominently in discussions of the invasion as it was underway. It remained an important topic throughout the early post-invasion period of the Iraq War, and was at the center of a disagreement between John Edwards and Dick Cheney during the 2004 Vice-Presidential debate. In this way, the number and names of coalition allies played an outsized role in helping to vindicate the American military action against Iraq.

The evidence in our analysis does not tell us why the White House went to such effort to modify seemingly innocuous information contained in the coalition list documents. But the extent of White House effort to alter the contents of this list suggests greater cause for concern beyond the five documents in our analysis. If so much energy was focused on reshaping the names and number of coalition countries, one can only imagine what might have been done to higher-profile or more sensitive content on the White House web site.

Our study is the first to demonstrate that the factual content of press releases was revised and backdated in ways that made the revised documents appear original. But our study is not the first to note unusual content changes to the White House web site.

* In December 2003, the Washington Post noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development had removed from its website the transcript of an interview with its head, Andrew S. Natsios, in which he told ABC's Nightline that the total cost to the American public of the Iraq war would be only $1.7 billion. The same article noted that the headline of one of President Bush's speeches had been revised after the fact to insert "Major" into the title "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." It also detailed a wide range of redactions and changes on other agency sites under the administration's control.
* Eleven months later one of the coalition lists was removed from the White House website after a controversial exchange between Dick Cheney and John Edwards in the Vice-Presidential Debate on October 5, 2004. A few news reports noted the disappearance of the list (these are discussed later in our analysis) but failed to follow up when the list was finally restored to the site. Our analysis shows that the replacement list was a country lighter and backdated more than a year earlier.
* In years since, occasional attention has been given to edits in other portions of the White House web site. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics noted late last year that during a discussion of whether the White House Office of Administration was subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the corresponding White House page was suddenly changed from saying the agency was subject to FOIA to stating that it was exempt. Unlike the lists in our analysis, the text in question came from an informational web page that did not purport to be an original document.

Until now, each of these incidents appeared to be a one-time edit or deletion. Seen in isolation, each of these incidents could have a reasonable explanation. But the pattern we find has not been noticed before, and it is much harder to explain away. We find clear evidence that the White House not only altered informational web pages, but altered important documents in the public record. The trail of edits, deletions, and backdated revisions spanned a period of at least two years. All were focused on the contents of an historically important list used by the Bush White House to vindicate its decision to invade Iraq.

In this way, our analysis is not the story of small changes to an old list. It is more importantly the story of how key facts from the historical record of the Iraq invasion were reshaped, an effort that continued for years after the invasion had ended. If the same sort of reshaping was also done to other parts of the public record maintained on the White House web site, then the scope of the problem could be much larger.


Scott Althaus is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate of the Cline Center for Democracy. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between media coverage of war and public support for war.

Kalev Leetaru is Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the Cline Center for Democracy; Chief Technology Advisor to the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science; Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and affiliated with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He has worked extensively with web and data mining and recently completed a book manuscript titled Content Analysis: A Data Mining and Intelligence Approach.

To read the full article: http://www.clinecenter.uiuc.edu/airbrushing_history