Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Author: SCOTT ALTHAUS and KALEV LEETARU
Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Publication Date: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Link: Airbrushing History, American Style
Stephan: I am an historian, and this sort of thing is really vile. These are the acts of Orwellian cowards who know they have screwed-up in a major way, and want to hide it from history, while self-righteously and piously flaunting around history's stage. There is a constant lack of moral and ethical awareness in these people. You can see a perfect example of it in Dick Cheney's book.
This is not a new document and we now see with better hindsight confirming its findings and expanding on them. This is geopolitics at a psychiatric level.
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.
Key Findings
There are at least five documents taking the form of White House press releases that detail the number and names of countries in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ that publicly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At one time, all five of these documents were archived on the White House web site.
Today, only three of these five documents can still be accessed in the White House archives. One of the missing lists was removed from the White House web site at some point in late 2004, and the other was removed between late 2005 and early 2006. These two ‘missing’ lists represent earlier and smaller lists of coalition members.
The text of three of these five documents was altered at some point after their initial release, even though in most cases the documents still retained their original release dates and were presented as unaltered originals. These alterations to the public record changed the apparent number of countries making up the coalition, as well as the names of countries in the coalition. Some of these alterations appear to have been made as long as two years after […]
