Airbrushing the 'Coalition of the Willing' -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- - -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

• 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 the document's purported release date. -- /snap/ [link]

Labels: airbrushing history, Cline center for Democracy, Coalition of the Willing, Dictionary of War, Iraq invasion, White House archives

  ¶ Thursday, December 04, 2008 0 Comments

  Digital despair - -- -- -- -
Says Geert:

"At the moment I am in Novi Sad for the fifth edition of the Dictionary of War. The material will be online within a week. The concept (Begriff) that I will be talking about is ‘digital despair’, using material from the Streamtime Iraqi Blogs Support Campaign. Together with Cecile Landman, who runs the aggregator metablog, I prepared a presentation about the faith or demise, if you like, of the Iraqi blogosphere, five years after Salam Pax started his blog, still writing under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."

Read more at Net Critique

An Iraqi-flag-interpretation:

Labels: Dictionary of War, Digital despair, Iraqi blogs, Net critique, Novi Sad

  ¶ Sunday, January 27, 2008 0 Comments