Airbrushing History, American Style: The Mutability of Government Documents in the Digital Era

The Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois recently released a study chronicling systematic revisions to official presidential press releases on the White House website listing the members of the Coalition of the Willing that backed United States military action in Iraq. Although these archived press releases are presented as original and unaltered documents, three list documents underwent a series of content revisions. In total, the documents were altered at least seven different times, with three countries added and one removed. In each case, when countries were added or removed from the lists, the release dates remained unchanged, suggesting that those countries were always (or never) listed as part of the coalition on that date. In addition to revisions, some of these documents were later deleted. Of five URLs hosting copies of the list on the White House website, the two earliest versions of the list – those containing the smallest number of countries – were later removed from the site while other press releases from those days remain on the site.