Whitewashing the White House

[Doug]

On March 16, 2003 Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press. His absurd claims in that interview have since become politically embarrassing to the White House. For example, he declared...

I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

You won't any longer find a link to this transcript on the White House website—nor, indeed, are there links to most of Cheney's interviews from before 2006. Don't believe me? Just do a search for that infamous sentence at www.whitehouse.gov.

The WH website evidently has been busy scrubbing links to interviews and perhaps other public appearances by top officials. The operation has proceeded somewhat unevenly, though aggressively.

...It's difficult to tell how extensive the operation has been, of course, but clearly it has wide dimensions. The most obvious losses from the White House website have been the transcripts of interviews. A little searching for prominent interviews by the Vice President quickly turned up some striking absences.

For example, on May 30, 2005 Cheney told several whoppers to Larry King on CNN, in particular this one:

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.

You'll look in vain for any transcript of that interview at the White House website, however. There are several transcripts of subsequent White House briefings in which reporters asked one or another official to comment upon the validity of Cheney's "last throes" statement. But the transcript of the interview in question? AWOL.

Again, on Meet the Press on September 14, 2003 Cheney rejected the calls for an investigation of the pre-war intelligence on so-called WMD, denied that there had been any administration failure in that regard, and predicted that the WH would be vindicated.

I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program.

The White House website nowhere links to a transcript of that interview, either.

Read the rest here.

[Dardedar]

DAR
Interesting that they are stooping to this but these quotes from Cheney have so entered the mainstream vocabulary via books and articles written about him I don't think they will get this genie back in the bottle. Plus, with archiving and the internet "way back machine" (which I have never used) I don't think any one will have any trouble verifying that he did say these things.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

They're probably trying to erase everything so they can call the quotes out on the blogosphere "unwarranted liberal attacks". Not going to work until the corporate-owned media obliges and erases their transcripts as well. If I belonged to the COM, I certainly wouldn't - these guys are getting too dangerous - their handlers need to keep a leash on them.