"Rectifying" Big Brother's embarrassing words.

In Orwell's classic precautionary tale 1984, the hapless central character, Winston Smith, was employed by the totalitarian state's "Ministry of Truth." Smith's job was to scour the public statements made by Big Brother and "rectify" those that subsequently proved to be in error; he did this by excising the offending words from the database, reworking the public record to fit the current party line, and casting the offending comments down the "memory hole." In this way the Party and its embodiment, Big Brother, were always right.

Every government, when allowed to, acts in the fashion Orwell described, and U.S. presidential administrations are certainly no different. Bill Clinton's compulsive mendacity was a national shame and a running joke. But things have not improved under his successor as the White House has, at least in cyberspace, literally followed Orwell's prescription for wiping its records clean of embarrassing public statements.

"It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history," observed the December 18th Washington Post. "Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, administration Web sites have been scrubbed for anything vaguely sensitive, and passwords are now required to access even much unclassified information." This includes deleting or revising statements by the president and other officials that have been proven incorrect:

* Last spring, Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that reconstruction of Iraq would cost U.S. taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion, with other nations providing additional funds. After Congress appropriated $87 billion for reconstruction, and other nations declined to contribute, the Bush administration "purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's website. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished."

* The original headline on the whitehouse.gov website for President Bush's May 1, 2003 speech read: "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But months later, with the ongoing insurrection in Iraq becoming a growing political problem for Bush, the website was edited by inserting the word "major" before combat, objectively changing the meaning well after the fact.

To facilitate such Orwellian "rectification," the White House prevents its contents from being archived by popular Internet search engines. According to a report in the October 28 issue of the Australian newspaper The Age, this is done "by means of a file called robots.txt, which resides in the root directory of a site. Adding a directory to robots.txt ensures that nothing in that folder will ever show up in a search and will never be archived by search sites. The White House's robots.txt file lists a huge number of directories all related to Iraq." When documents are filed in this fashion, "any future changes will be extremely difficult to spot--and even more difficult to prove."