AP is reporting "Spokesman for military unit at Al-Qaqaa says there was no search for explosives":

There's more on the specific dates of all this in the story, and as we've pointed out before Josh Marshall has pulled together all the math to make sense of it. His later coverage, is similarly reasoned and clear-headed. Inform yourself.

In the meantime, as I was watching Fox and listening to the other Wingnut pundits yesterday (See Edward Daley's "Al Qaqaa Bomb Cache Fraud: A New Low For Liberals" for instance), this question occured to me:

What is more important at this point?

You tell me which one of those questions should be of more concern right now.

I had been planning to cover this a bit, but it looks like New Donkey has taken care of some of it for me:

Read the article for more specifics.

As I've mentioned here previously, when the GOP starts charging something about Democrats (e.g. "They're trying to scare voters!", "They're intolerant of free speech!", etc.), it's a virtual guarantee that it's something they are either currently doing or plan to do themselves. For years now, they've honed this pre-emptive attack on others for what they are actually doing themselves to an art form. Will the media and the voters be smart enough to recognize that this time around?

(Hat tip Bryan for the link!)

Just a quick note to mention that the BRAD BLOG has been steadily gaining traffic over the last month or two due to so many of you spreading the good word and staying involved.

Yesterday we had just under 10,000 unique visitors stop by. More importantly though, 2,500 of you were return visitors which is really most important to me. Whatever brought you here, many of you decided to come back again, and that's truly appreciated.

As I mentioned to our friend Henry in comments yesterday, never "mis-underestimate" the power of one. Please keep that in mind as Election Day nears. Get to work, spread the word, volunteer to knock on doors or help keep them honest on Election Day or just work the phones from home if that's more convenient. But do something.

To quote this year's savior of the Democratic Party: "You have the power!...You have the power!...You have the power!..."

He was right. I know this for a fact. So please, go use it!

While it may not be "breaking news", still I never fail to grow more amazed each day at the ever lowering depths of stark and cynical politicization of this George W. Bush administration.

While I'm not old enough to have contemporaneously tracked the troubling goings-on of the Nixon administration, I must say that from what I've been able to glean over the years about them, they just don't seem to hold a candle to the slick and orchestrated campaign of top-to-bottom politicization of virtually every facet of the current administration.

Sure both Clinton and Reagan were political champs, but they just didn't seem to have the fixation on the politicization of every nook and cranny of their administration in the way the Dubya team seems have accomplished during their catastrophic failure.

As I've been dealing with various issues related to the political scrubbing and/or white-washing and/or flagrantly partisan use of the White House website over the past couple of weeks, I've come across various bits and pieces, and have received various tips from readers on all sorts of questionable and/or deceptive and/or partisan and/or downright ugly uses of Bush administration-run facilities on their portion of the tax-payer funded "Internets".

By way of just a few examples, the White House's website is one of the top destinations on all of the Internets, as it offers a treasure trove of historical and educational information, including a section specifically tailored for children. (NOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU IN BLINDFOLD LAND: We're talking about the publicly funded Whitehouse.gov site now, a different animal all together than the appropriately partisan GeorgeWBush.com campaign site!)

Yet take a look at the screenshot on the right taken from the front page of Whitehouse.gov today. There's your tax dollars at work. A historical report concluding that "President George W. Bush's first term has been among the most consequential and successful in modern times."

I'll grant them "most consequential", but "most successful in modern times"?

Clicking on the link to their "special report" called "President George W. Bush: Record of Achievement", I found that my tax dollars are being used to inform me that...

And all of that is just on the first page of the full 19 Chapter "report"!

Meanwhile, lest we forget the children, the "Kids" section of Whitehouse.gov informs the impressionable tykes that "President Bush has pledged to work in a bipartisan spirit, which means he plans to work with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress." Perhaps those plans got set aside.

In another example of rank partisanship at work on the official Whitehouse.gov website, a reader (Vic) pointed out that there is a page devoted to a short biography of each American President. And right in the middle of the text of each one of those, they've been kind enough to offer the reader a convenient set of "Related Whitehouse.gov links" (See screenshot at left for the "Whitehouse.gov related links" to Abraham Lincoln, for example.)

The bio pages for each of the 43 former (or soon-to-be former) Presidents have that same set of "related" links dropped squarely into the middle of every historic Presidential biography.

As the reader who sent the tip noted, we might give the benefit of the doubt and overlook the links to the current President and Vice-President perhaps --- but links to their wives as well?!

To be fair, we've only had two administrations so far that have even had websites. So I wondered if perhaps Bill Clinton's website was similarly as unabashedly partisan and politicized as George W. Bush's.

I jumped over to the National Archives, where they have all five versions of Clinton's Whitehouse.gov website archived, versioned, indexed and frozen for posterity as the historical documents that such websites are --- according to the "rule of law" anyway, for those of you out there who still care about such antiquated notions.

I looked mostly at the fifth and final version of the Clinton website, since it would have been in play during the 2000 Elections and most comparable to Bush's current site. While I found documents that discussed various positive Clinton achievements, I just didn't come across the sort of wildly unabashed campaign rhetoric that the current White House site offers readers in spades.

One enlightening, though admittedly anecdotal measure of the differences in the two administrations is revealed by comparing each administration's former (and soon-to-former) historical bio pages of past Presidents.

There are no "Whitehouse.gov related links" to Clinton, Gore and their respective wives in the middle of the Clinton versions of those pages. Though there is a link on each page to a bio for each respective President's wife on the Clinton version. The direct links to the First Ladies (other than Laura Bush, of course, who is on every page) is removed on the Bush version. Instead, the Bush site, as did the Clinton site, offers a section specifically dedicated to historical First Lady bios.

More telling, however, is the direct comparison of the biographical essays for each President. I compared each site's version for LBJ through "present".

But for a short "FUN FACT" removed from the top of each of the Clinton site's Bio pages, it looks like the Bush Administration retained the exact same texts from the Clinton years for almost every President. That says something, I'd think, of the fair and balanced treatment that the Clinton team gave to former Presidents.

All of the Clinton essays seemed to be mostly even and non-partisan essays. An observation further borne out, I'd suggest, by the fact that even the Clinton team's version of Dubya's dad, Bush 41, remains completely unchanged on Dubya's version for his own dad through all four years of his term.

So Bush 43 found no reason to change the essay that Clinton had created for Bush 41, but --- as you might guess --- they did change the text for the Clinton bio when they took over the sandbox. Appropriately, they added information that hadn't been there previously about impeachment, but many Clinton achievements were simply excised entirely. Phrases such as "he outlined a bold strategy to lift the economy through increased public and private investment while cutting $500 billion from the Federal deficit" were removed. While other descriptive phrases like "After the failure in his second year of a huge program of health care reform" were added by Team Bush.

You can compare other differences for yourself.

While all of this is not necessarily earth-shaking --- as I said, "not breaking news" --- I do find it interesting, instructive and indicative of the politicized posture the current Administration has had from Day 1 of their "Presidency" in virtually every area, large to small.

The only other differences in Presidential essays that I noticed between the two sites is the entirely lopped off final paragraph from Clinton's version of the Jimmy Carter bio. The short excised paragraph at the end which spoke of Carter's achievements after leaving the White House, such as his founding of "the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta to promote peace and human rights worldwide" was simply gone.

Perhaps the Bush White House decided that post-Presidential activities were a can of worms they preferred better left unopened.

Some day, if I find the stomach for it, perhaps I'll compare the First Lady bios from the Clinton and Bush sites. Though I have a feeling it's not gonna be pretty.

UPDATE 10/29/04: BRAD BLOG SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing...

A helpful note to our Wingnut Readers: Before you race to your blogs in a panic to parrot the misleading Drudge/NBCNews story which tries to suggest that the 380 TONS of missing high explosives from al Qaqaa were missing before we ever got there....Before you hit the comments button here and re-type what Rush is lying to you about this morning...For once, try to educate yourself and understand the facts of the story first so you don't embarrass yourself again, and waste everybody's time. Josh Marshall --- a very good and professional reporter --- can help you avoid that mistake again. But you'll have to read him first. Please do.

Thank you.

Gave me the smile I needed tonight.
via Angry Finger who titled it "Biggest. Kerry. Fan. Ever"

The Washington Post is reporting this in tomorrow's paper:

Now go watch Bush not answer Charlie Gibson's direct question about precisely that on tomorrow's GMA interview (I've seen the preview).

GeorgeWBush.org, a very funny parody website, has just discovered the misaddressed email they've been receiving in their "catch-all" mailbox intended for addresses of GeorgeWBush.com. Peruse the "dead letters" from GOP operatives! Share your favorite finds in comments here (and give Mary Matlin a phonecall with our best regards while you're there!)

Can't these guys get anything right?

"Pacific John" at DKos has info on the now vanished "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated" from a State Dept. website report on a "very embarrassing Nov 10, 2001 State Dept. Report" on "Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda".

I've found other missing material from the State Dept. website, but haven't had time yet to report it in detail, unfortunately. Glad they're picking up the ball at Daily Kos!

(Thanks to tipster Brad J. for this one!)

UPDATE 10/29/04: BRAD BLOG SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing...

While I've gotten sidelined a bit on the "Shrub Scrub" story, other all-new all-more-incredible failures of this administration have been hitting the wires. Most notably the 380 tons of explosive material that went unsecured and now missing from Al-Qaqaa after the U.S. capture of Iraq.

Apparently the latest White House / Wingnut line is that this is no big deal, and we don't even really know for sure when these 380 tons of explosives(!) went missing.

Josh Marshall, who's all over this one, shows that not only has the Administration known about this for over a year (only of actual concern to the White House now that the media has reported the story) but contrary to the denials of the Bush Dead Enders, the explosives which the U.N. and the IAEA both notified the U.S. about before the war was indeed found to be there, according to AP after we invaded Iraq:

So it was there, and we didn't secure it, and now the White House is stuck in another lie, fib, mislead, failure, disaster...whatever you wish to call it.

The extraordinary thing at this point seems to be that the sheer unprecedented number of failures for a single administration may, in the end, help them cover up all of them! From 9/11 to WMD's to Abu Ghraib to Increases in Terrorism to 9/11 Commission failures to Backdoor Drafts to deadly Flu Vaccine mishaps to Website Scrubbing to Job Losses to Increases in Poverty Rates to Decreases in the number of Insured to rises in Health Costs to Rising Death Tolls to Unsecured Munitions Sites to Insufficient Forces on the Ground to Osama bin Laden both running and hiding...and on and on...Who can keep up with it all?

I suspect, as when America simply became turned off to endless silly (and unproven) allegations of scandal during the Clinton Administration, it's likely America may end up viewing actual disastrous policy failures-- most of which have made America less safe and certainly less better off than we were four years ago --- as more than they are able to process. I know I can hardly process it all anymore, and I'm paying attention!

Will Bush's endless failures turn out to be his trump card in the end? It's amazing to ponder that this may be the very thing that Bush and Co. now have to hang their hat on!

"Bush/Cheney '04: Who Understands Disaster Better Than Us?!"

· 10/06/04: WH Scrubs Coalition List from Website...
· 10/17/04: WH caught red-handed trying to cover tracks...
· 10/18/04: Bush's "not that concerned" about bin Laden Audio/Video goes missing...
· 10/21/04: More embarrassing Audio/Video files found missing from site...
· 10/22/04: 'Vanished Coalition List' story hits AFP news wires...
· 10/24/04: Scrubbed files in violation of "Presidential Records Act"...
· 10/25/04: Washington Post gets in game, covers Scrub story twice in one day...
· 10/25/04: State Dept. website scrubbed as well!...
· 10/26/04: WH uses website to campaign for Prez!...
· 10/29/04: SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing...
· 1/21/05 (Yes, '05!): Reuters Reports: "White House Scraps 'Coalition of the Willing' List" (What took ya so long?!)
· 9/15/07: White House Still Lying About Coalition in Iraq After All These Years...
· 12/5/08: Altered White House Iraq War Docs "Discovered" by University Professor...More Than Four Years After The BRAD BLOG Originally Reported Same

Looks like I can back off a bit, for the moment, on my criticism of the print media (if not the broadcast media) as The Washington Post today has finally picked up the "White House Website Scrub" story in two different pieces. (Unlike the wire report on AFP/Yahoo, both WaPo stories were kind enough to give credit to yours truly for breaking the story.)

Helen Dewar and Brian Faler cover the story on page 6 of today's paper here. And then Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing" follows up a bit on that report here.

Since Froomkin's column does not get archived on the WaPo site (I don't think) and since a few minor corrections should be made to his report, I'll run it here in it's entirety:

Indeed, as Froomkin reports, the audio from the "March 2002 press conference" where Bush used "misunderestimate" is now back online. It was not there when we originally reported that part of the story a few days ago. But as the other WaPo piece on this today from Dewar and Faler report, James Orr, head of content for the White House website claims that staffers are now "'clicking on every single audio and video link on our site' to make sure they work. So that could be one of the pages where they've now restored the previously missing audio.

In regards to the other version of the coalition list Froomkin was able to find by searching Google, as we reported old versions of the coalition list could be found via searching, but that the latest coalition list, the version linked to their actively updated "RENEWAL IN IRAQ: the Coalition" special report was expressly removed from that report just after Dick Cheney blasted John Edwards in the Veep Debate for being "dead wrong" for not counting Iraqi casualties as part of the coalition. That issue is explained, with before and after screenshots here.

Finally, the transcript for the "July 2001 press conference" where Bush spoke about being "unusually deliberative for my administration" on Stem Cell research was always available online, as my report on that indicated at the time. It was only the Audio and Video from the press conference that was not --- and is still not, as of this post --- available online. The links to them are there, but the content is unavailable.

Nonetheless, those are minor issues and I'm glad to see the media picking up on this story at all. I hope they will also look into the issues of possible criminal violations by the White House of the Presidential Records Act that I reported on last night.

Most importantly, I hope the media keep pressing the White House on all of this since their ridiculous cover story (now given by Orr to both AFP and WaPo) has been pretty pathetic. As the Dewar and Faler story reported in it's final graf...

So Orr is suggesting here that it takes over a month to remove a single line of text from an HTML web page?! Yet they were able to both delete the original page --- a list which never contained the country of Iraq, as Cheney suggested --- and remove the graphic link to that list from their special report on Iraq just a day or two after we first reported on it? But they can't seem to provide a list of coaltion countries during a time of war and in the middle of a Presidential campaign?

If you believe that, you probably also believe that "freedom is on the march" in Falluja.

These guys are incredible, and will say anything to cover their asses for what is clearly a cynical and corrupt, and likely illegal (remember that "rule of law" that used to matter?) use of the historical record on the publically funded White House website. Sadly, it's all merely demonstrative of the way everything in this administration seems to be handled.

UPDATE 10/29/04: BRAD BLOG SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing...

Just when you thought there was no new depths for these Bush bigots to plumb...Homophobia becomes a fully outted and approved Bush/Cheney campaign tactic. Why hide it in the closet? I guess we should expect nothing less from these people. Sad and pathetic. Be horrified..

Vote November 2nd.

On Nov. 1, 2001 George W. Bush issued Executive Order #13233 which modified some of the measures of the "Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978", instituted in the wake of the Nixon Administration's legal imbroglio over which Presidential documents were private and which were public. The PRA, according to the National Archives, "changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public."

In a bit of Orwellian irony that has now become all too recognizable for the Bush Administration, their Executive Order #13233 which modified that PRA, is not listed at all on the White House website page entitled “Executive Orders Issued by President Bush”.

Despite the changes implemented by George W. Bush, the PRA still "Defines and states public ownership of the records" as the National Archives points out.

Specifically, the National Archives makes it clear:

The Clinton Administration was the first to have a White House website, and indeed the original architects of that site apparenty took great pains to create a precise "versioning" system to capture various changes to the content over time. As the National Archives website on this notes; "These versions are historical materials." One can still view all of the various versions of the Clinton White House's website via that link.

Over the past several weeks, the BRAD BLOG has been chronicling the stark difference in the Bush Administration's management of their White House website. We've caught them red-handed as they hastily removed the website's list of Iraq "coaltion" members just after the V.P. Debate when Dick Cheney accused John Edwards of being "dead wrong" for not counting Iraqi casualties as a percentage of "coalition casualties" and then again after the third Presidential Debate when the White House removed damning video footage of Bush admitting at a press conference that he was "not truly that concerned" about bin Laden --- precisely as John Kerry had charged during the debate.

Continued investigation by the BRAD BLOG has found a great deal of information that has vanished from the site. Some of it easily spotted, such as the link to "Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neil testifies about terrorism risk insurance" still displayed on this page (a sample from that page is pictured at right) but which now leads instead to a "The file you have attempted to access cannot be found" page.

More troubling, however, are those pages which have simply been modified, or deleted all together and which are not tracked and/or cached (and are therefore lost to the historic record entirely, as discussed shortly) by Internet archive and caching sites. Enormous sections of the White House website then are not indexed or cached at all by these external public archive and search engines.

Therefore, any number of modified and/or deleted pages of "historical material" may now be almost impossible to track, record or even notice. Ever.

Notably, we've documented here just some of the loads of audio and video material that has been "disappeared" from the website. Such audio and video media is not indexed or cached at all on any site by search and archive sites. So the material systematically removed from hundreds of pages at Whitehouse.gov may well be gone for good.

A critic or two have suggested that the White House Website has a policy to remove old media after a year or so for space reasons. Given how inexpensive digital storage space has become and the vast amount of material already catalogued on their website, such an explanation would constitute a strange reason to delete "historical material". As well, such a practice is likely illegal defined by the PRA. But even if one sees "storage space" as a plausible explanation for some of the vanished material, it certainly could not be used to explain their purposefully removed link to their "List of Coalition Members". Good luck trying to find any up-to-date listing of "coalition" countries on the Whitehouse.gov website at this point. Pretty remarkable considering we're in the middle of a war, and Bush/Cheney are parading around the country talking about the strengths of this --- apparently mysterious --- "coalition of the willing".

The AFP wire story that finally picked up on our original reporting at the end of last week offered this "official" explanation:

So, in other words, a simple list of "coaltion member" countries that had previously been updated regularly (here's an example of one from April of 2003) to add new countries whenever one came on board, can no longer just be updated to add or remove countries as they come and go. Now, they must just "take it down" entirely instead of updating the information on the page.

Of course they must. With Bush/Cheney running around the country telling folks that Kerry/Edwards are disrespecting "coalition" countries like Iraq (never, ever, ever named as a "Coalition Country" on any White House or State Dept. or Pentagon website page that I've been able to find - and those other Websites have also been scrubbed apparently of such information!) they've now got to use the publically owned White House website, in possible violation of both the PRA and existing campaign laws, to scrub the evidence entirely that might show Bush/Cheney are actively lying to America.

Anyone willing to bet that the "entire Iraq site" won't be "updated" accurately again until some time after, oh, say November 2nd or so?

As this story has gained momentum in the blogosphere, there has been a critic or two --- okay, one, Jim Gilliam, one of the producers of the excellent OutFoxed documentary (who, by the way, has some superb inside skinny on the late-in-the-week O'Rilly "buzz") who seems to be backing up the White House line from the AFP article suggesting the White House is simply removing old media after a year, as some sort of a space-saving policy.

He is wrong. Clearly, on the "Coalition List" issue there is no denying their purposeful cover-up to avoid telling America who the "coaltion" countries are. On that, they've been caught with a hand directly in the cookie jar.

But on the issue of various audio and video being removed from the site, also as reported here, there is ample evidence that Gilliam is giving far too much credence to the White House spin of removing old media after a certain date.

While such a "policy", questionable in and of itself, might have explained some of the media that is no longer available, there is far more evidence suggesting that there is no blanket policy for the removal of audio and video media from the site. Rather, if there is such a policy, it is either a haphazard operation or, more likely, done as the political operatives see fit.

How otherwise to explain the January 21, 2002 video from a Martin Luther King Day event which is still available from the White House website? We're well beyond the suggested one-year expiry date for such material. And, of course, that's just one of many videos well over a year old which are still available for viewing at the White House website.

And take a look at a sampling of Bush's Radio Addresses from all the way back in 2001, just before and after 9/11. Some audio is still there, some isn't:

Could that simply be the result of sloppy webmastering? I suppose so. Though it's certainly of note that audio only from "National Security" and "Compassionate Conservatism" addresses remain online, while Economic, Education and Stem Cell related addresses are no longer available.

As well, it all begs the question as to why a White House as politically structured from the ground up as this one has proven to be, who have now been caught specifically removing politically damaging material and demonstrably lying about virtually every aspect of their four years in power as part of a clearly orchestrated campaign strategy, should now be given the benefit-of-the-doubt on anything anymore.

That notion alone underscores why these guys need to go; if they can't even be trusted in their own country by their own citizens, how are they to be able to represent our best interests and be trusted by any of the nations in the world who's confidence we so desperately need to gain back at this time to assist in all forms of crucial foreign policy?

The unavoidable perception is that of arrogant attempts at deception, displayed by a willful manipulation of the publically funded and historically relevant records of the White House website. The arrogance here is revealed by the fact that it's so simple to demonstrate what theses guys are doing and yet they both continue to do it and lie about it in the bargain.

We're able to follow some of the shenanigans thanks in part to Internet cache and search sites as mentioned, such as Google's Cache and The Wayback Machine. But those sites do not cache old media (audio and video) files, only old documents --- and the White House has even attempted to block caching of those, as reported over a year ago by 2600.com and others. That policy is still in effect today via a Robots.txt file on the site which provides a long list for Internet search and archive engines describing precisely which directories should not be indexed! And yet, even with all the evidence to the contrary, this White House baldly announces to the American people that this entire process is nothing more essentially than routine maintenance.

Right. And George W. Bush never said he was "truly not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden. Just one of those "ex-agg-er-ations" in a world where words, they continue to hope in these last few days of the campaign, will speak louder than actions.

With the exception of a single AFP report filed on this on-going matter, and despite the story becoming amongst the most discussed in the entire blogosphere over the past week, we still continue to scratch our head and wonder how the Mainstream Media can file report after report about lesbians, wolfpacks, and goose-hunting while possible on-going violations of federal laws by a sitting administration go virtually unreported!

That is a courtesy granted, apparently, only to this administration. I'm sure Al Gore would have appreciated the same back in 2000 when literally hundreds, if not thousands, of reports were filed on a couple of campaign-related phone calls alleged to have been made from a White House telephone and "no controlling legal authority" became the buzz phrase of both the Rightwing and (supposedly) "Liberal" Media from then on through Election Day.

As ever, a different set of "media rules" seem to apply Democrat versus Republican administrations. Never fear. I'm sure the media will suddenly begin to "get it right" again during the Kerry Administration.

Bush/Cheney '04: These aren't the droids you're looking for...

UPDATE 10/25/04: The Washington Post finally picks up the story today! Twice!

UPDATE 10/29/04: BRAD BLOG SUCCESS! WH restores Audio/Video! Though much still missing...