Monday, October 27, 2003

White House Disallows Search For "Iraq". This utterly bizarre.  Whoever runs the White House's web site has supplied a robots.txt file (which is used to direct web search engines) that prevents indexing of much of the content that is related to Iraq.  In other words, if you go searching for "Iraq" and "White House" on Google, you won't be getting any hits on the White House's site. If you are trying to make debate go away on a certain issue, this is a way you might quiet it down.  Reducing the ability of the average citizen to search for what has actually been said and written by the White House makes sense in a scary kind of way.  Altering the robots.txt like this may also limit the capability of "Wayback"-type engines, which show the web as it was, not how it now is.  I'd like to think that this tactic does not have formal acknowledgement in the White House, and that it is the act of a some crank (who should be fired).   10:49:27 AM     | comment [] | trackback []

The Way of Terrorism. This morning we find the NY Times and just about every other paper covering a serious round of terrorism in Baghdad.  There are at least 200 wounded, at least 34 dead.  Virtually all of them are Iraqis.  This is not, in any shape or form, "resistance" fighting.  What resistance murders dozens of its own people to make a "point" against an occupier?  If "collaboration" is given as a reason, it is a fiction.  The vast majority of the dead are regular Iraqi civilians, not police or anyone else who could be termed a collaborator. I find the events of the past two days to be one of the strongest indicators we have yet seen of Iraq's former government being involved in terrorism.  That they have shifted to this tactic so quickly, and with deadly effects, speaks volumes about who they are, and what they were and are prepared to do. If new elements in Iraq are responsible for these atrocities, we need to root them out.  The Iraqi people don't need foreign elements blowing them up, while they're trying to rebuild a society.  10:28:48 AM     | comment [] | trackback []