Via Neat New Things:Library Journal – The Case of the Disappearing Article

On March 2, 1998, TIME magazine ran an article on the public’s reaction to President Clinton ordering air strikes against Iraq. “Selling the War Badly” had a sidebar by George Bush Sr. and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam,” the sidebar, an excerpt from their book A World Transformed, laid out the reasons Bush decided not to send forces on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War. This passage gives the gist:

Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well…. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

The article remained on TIME’s web site until spring 2003, shortly before the current President ordered the attack on Baghdad to begin. “The Memory Hole” (www.thememoryhole.org), a web site devoted to preserving “lost” information, reported the article’s removal from the TIME site and posted a scanned version of the original. I was sure that the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee (or some such group) would raise a stink, but I didn’t see anything. So, this fall, I began looking into the matter myself.

It appears to have been partly oversight and partly a question of web rights for articles excerpted from elsewhere, but the disappearance at such a sensitive time was troubling. Greiner did a little digging and was most troubled by the fact that TIME magazine couldn’t really answer his questions about the removal of the article in the first place. He goes on to say:

The continued confusion about web rights has a direct effect on researchers. TIME removed the piece, H.W. Wilson removed it but maintained a link to another site, and Gale and EBSCO kept it. FirstSearch had it under a different name. Doing a search? Better use all your resources.