Back Up – The Memory Hole

What happened
to the Memory Hole? At this point it is unclear whether the Defense Department
actually tried to prohibit access to Memory Hole, as has been reported
by numerous reputable media sources. Some facts, however, are clear.

The US Government has been desperately trying to enforce a ban on dissemination
of photos of bodies or caskets of US servicement killed in the war on
terrorism.  The ban has been in place for over ten years, since
the first Gulf war.

Russ Kick, operator of The Memory
Hole, a site dedicated to exposing
stuff the government wants to keep hidden, last year filed a Freedom
of Information Act request for the photos in question.  It was refused.
  He appealed, and last week, to his considerable surprise, he recieved
361 photos from the government, which he posted.

The US Government, specifically the White House and the Defense Department,
freaked out. They issued a statement that the release of the photos was
"a mistake".

Exactly what steps they took to limit the damage and the distribution
of the phots remains one of the incognitos of the story. However, The
Memory Hole was inascessible Friday, and attempts today could reach only
a tiny fraction of the pictures.

However, in a dramatic illustration of the futility of damming information
on the Internet, it was already too late.  The story, and the pictures,
had been picked up by dozens of papers and major news sites.

Today, the government is involved in some frenetic damage control. We
can expect to hear much more about this story in thenext few days – it
seems to have some serious legs. Here is an excerpt from one of the stories
recently posted.

The first of the photos-depicting a long
row of coffins, three abreast, on
a military
transport plane-came from a civilian contract worker
assigned to the Kuwait airport. After its appearance
in the Seattle Times, she was summarily fired from her job.

Then hundreds of photographs were posted on the Web site The
Memory Hole www.thememoryhole.org, which had obtained
them through a Freedom
of Information
Act request. The Pentagon claimed that the release of the
photos by an Air Force command was a "mistake" and refused to
provide them
to any
other media outlets. Nonetheless, many newspapers took
the photos off the Internet
and published them Friday.

As for The Memory Hole, its Internet site was inaccessible
Friday. It was not possible to ascertain whether it was because
of a
vast increase in
traffic, deliberate sabotage or censorship.

from Axis
of Logic

related article from the New York Times