White House altered, deleted press releases on 'coalition of the willing'

The White House altered documents regarding the nations involved in the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" that aided the US invasion of Iraq.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science professor says he found that the White House had modified elements of its website dealing with the coalition and in some cases deleted key documents in the public record.

At the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House released a list of the nations participating in the coalition, an important part of Bush Administration PR efforts, as the war was not UN-endorsed. Over a period of years, however, the original releases were modified to account for the diminishing number of nations.

Two releases were deleted from the White House website entirely, the professor says.

"I think that it raises the question of whether or not we can trust the government to maintain public records of things that were said or done that later prove embarrassing," Illinois political science professor Scott Althaus said.

"It could be what we found is limited," Althaus added. "But if it is not, it certainly opens the finding up to larger questions."

According to the university's student newspaper, a proofreader doublechecking a paper Althaus co-authored on the edited releases found that one of the URLs included in his paper now led to a blank page. "Related lists of coalition countries also appeared to contradict one another," the paper added.