Winston Smith

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.” –Chapter 4, 1984, George Orwell

Winston Smith rewrote history. In 1984, he worked in a vast bureaucratic environment where he would take old newspaper articles and change some of the facts to fit what the “Party” policies were at any given time.

Andrea Mitchell works for NBC News and is the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent. AmericaBlog today caught a gaffe in a transcript of an interview Mitchell was conducting with New York Times reporter James Risen, who first broke the story 2 weeks ago about Bush authorizing spying on domestic communications soon after 9/11. Evidently one of Mitchell’s questions was deleted from the interview transcript “1984-style.” You don’t have to wait months or years anymore for history to be rewritten—it’s done on the fly, now (From AmericaBlog):

Well this is getting interesting. NBC just delete two paragraphs from its Andrea Mitchell interview, the paragraphs that talked about whether Bush was wiretapping ace CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour (kudos to Atrios for spotting this).Here's what the NBC "official" transcript used to say (I copied this text from NBC's own page only 2 hours ago):

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Here's what it says now:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You are very, very tough on the CIA and the administration in general in both the war on terror and the run up to the war and the war itself the post-war operation. Let's talk about the war on terror. Why do you think they missed so many signals and what do you think caused the CIA to have this sort of break down as you describe it?

Risen: I think that, you know, to me, the greater break down was really on Iraq. It's very difficult to have known ahead of time about these 19 hijackers. They were, you know, probably lucky that they got through and they did something that no one really assumed anybody would ever do. And I think that made 9/11 a lot like Pearl Harbor. That even when you see all the clues in front of you that it's very difficult to put it together.

Then there is the interesting and pointed possibility of a “subplot,” to quote Newsweek reporter Christopher Dickey’s The Shadowland Journal blog. Was the entire story of the surveillance and bugging, along with a story that implicates the CIA in handing over information to Iran about how to build an A-bomb, held up until the publication of Risen’s book concerning it all?

A lot of this sounds like a really poorly-played game of telephone. By the time we read what might be known by whom and when—does Mitchell know more than she lets on about surveillance of Christiane Amanpour; are millions of Americans’ civil liberties being violated; will the nukifying of Iran give Bush the excuse he needs to stay on in the Middle East?—the mire of mud obscuring our view reduces the significance of the facts to a confusing blur.

Here’s an important simple truth: in our delicate system of checks and balances, congress needs to scrutinize the potentially illegal goings on of the renegade Bush administration, before Caesar-like, a dictatorship-for-life slips in under all of us, and by then it’s too late for the fear-mongered mob to react.