Winston dialed "back numbers" on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. [ . . . ] As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a "categorical pledge" were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
Now consider this list (hats off to Sirotablog for pulling most of these together):
Knight-Ridder, April 14, 2005: "The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered."
St.Paul Pioneer Press, November 1, 2004: "As the National Council for Research on Women documented last spring, information about women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. Apparently, Bush & Co. believe that if they stop publishing the data, the discrimination will be invisible."
Associated Press, September 5, 2004: "Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts."
The Washington Post, March 11, 2003: "The White House's Office of Management and Budget is discontinuing the annual report called "Budget Information for States" -- the primary federal document reporting how much states get under each federal program. In fiscal 2003, the report ran 422 pages. In 2002, it was 415 pages."
The San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 2003: "The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies."
Associated Press, October 22, 2002: "Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Sherrod Brown of Ohio demanded explanations in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.
They complained that information about the effectiveness of condoms had been removed from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site; that experts serving on advisory committees were being replaced because their views do not match the administration's; and that HHS is singling out AIDS groups with probing audits.
In addition, they said, information showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer was removed from a National Institutes of Health Web site. "Scientific information ... has been removed, apparently because it does not fit with the administration's ideological agenda," Waxman and Brown wrote."
The Guardian (UK), November 2, 2001: "The US president, George Bush, last night signed an executive order that allows either a past or sitting president to block access to White House papers, a move that has angered historians, journalists and former president Bill Clinton.
The order amends - and some argue, reverses - a 1978 law that allowed journalists, historians and other interested parties to read presidential papers twelve years after the term of office finished."
Heads up, people--it's a bright cold day in April, and the clocks are striking thirteen.
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