The Memory Hole

» see thememoryhole.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In the last week of April 2004 the coffin photographs reached Turkey. They were on the evening news and in the papers here in the same days they were everywhere else, rows of flag-draped cases strapped to the floor of a cargo aircraft, and the Iraq war looked different in them than it did in the footage from Baghdad. The name of the website they came off reached almost nobody outside the American records-access trade. I spent twenty-two years not knowing the pictures had a publisher.

They came off The Memory Hole, which Russ Kick started in July 2002 and ran essentially alone. The premise was that documents the United States government had released and then quietly withdrawn, or had never released at all, should sit somewhere permanent and public. Kick filed Freedom of Information Act requests in volume, paid the copying fees, scanned what arrived, and posted the PDFs with a note explaining what they were. The tagline across the top read Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information.

He had asked Dover Air Force Base for every photograph taken of caskets containing the remains of American military personnel from 1 February 2003 forward. Dover refused the request in full. Kick appealed, and Air Mobility Command at Air Force headquarters overturned the refusal and mailed him a CD-ROM on 14 April 2004. It arrived on 21 April with 288 photographs of soldiers' coffins on it, plus 73 more showing the caskets of the seven astronauts killed aboard Columbia the previous year. He put all 361 online on 22 April.

The Pentagon had maintained a ban on this imagery since 1991, so the release was treated internally as an error rather than a policy change, and the ban was reasserted within days. By then the photographs had run on the front page of The New York Times and were in continuous rotation on the cable news networks. President Bush was asked about it and backed the Pentagon's position on the grounds of family privacy. One man with a fee waiver argument had put the cost of a war in front of an electorate that had been carefully shielded from it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the photographs ~

The mechanics of what Kick did are worth keeping, because they were unremarkable. He wrote a request describing exactly what he wanted, including caskets arriving, caskets departing and any funerary rites being performed. He accepted the denial, read the exemptions cited, and appealed to the agency above the base. The appeal succeeded because the photographs were official records with no legal basis for withholding, which is a thing that was true all along and that nobody else had tested.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University later republished the full set with the request paperwork attached, which is how the chain of custody survives today. Kick's own copies went offline with his site. The photographs did not: they are in the Archive's collection, in newspaper morgues, and in the visual record of the Iraq war, generally without his name anywhere near them.

~ the decline ~

The Memory Hole kept going for five more years and the Dover release was always going to be its high water mark. Kick moved the site onto WordPress in the summer of 2008, which is visible in the archive as a front page that triples in size between July and August. The posts that follow are the old diet: a Senate subcommittee report on Army surveillance of civilian political activity, with an introduction by a researcher who worked on government secrecy, and a US government translation of a paper on experimental psychosis induced by LSD. Then they stop, in May 2009.

There was no announcement, because a one-person archive does not issue one. Kick had other work. He was editor-at-large at a publisher of counterculture nonfiction, and he spent the following years assembling The Graphic Canon, a three-volume anthology of classic literature redrawn by more than a hundred and twenty artists, which is an enormous job. He later built a second site, Memory Hole 2, and then AltGov2, and from 2018 he ran open-records work for an animal research transparency project. Russ Kick died in Tucson on 12 September 2021, aged 52, after a decade of poor health.

The original address outlasted the posts by a year. thememoryhole.org served its archive for the last time on 13 May 2010, a 33 kilobyte front page with twelve-month-old entries on it, and was redirecting away by 12 June. From October 2010 it answered in 618 bytes, which is parking. Somebody eventually put a WordPress blog there called A Lifestyle Blog To Remember, whose own posts give out in 2018, so the domain that existed to stop things from disappearing is now two dead sites deep.

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