Something strange is afoot at whitehouse.gov...

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - White House Website and History: "# Democratic National Committee Blog: Enabling historical revisionism. Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them."

A comment further down on the page adds:

In an effort to shed some light on this I analyzed the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov using a simple script. Of the 1562 total "Disallow" lines: 700 end with "iraq" 855 do not end with "iraq" The interesting part is that of those that end with "iraq" ALL of them match another "Disallow" line except the matching line has something other than "iraq" -- in other words, it looks like a systematic effort to add "iraq" to existing exclusion directories. A rough glance did not make it clear what the pattern is for the 155 entries that don't have an "iraq" partner on the list. Although it does show a systematic effort, it also DOES NOT show an attempt to exclude any particular content from a directory with "iraq" (or, perhaps it's even more elaborate than we think and most of them are a smokescreen) in it's URL..

The blocked pages apparently include this page, which has the statement "U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq could have produce enough biological and chemical agent to kill millions of people. The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so." Here's my version of the conspiracy theory:

It is possible that this is some kind of odd mistake. It is also possible that they are deliberately attempting to obscure one or two particular pieces of information. It may be something that is public information (i.e. they can't really make it secret). Burying it in a long list of strange entries would be a good way to obfuscate. This isn't a very high-tech trick (in fact it is probably more effective than some high-tech tricks). I'm sure no one at the White House is a stranger to the art of obfuscation. But, like I said, it could also be a wierd coincidence. It is tantalizing though.

A somewhat less sinister theory is presented here.