Cheney points to anti-Bush site

More politicians have been giving pointers to Web sites during speeches and appearances, particularly during this presidential election cycle. But last night, citizens were pointed to a site that directly contradicted the message Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to make.

During the Tuesday night vice presidential debate, Cheney cited a Web site developed by the Political Fact Check project at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania as a place for citizens to find details about the charges Democrats have made against Halliburton. That includes a charge that the company did not have to compete for multimillion dollar contracts in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive officer before he ran for vice president.

However, while the project's Web site is at factcheck.org, the address that Cheney provided was factcheck.com.

Factcheck.com redirects visitors to another site, georgesoros.com, a personal site of billionaire George Soros titled "Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush: A Personal Message from George Soros."

Mixing up dot-com, dot-org and dot-gov addresses is a common mistake. For years, many people seeking the White House's Web site ended up on the whitehouse.com pornography site by mistake.

According to the Whois database, factcheck.com was registered in February by an independent domain name administration company in the Cayman Islands and updated Sept. 12.