The industry-funded right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has taken aim at non-governmental organizations.

"President Bush's recent claim that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq highlights two disturbing trends in rhetoric from the White House," observes Bryan Keefer. The first "is the Bush administration's record of factual misstatements and distortions.

Most public relations practioners will tell you that PR is about good communication between an organization and its public. But the Guardian's Mark Borkowski finds a different kind of public relations being practiced by political and corporate institutions. To deal with objections to their actions, these institutions "create smokescreens of confusion and perplexity to enable them to do exactly what they want, regardless of the wishes of the people they are supposed to serve," Borkowski writes.