Secrecy

"The Pentagon took another step in distancing the media from US casualties of war last week with the announcement of new restrictions on funeral coverage at Arlington National Cemetery (ANC)," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua reports. "Any reporter wanting to cover a soldier's funeral at the Virginia cemetery will now be required to stay within a distant, roped-off area. This 'bullpen' is described as an area far enough away from the proceedings that a clergyman or family member's words cannot be clearly heard.

"Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal communications about its electronic voting machines," reports John Schwartz.

"Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush - living up to his recent declaration that he's in charge - told his top officials to 'stop the leaks' to the media, or else," report Joseph L. Galloway and James Kuhnhenn. "News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

The White House official who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame did more than attack a political enemy, writes Shaun Waterman. Plame worked for the CIA "on the very issue the Bush administration says was at the heart of its decision to go to war with Iraq: weapons of mass destruction. ... Plame's outing, whomever did it, has damaged the very effort the White House said it was pursuing in going to war in the first place. A very important line has been crossed here. The integrity of the policy goals - non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - is now seen by at least some in the White House as less important than the integrity of the message - we didn't exaggerate the case against Iraq. ... The message seems to have trumped everything, even the need to get it right in the war on terror." And as Walter Shapiro notes in USA Today, the Plame flap is only one of several scandalous recent developments related to the war in Iraq. "In the past week, three major Iraq-related developments should have, in theory, caused lasting embarrassment to the Bush administration," Shapiro writes. "But because none of these flaps touched on illegality, they have been treated as one-day stories."