U.S. Government

"For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government - cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters," report Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound.

"The man leading the US hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [David Kay] will leave his post prematurely in the next few months amid dwindling expectations that there is anything to be found. ... 'This is a big blow to the administration and it will signal the effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction,' said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace in Washington. 'Some will continue looking but very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this point.' ...

Norman Solomon writes that "few Americans have heard of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence employee facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act. So far, the American press has ignored her. But the case raises profound questions about democracy and the public's right to know on both sides of the Atlantic. Ms. Gun's legal peril began in Britain on March 2, when the Observer newspaper exposed a highly secret memorandum by a top U.S. National Security Agency official. ...

In Weapons of Mass Deception, we showed how the U.S. news media virtually ignored the use in Iraq of cluster bombs -- anti-personnel devices like land mines that leave behind a deadly litter of unexploded "bomblets." Now Paul Wiseman has written a major report in which he concludes, "The Pentagon presented a misleading picture during the war of the extent to which cluster weapons were being used and of the civilian casualties they were causing. Gen.