Secrecy

Using the Pen to Obscure the Sword

"The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism ... amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated," reports the Los Angeles Times.

A Beef with Human Rights

In a move Australia's foreign minister decried as "outrageous and indefensible, utterly at odds with ... an open and democratic society," an American human rights monitor has been ordered to leave Indonesia.

Trading Places?

After being arrested by Israeli secret service agents "on suspicion of having arranged a television interview with Mordechai Vanunu in violation of state gagging orders," British journalist Peter Hounam was released today. Hounam was in Israel working on a BBC documentary about Vanunu, a former nuclear technician turned whistleblower. In 1986, Hounam's reporting "helped to reveal Israel's nuclear secrets," after Vanunu came forward with weapons programs information.

Economic Protection Agency

"EPA decisions now have a consistent pattern: disregard for inconvenient facts, a tilt toward industry, and a penchant for secrecy," said longtime Environmental Protection Agency official Eric Schaeffer, who quit the agency in protest in 2002. He was responding to a new decision to exempt wood products plants from controls on emissions of formaldehyde, a chemical linked to cancer and leukemia.

Pennsylvania Boots a Whistleblower

"A whistleblower who uncovered evidence that major drug companies sought to influence government officials has been removed from his job and placed on administrative leave," reports Jeanne Lenzer. "Allen Jones, an investigator at the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General (OIG), was escorted out of his workplace on 28 April and told 'not to appear on OIG property' after OIG officials accused him of talking to the press. ...

Park Service Whitewash

"Despite budget crunches, poor air quality, maintenance backlogs and other problems, the public is not likely to hear any bad news from staff of the National Park Service (NPS)," BushGreenwatch.org writes.

Free the Press!

The Associated Press and the Mississippi paper Hattiesburg American filed a lawsuit "against the U.S. Marshals Service over an incident in April in which a federal marshal erased reporters' recordings of a speech Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave to high school students" about the U.S. Constitution.

Let Freedom Ring? China Says Not So Fast

China's "censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilization, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," wrote Beijing journalism professor Jiao Guobiao in a recent article that has been widely circulated by Internet in Beijing despite, not unpredictably, being banned by the Communist Party's propaganda department. "Such explicit outbursts of dissent are still rare in China, reports Joseph Kahn. "But Mr.

Battle of the Photographs

"The Bush administration, despite the savvy of its spinmeisters and Hollywood-trained publicists, has lost the war of images abroad," writes Juan Cole. "Although it has had more success in managing war images at home, cracks have increasingly opened up on the domestic front as well." Recent examples have included the publication of photos of flag-draped coffins bearing U.S.

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