Fighting the fight for government information

Utne Reader provides a great summary of the Bush administration's attempts to remove public information from public access: Bush Hits the Delete Button.

Dick Cheney’s aversion to the sunlight has made headlines so often that his latest information crackdown is more likely to be fodder for David Letterman than it is to spark outrage. Still, if the average citizen saw a grocery list of all the instances of government suppression over the past seven years, it’s a good guess it would lead to an outcry. Something like: Hey, what the hell happened to the public’s right to know?

There's a long list of information resources that have been shut down, all from the ongoing compilation being done by TPM Muckraker.

Great work.

And, speaking of supressed government information, due to the work of McClatchy's Washington Bureau, ABC News, bloggers and now, the Federation of American Scientists, a report based on captured Iraqi documents that showed little basis for the U.S. claim that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda has finally been published. Here's the story, from the FAS's Secrecy News Blog: DoD Report on Captured Iraqi Documents; and the report itself, on the FAS website: Iraqi Perspectives Project.

In The Washington Independent, some background on the report and what it means and how two journalists built up their careers on amplifying the administration's claims: Fast and Loose with the Facts.
An alternate view at the Wall Street Journal.