White House continues to bury reports

I've been cataloguing--here and here--the preference of the Bush administration simply to stop making government reports physically available when they contain information that goes against the administration line.

Here's another one to add to the list:

A government-commissioned report on working conditions in Central America--focus of the CAFTA free trade pact that the White House and its allies are pushing--has been buried for two years by the Department of Labor because it documents poor working conditions and disregard for workers' rights.

The department instructed its contractor to remove the reports from its Web site, ordered it to retrieve paper copies before they became public, banned release of new information from the reports, and even told the contractor it could not discuss the studies with outsiders.

[. . . ] One lawmaker said he was shocked that a federal agency charged with protecting the rights of Americans workers would go to such lengths to block the public from seeing its own contractor's concerns before Congress votes on the agreement.

"You would think if any agency in our government would care about this, it would be the Labor Department," Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said.

[Thanks for the tip, Gary.]