Secrecy

Leading a double life would seem to be the exclusive domain of professional spies, fictional secret agents and undercover operatives with foreign accents. But seemingly ordinary men and women sometimes hide extraordinary secrets from those closest to them: their families, friends and co-workers. Consider the well-respected chief executive who embezzles funds from his company. The man with two wives and two sets of children who know nothing of one another's existence.

In recent weeks, a parade of top officials has given sober, underpublicized speeches explaining why President Obama not only considers "targeted killing" drone strikes against terrorists legal but has massively expanded their use, even approving a strike against a U.S. citizen, the New Mexico-born Al Qaeda preacher Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen last year. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. gave a lecture arguing that the government has a right to kill U.S. citizens who practice terrorism as long as it observes some form of "due process" in its secret decision-making.

One of Roman Catholicism's most tantalizing secrets came to an anticlimactic end Monday as the Vatican unveiled a 62-line handwritten account by Lucia de Jesus dos Santos of what she saw as a 10-year-old shepherd in a pasture near Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917. The text describes a radiant Virgin Mary, a flaming sword and a "Bishop dressed in White," presumed to be a pope, who leads a sad procession of priests and nuns up a mountain through a half-ruined city strewn with corpses.

We're in the second month of a vitally important experiment at the Los Angeles County Dependency Court, where court officers and others are wrestling with what it means to be watched. So far, so good: The public has gotten a look, not one child has been hurt, and awareness is slowly growing. Taking advantage of the order by Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Juvenile Court, I made another trip recently to the Monterey Park courthouse where Dependency Court is housed. Just a few months ago that would have been unthinkable, as dependency hearings - where the fates of children in the foster care system are decided - were closed except in unusual circumstances.

Saudi Arabian businessmen and arms brokers with close ties to the royal family head a group of Middle Eastern investors who secretly acquired a major stake in leases on public land in Marina del Rey, The Times has learned.

The year was 1980, and Bonnie Busby, who had put in 17 years on a Continental Can assembly line in St. Louis, was just months away from vesting in a union-negotiated pension plan. Busby, 50, says that when the company laid her off in November that year, she was assured that the layoff was temporary. She said company officials for the next five years repeatedly told her that she was likely to be rehired soon.

A former Trinity Broadcasting Network employee who was paid $425,000 to keep quiet about his claims of a homosexual tryst with televangelist Paul Crouch has disclosed details of his complaint, saying that he had felt forced to engage in the alleged sexual acts to keep his job. Enoch Lonnie Ford, 41, said he was going public with his story because he believes TBN officials breached a confidentiality agreement that was part of a 1998 settlement that provided the payment to him.

It is known simply as The Plan, and it is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world today. No more than 15 top U.S. officials are privy to the exact scheme under which U.S. forces will confront the Iraqi military if the current crisis in the Middle East erupts into a war. "I'm not going to tell you the sequence or what the timing of that sequence would be," says Gen. Colin L.

'For a long time now there's been too much secrecy in this city." That's what President Obama said on his first day in office. He was talking about the way George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had used 9/11 as a pretext for pulling a veil over many of their key policies and actions. Last week, Obama announced he was replacing Bush's executive order on classified documents with a new one designed to reduce secrecy. Obama's policies are a distinct improvement, but they don't really solve the underlying problem.

We're in the second month of a vitally important experiment at the Los Angeles County Dependency Court, where court officers and others are wrestling with what it means to be watched. So far, so good: The public has gotten a look, not one child has been hurt, and awareness is slowly growing. Taking advantage of the order by Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Juvenile Court, I made another trip recently to the Monterey Park courthouse where Dependency Court is housed. Just a few months ago that would have been unthinkable, as dependency hearings - where the fates of children in the foster care system are decided - were closed except in unusual circumstances.

You couldn't listen without feeling creepy. The panic: "She's convulsing…burning up. " The action: "She smoked something". And finally the reveal: "How old is Demi?" That Demi? Moore? Of course it was. Otherwise we wouldn't have been privy to, or cared about, the recording of the lurid 911 call from the actress' home that made the YouTube/Facebook rounds recently. In response to the tape's release, Assemblywoman Norma Torres is preparing a bill to stop 911 calls that disclose a medical condition from reaching the public.

They're among the most elite and mystery-shrouded members of the U.S. military, part of a traditionally anonymous group of alpha males known as the "quiet professionals" for their daring, clandestine missions like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But the secret world of the U.S. Navy SEALs is about to open up in dramatic fashion — in an unusual, independently financed action movie called "Act of Valor. " In a moment of unprecedented public exposure, several active-duty SEALs play the lead parts in the film, which opens Feb. 24. Though their names don't appear in the credits — listed instead are the names of Naval Special Warfare forces killed since Sept.

Just days into an unprecedented effort to open Los Angeles County children's courts to the press, Judge D. Zeke Zeidler weighed the case of a young boy whose abuse injuries raised concerns that he might never be able to run again and have confined him to a medical facility for many months. In a hearing Tuesday at Edelman Children's Court in Monterey Park — the sort of proceeding almost never viewed by the media or outsiders prior to an order handed down last week — the boy's lawyer reported that since being taken from his parents, the youngster has made remarkable progress.

Los Angeles County Juvenile Court will be opened to press coverage regularly, with certain exceptions intended to protect the interests of children, under an order issued Tuesday by the court's presiding judge. FOR THE RECORD: Juvenile Court: In the LATExtra sections of Feb. 1 and Feb. 8, articles about a decision to open Los Angeles County children's courts to reporters erred in some instances in headlines and in text by referring to access by media. The order by Judge Michael Nash specified that those courtrooms be open to the press.

The ruling African National Congress pushed a secrecy law through Parliament on Tuesday over the objections of Nobel laureates, opposition politicians and editors who complained that it will have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and investigative journalism in a country rife with corruption. Critics said the law, which makes it illegal to reveal state secrets, lacks a provision allowing a legal defense for acting in the public interest by exposing criminality, corruption or incompetence.

Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Los Angeles Juvenile Court, has long lobbied for legislation that would allow the public greater access to the work of California's dependency courts, where the fates of children in foster care are decided. Twice, bills have been introduced in Sacramento to achieve that important objective, only to be stymied by well-meaning but misguided objections from child welfare advocates and self-interested protests from public employee groups whose members would face greater scrutiny.

Britain's top spy came in from the cold of a crisp autumn morning Thursday to condemn torture, warn of nuclear proliferation and defend the shadowy world of covert intelligence-gathering as crucial to keeping the country "safe and secure. " John Sawers, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, made the comments in an unprecedented public speech in which he addressed allegations of British complicity in the abuse of terrorism suspects and pleaded with his compatriots to understand that, despite an ever-increasing trend toward official transparency, "secrecy is not a dirty word.

The new 'Doctor Who': If you've noticed a spike in bowtie sales recently, it could be due to this lively and unmistakably British sci-fi classic, which launched another of its patented reboots on BBC America this spring. Think it's strictly for Anglophiles, comic nerds and striped scarf enthusiasts? Last month's premiere starring Matt Smith as the series' 11th Doctor was the network's most-watched telecast ever.

The question has lingered in the air for years: What happens to the Raiders when Al Davis dies? Because the organization is so shrouded in secrecy, we can only piece together a partial picture, though Davis has said for years that his succession plan will keep the team in his family — with his wife, Carol, and son, Mark. In 2006, when asked who might run the team when he was gone, Davis said Amy Trask, Raiders chief executive, would certainly have a role and that Hall of Fame coach John Madden might be involved too. "That's if I don't outlive them…," Davis said, changing the subject.

Every 6-year-old knows what a secret is. But apparently our nation's national security establishment does not. Consider this strange case from earlier this year. On June 8, the National Security Agency, a top-secret government spy agency, heralded the "declassification" of a 200-year-old publication, translated from the original German, on cryptography. It turns out, however, as reported by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists on his blog Secrecy News, that the 1809 study had long been publicly available and had even been digitized and published online through Google Books several years earlier.