Saudi officials also expressed fears that Iran's nuclear energy program concealed a covert effort to develop nuclear weapons.
Dr. Carroll said that the program concealed unfavorable data and side effects of drugs made by AstraZeneca, which sponsored it, and played down alternatives to those drugs.
Representative Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said Mr. Bush's broader plan for overhauling the Medicare program "conceals a scheme for privatization of Medicare and could have been written by the pharmaceutical industry or the insurance industry".
Programs concealed from the citizenry have been declared unconstitutional by federal courts.
The familiar answer is that in 1965, Lyndon Johnson was protecting his Great Society programs by concealing the scale of the war he was launching.
It takes a village to raise a big-time college football program and conceal its blemishes.
But Saudi Arabia also sees nuclear energy as a way to compete with Iran, which has one reactor in addition to the uranium-enrichment program it concealed for years.
Clark reported on the secret, mass graves of Panamanian civilians, as well as on the U.S. disinformation program to conceal the large number of dead and wounded resulting from the attack.
Faith that such a deal would be honored is not encouraged by North Korea's recent behavior, which includes concealing a program to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs as well as this clumsy missile shipment.
In March 1998, however, a report after one of Mr. Ritter's visits pointed to "indisputable proof" that Iraq was still concealing weapons programs.
