New Delhi, July 17 -- WASHINGTON - For more than two decades, the Government Accountability Office published its annual review of the F-35 fighter jet program for anyone to read. This year, for the first time since those reviews began in 2005, the public version never appeared.

Update on Production and Modernisation Efforts" - and it landed in the offices of four congressional defense committees as scheduled. But the version that would ordinarily have appeared on the GAO's website, available to researchers, journalists, and the public, was withheld. The Pentagon applied a "Controlled Unclassified Information" designation to the document, a federal classification category that allows agencies to restrict distribution without formally invo...