Sibel Edmonds may never get her day in court - or at least the kind she wants.

The former FBI translator has spent seven years trying to get a court to hear her allegations that foreign agents, in particular Turkish intelligence, had penetrated her unit, the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress.

This weekend she's going to try again.

Leon Panetta, the former congressman and White House staffer who runs the CIA, says people should forget about the past and move on.

I totally sympathize with him. The mistakes I've made - man, I'd like people to just forget about them!

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency's congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers.

"They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of  'on the one hand . . .'" said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name "Ishmael Jones."

The political momentum toward détente with Cuba may be moving so fast that the idea of a spy swap as the first step in a thaw may already be passé.

Candidate Obama called for doubling the size of the storied Peace Corps, but President Obama is falling far short of that pledge, with plans to ask Congress for perhaps a 10 percent budget increase in April.

That has a growing chorus of Peace Corps veterans hopping mad.

One hand giveth out, the other keepeth secret. That's the mixed-use practice of Congress when it comes to deciding what's classified.

My colleague Tim Starks uncovers a pile of nuggets about congressional secrecy in his not-to-be-missed CQ Weekly cover story, now available online.

"Naturally, the Intelligence committees and their ilk that handle classified information need an outlet to do so behind closed doors," Starks points out.

But the Senate Armed Services Committee considers the annual Defense authorization bill in private, while the House Armed Services Committee doesn't. So, clearly, the Senate panel could open its markup sessions if it wanted to -- the House panel does, after all.
 
Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee marks up all its legislation in secret, but the House Intelligence Committee does so in a session labeled "open/closed."

Ostensibly, that means the session is open to the public until such point lawmakers need to kick everyone out and discuss classified matters, Starks reports.

But in reality, none of it is done in the open because the bills are taken up in a committee room that the public is not allowed to enter. And committee Democrats, who complained about Republicans marking up bills in secret, haven't followed through on their pledge to make transcripts of the so-called "open" portions of their business meetings available.
 
And the bill that actually funds the Pentagon and most of the intelligence community?

That measure, the annual Defense spending bill, is marked up completely in the open in the Senate. In the House, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense handles it behind closed doors, but when it gets to the full committee, anyone can watch.

 
And that's just a hint of what's going on, Starks writes.
 
"For all its apparent openness, its televised debates and public hearings, Congress is more secretive than its reputation suggests," he says.

Child's file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.