>From Joe Pannon:
>If I recall correctly, there used to be a regular contributor to this
>list who worked for the Library of Congress.  His name may have been
>Nyiradi.  Could either he, or anybody familiar with the process,
>describe just how those "country studies" are made for the Federal
>Government?  How serious a research goes into that?  My hunch is that
>those making such studies review books published on the subject and give
>a synopsys of what they found.  This also means that a study about
>Hungary would probably be mostly of a rehash of Hungarian authors, about
>Romania from Romanian authors, because they are the most likely ones
>having published on the subject.  So how objective such country studies
>could be?

I wrote the first US AID (Agency for International Development)  report on
local government in Hungary in 1990, and I used interviews with scholars,
country reports, Radio Free Europe transcripts (usually the same day that
items are published in Hungary, they are translated and sent to the US from
most foreign countries), and internal contacts within the State Department.
 The personal contacts were usually former Hungarians, or at least people
with dual citizenship, and they were most decidedly completely fluent and
aware of Hungarian culture. As I  understood how information is gathered
while I was gathering my own, most country reports are written by the CIA,
or at least use a lot of information gathered by the CIA and permissable
for public use.  I met one such writer of the Hungarian Country report.  He
later informed me, in so many words, what his job was (his business card
was appropriately strangely blank, and just read his name and "State
Department"). The information in country reports in my opinion is generally
reliable, but it may be structured in such a way as to...um...put a certain
slant on things.  Who's to say...certainly I wasn't able to in 1990.