Lonewolf,
It has to do with french accident reports - if the military are involved the reports will be trash - but that appears to be the case in every country on the earth.
I live in France, and I think the the AF 447 report will be clean, since it is locally visible that extraordinary measures are being taken in order to get hold of some facts. At the very least, the facts will be used to make future flights safer.
I do remember that in the past even the FAA has occasionnally been overly cooperative with the aircraft industry, to the extent sometimes of not explicitly enforcing safety-related design changes. The unsavory story of the well-understood, recurring, and ultimately deadly DC10 cargo door issues is
related on Wikipedia.
The French are not known for understatement, which is why one of the final paragraphs of the
Ermenonville report (p50) is a striking indictment:
The commission recommends that the mandatory procedure of airworthiness directives, whatever the financial repercussions, should be selected whenever safety could be at serious risk.
Of course it is quite possible that in the case of the Pitot probes they should have remembered this sentence themselves
Edmund