It is said that Common Sense has no place in the Bush administration. But that is only because our imperious leaders do not care for Thomas Paine, who in 1776 asserted that, “in America, the law is King.� Someone should point that fact out (and carefully explain it) to the President, who seems to have designs on monarchy and to imagine that the government is his own personal secret society, the Washington, D.C. chapter of Skull and Bones. How secretive is this administration? Consider what John Dean, former White House counsel to President Nixon, had to say about it in the preface to his 2004 book, Worse Than Watergate:

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime. Their secrecy is far worse than during Watergate, and it bodes even more serious consequences. Their secrecy is extreme—not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive. [full text]

How obsessive? Consider the frequency with which the Bush administration asserts the state secrets privilege and how such is used principally to avoid accountability or criticism. Consider the program—exposed earlier this year—that “secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration.� (These were documents, most decades old, that had previously been declassified and made available to the public.) Consider other recent efforts—ostensibly in the name of national security—to redact information from formerly public documents, as reported in today’s Washington Post:

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

“It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons,� wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. “ . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before.�

The report comes at a time when the Bush administration’s penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information. The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency had for years kept secret a reclassification program under which the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies removed thousands of records from public shelves.

One month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft instructed federal agencies to be more mindful of national security when deciding whether to publicly release documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, in a study of FOIA requests at 22 agencies from 2000 to 2004, the nonpartisan Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that agencies cited reasons to withhold unclassified information 22 percent more often than before Ashcroft’s directive. [full text]

No good can come of such extreme secrecy, which breeds suspicion and mistrust and invites corruption and abuse of power. The flower of democracy can only wilt in the shadows. And we, who sip its nectar, must pay heed, lest we grow so accustomed to the gloom that we shut our eyes to the light.