The Patriot Act was rushed through Congress without the normal hearings and public deliberation. More recently, the "Real ID" Act was also passed with little public attention, attached to an emergency appropriations bill covering funds for Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for tsunami relief. The act seriously diminishes the nation's founding commitment to offer asylum to victims of persecution abroad and moves us substantially closer to a national I.D. card (by mandating that state driver's licenses conform to new federal standards, including machine-readable personal address and Social Security information accessible to electronic databases).

SOMETHING TO HIDE?—In terms of the sheer number of secret documents (more than 15 million newly classified last year, almost triple the number Moynihan complained about in 1998, with declassification proceeding at less than 25 percent of the rate in the Clinton years), this administration has stepped up the culture of secrecy to levels never before seen in our history, even at the height of the Cold War.

The administration has also used an executive order to vastly expand the scope of executive privilege authorized in the long-standing Presidential Records Act. Now both sitting and past presidents can use the act to block the release of potentially embarrassing historical records without national-security or even public-interest justifications. Not coincidentally, this happened just in time to cover up Reagan administration records pertaining to the role of President Bush's father during the Iran-contra scandal.

Erwin Griswold, solicitor general to the notoriously secretive President Richard Nixon, noted that fear of embarrassment often trumps national security as the true motive for secrecy. Even arch-conservative Phyllis Schlafly wrote not long ago that "when information is kept secret, the natural inference is that there must be something the Administration is very eager to hide."

Senator Moynihan persuasively argued that the prior culture of secrecy had been "for losers" in that it harmed national security by preventing healthy criticism and debate. It had increased the risks of intelligence errors, he said, like the misguided concept of a "missile gap," the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and the erroneous estimates of Soviet strength.

To this litany of intelligence failures and wrong-headedness, we could now add the failure to predict what happened on 9/11, and the mistaken view that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

THE PRICE OF GOVERNMENT SECRETS—While a careful approach to secret intelligence methods is important when fighting a shadowy enemy like Al Qaeda, too much secrecy is costly, and not just figuratively: the cost of making secret the millions more documents classified under Bush was over $6.5 billion in 2003 and over $7.2 billion last year. The toll also extends to legitimate secrecy and security. Excessive secrecy allows mistakes to be covered up, eliminates the critical analysis needed to make improvements, and jeopardizes confidentiality where it is really needed.

The unprecedented surge in secrecy under President Bush also poses a great threat to U.S. constitutional values. A policy of secrecy denies citizens, Congress and the press the information they need to exercise their "checking" roles in our democratic republic. Stigmatized both as ignorant and as unpatriotic, those on the other side of the soaring wall of secrecy are counterproductively silenced. Secrecy's history is a history of stifled dissent.

This administration goes well beyond these risks, however, by taking the old adage "knowledge is power" to a new extreme. Secrecy is used not just as a shield to protect us against our external enemies, but a blindfold to keep the American public in the dark and to rend our Constitution. The Sixth Circuit court wrote, in holding that the administration's secret immigration hearings violate the First Amendment, that "when government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."

Moynihan called the culture of secrecy "a belief system . . . a way of life" that blurs judgment. By increasing the scope for discretionary judgment, secrecy enhances the rule of man and subverts the rule of law. With the facts hidden, the administration can and does define reality as it sees fit. The White House believes that the president has a "blank check" in the war on terror and is effectively above the law.

DEBATING WITH THE GOVERNMENT—In debates I've had with FBI and Department of Justice officials on the USA Patriot Act, I was told that the law has resulted in hundreds of terrorist convictions. A look at the figures proves that the real number (as the Washington Post recently demonstrated) is more like 39. And even those 39 are hardly Al Qaeda terrorists, but include people who entered guilty pleas and received short sentences in large part to avoid lifetime solitary confinement as "enemy combatants."

Similarly, the administration has persistently fallen short on the reports required to be provided to our legislature under the terms of the Patriot Act. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) even threatened to subpoena former Attorney General John Ashcroft to provide required information. Although the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, offers more cooperative rhetoric, his Justice Department repeats the same misleading arguments that the Patriot Act has prevented another 9/11, no civil liberties issues arise, and no abuses have occurred.