Without a way to verify the truth of the administration's claims about its effectiveness in keeping us safe, we are merely taking things on faith. This is a major problem. To the degree that scarce resources are being wasted putting illusory notches on law enforcement belts and real terrorism is neglected, our security suffers.

Secrecy also covers up other illegal activities and abuses, such as those relating to the corrupt practices of the vice president's "former" employer Halliburton (from which he continues to receive over $160,000 a year). The Pentagon's notorious stonewalling of Congress, hiding our own government's audits revealing hundreds of millions in fraud and overbilling, arose from deferring to Halliburton's expansive view of what constitutes proprietary information.

The war in Iraq was in part justified to our allies by manipulated intelligence from secret deliberations that have been revealed through leaked documents like the Downing Street memo. In 2002, President Bush secretly diverted $700 million from Afghanistan to Iraq invasion planning without congressional approval. It is not legal for our government to subject the American public to domestic propaganda. Yet the government secretly produced hundreds of videos on behalf of different federal agencies purporting to be from news outlets but actually advancing the administration's positions on welfare reform, Social Security, and the like.

Secrecy has enabled the systematic approval, contrary to official condemnations, of illegal torture and ill treatment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, and also in secret facilities operated by the CIA in such places as Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Diego Garcia and on U.S. ships. Leaked classified memos show that the White House contemplated a secret global detention and interrogation network practically from the time of 9/11.

TORTURED LOGIC—At the time that Alberto Gonzales was the White House Counsel, he asked for, and received, Justice Department memos confirming that Guantánamo was a realm beyond the law, that torture could be narrowly defined as physical pressure equal to that causing death or serious organ failure, and that the president as commander-in-chief could override both the Constitution and international law. The administration lawyers readily complied, and the torture predictably commenced.

Secrecy is almost always a precondition for torture, for what self-respecting official would publicly admit to resorting to such means, so clearly prohibited by the absolute ban in the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture? The ban on torture is so clear that no exceptions are allowed even in times of war or serious national emergency.

As Winston Churchill said, secrecy is always the handmaiden to deception. The U.N. Committee Against Torture, the official body charged with monitoring and interpreting the torture treaty, has held that extended isolation in solitary confinement itself can be torture, and such isolation is also illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Yet in recent hearings before Congress, General Thomas Hemingway testified that he wouldn't call the practice "solitary confinement"—though he "might call it segregation." A New Yorker reporter visiting Guantánamo was similarly told that they don't hold people in isolation, just "segregation." This is akin to the legalistic wordplay that leads to the ludicrous statements from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Pentagon that things like chaining a detainee in stress positions, "hooding," sleep deprivation, and injecting IV fluids until the detainee urinates on himself do not amount to "torture."

Questions about numbers, names and nationalities of detainees went unanswered at a recent Senate Judiciary Hearing. Without more information, and free and independ-ent public inspections, we cannot know for sure what is being done in our name.

WE MUST RESIST—If I am correct that this unprecedented secrecy is qualitatively new in U.S. history, supporting a correspondingly new consolidation of executive power, we must do two things.

First of all, we must shine the light of public scrutiny on this hidden realm by demanding greater transparency and accountability. Congress should defend its laws from being unilaterally amended by executive order and should reassert control, for example, over the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

The second priority, related but conceptually distinct, is for the press, Congress, the judiciary, and the public to reassert their responsibility for oversight and re-create the constitutional scheme of checks and balances. Each of these bodies must be more aggressive in lifting the veils of secrecy and spin cloaking government violations. The people and the press have a special burden to hold the government accountable, as currently all three branches of our federal government are controlled by one party.

A good start would be further demands for an independ-ent commission and special counsel to investigate impartially, and for the first time, those high up in the chain of command who secretly approved the torture policies.