the Bush administration's mania for secrecy is one of it's most disturbing and unhealthy characteristics, imo....
well before 9/11 and all the "national security" cover it provided, the administration took a number of steps to reverse the trend toward governmental transparency that began in the Clinton years including:
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the Ashcroft memorandum
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It expressly encourages agencies to look for reasons to deny access to information, and to rely on FOIA's (Freedom Of Inoformation Act) exemptions from disclosure even when no harm would result from disclosure. And it assures the agencies that if they have even an arguable basis for withholding a document, the Justice Department will back them up in litigation.
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- impeding public access by sealing prior Presidential and Vice-Presidential records, including those of Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan
-the expansion of executive privelege claims to cover not just advice from top aides, but virtually any policy-making meeting as well. the Cheney energy task force meetings are currently the subject of a case before the Supreme Court. this has enourmous impact on policy, since it conceals the fact that industry now frequently writes the rules which govern it.
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One of the biggest obstacles to effective regulation and mitigation of hazards, however, is the White House’s obsession with secrecy. This takes the form of distortion of information needed to effectively deal with threats to health and safety; the outright censorship of scientific data generated by regulatory agencies; and the suppression of facts that don’t fit the administration’s political and ideological agenda.
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the Bushie's policy seems to be that it is not the public's business how laws and policies are drafted and implemented. only when political pressure intensifies (such as that which occurred recently during the 9/11 hearings) does the administration concede the public's right to know.
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"The Bush administration has made secrecy, not sunshine, its default position, whether the issue is industry input to the national energy policy (current report has yet to be issued), the names of those detained after the Sept. 11 attacks, or potential vulnerabilities in the nation's infrastructure. Secrecy has its place, but governments are always tempted to overuse the "secret" stamp. When that happens, it can come at the cost of the public's stake in such other values as safety or clean air and water."
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-Restore America's freedom of information, by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Carl Levin.