In 1975 the Church Committee launched the first ever independent review of the CIA. The committee dramatically exposed that the intelligence community had secretly conducted a host of illegal and outrageous activities. Among other startling revelations, the Church Committee found that the CIA had secretly administered LSD to unwitting human subjects, conducted extensive surveillance of American antiwar protesters, and engaged in numerous assassination and coup attempts of foreign leaders. In essence, the CIA -- funded by taxpayers -- operated as a separate, lawless, unaccountable government.

Committee chairman Frank Church, following the completion of his work, remarked: "The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened."

These comments are especially relevant in our current struggle with terrorism. We must be victorious. But we can only be truly victorious if we tackle the problem in a way that is consistent with our values.

The lesson of the Clinton years
While conventional wisdom holds that there is very little difference between administrations on the question of secrecy, the Clinton/Gore administration did take the problem of over-classification seriously and took a number of significant steps to make more information available to the public.

Those actions included the declassification in bulk of approximately 45 million pages of World War II and Vietnam War era documents -- nearly 15 percent of the National Archives' holdings of classified materials; the overhead imageries from the Corona, Argon and Lanyard intelligence satellite missions were declassified -- historic documents of great value to scholars, as well as to the natural resource and environmental communities; and most significantly, Executive Order 12958, which set tough standards for classifying documents and led to the unprecedented effort to declassify millions of pages from our nation's diplomatic and national security history.

Since the executive order was signed, more than 930 million pages of historically valuable records have been declassified, with the prospect of many hundreds of millions more pages in the next few years. In contrast, only 188 million pages were declassified in the previous 15 years.

The lesson of the George W. Bush administration
Today, the Bush administration has used the very real threat of al-Qaida to justify the sort of excessive government secrecy that has served the country so poorly in the past. And they have achieved the same unfortunate results -- disastrous policy choices, cronyism and a further decline in public trust.

In a struggle that predates 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney has spent three years blocking the efforts of Congress, the Government Accounting Office and public interest groups to acquire information about his energy task force, including the names of energy company lobbyists who attended task force meetings and how much those sessions cost the government. One of those cases will shortly be heard before the Supreme Court.

It is a telling sign that the use of government secrecy, which originated on the battlefield as a way to secure a tactical advantage over an opponent, has now degenerated into a method for Dick Cheney to secretly negotiate tax giveaways to energy corporations like Enron and its CEO Ken Lay.

But, without a doubt, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 exponentially expanded the administration's commitment to government secrecy.

In October 2001, Ashcroft radically altered the Justice Department's interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act, urging all government agencies to withhold any document if there was any possible legal rationale to keep it secret. In so doing, the attorney general reversed former Attorney General Janet Reno's guidance and the fundamental principle behind FOIA -- open government and the presumption of disclosure.

On March 20, 2002, Andrew Card, my successor as chief of staff to the president, issued a memo that encouraged agencies to consider removing "sensitive but unclassified information" from the public domain. In the wake of this decision more than 6,000 public documents were removed from government Web sites.

Among the information no longer available: EPA risk management plans, which provide important information about the dangers of chemical accidents -- including emergency response plans. These documents were removed even after the FBI admitted there was no unique terrorist threat from their release.

But has more secrecy made us safer? In fact, just as it has done in the past, the excessive secrecy of the last three years has in many ways made us more vulnerable.

Are we more secure trying to conceal the fact that any one of the 123 chemical plants around the country could endanger a million or more people if attacked?

Or are we better off informing the public so that they can demand that the risk of terrorist incidents or catastrophic accidents be reduced at those plants?

Are we more secure trying to conceal that U.S. customs inspectors are only able to examine 1 to 2 percent of the shipping containers entering the United States?

Or are we better off informing the public so that they can demand that the inspection process be improved by identifying vulnerable loading docks and tracking the movement and condition of each container from the point of origin to its destination?

We should think about these questions in an historical context. Over the last century our nation has become a superpower. We have achieved our success by creating a system of government premised not on secrecy but on accountability, openness, ingenuity and debate.

In the face of these changes, we can choose to turn inward -- but we do so at our own peril. There are solutions to the complex problems of the new century, solutions that will make all of us safer and more secure. But they won't be solved by a small closed group of insiders. The problems of democracy can only be solved by all of us, working together, challenging each other and holding each other accountable.

That way, when we win the fight, we will still have an America that is worth fighting for.

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