These are far from the only official abuses to occur in the post-9/11 era. Whole books have been written detailing the misleading, negligent behavior of the national-security decision-makers who paved the way for the Iraq invasion, presided over the Abu Ghraib prison, and looked away as private defense contractors stole from American taxpayers and misbehaved abroad. But surely the points above are sufficient reason to harbor a deep, abiding mistrust of the government.



That isn't to say that it can or should be abolished.



America needs a federal government. It needs national-security officials, and even classified programs -- I don't want or need to know the identities of those trying to infiltrate al-Qaeda cells. But the case for being distrustful is air-tight. The case for demanding transparency, and assuming that secret surveillance programs will be abused, is supported by all the relevant history. The case for more robust oversight, by Congress, the press, and the public, is firmly grounded in experience. The notion that American security depends on a pervasive surveillance state maintained in secret -- something we've never had -- is totally without precedent, and the evidence presented for it so far is "trust us." And that we shouldn't trust is obvious.



Let's go back a bit farther, to the 1970s.



"The rampant abuses uncovered by the Church Committee, recall, had in many instances gone undisclosed to the public for decades," indispensable policy expert Julian Sanchez writes at the Cato Institute. "This is for the unsurprising reason that when government officials illegally misuse information obtained in secret surveillance programs, they tend not to send out press releases about it, but rather make covert and indirect use of the information -- as via targeted leaks -- and conceal their actions as far as possible, which the shroud of secrecy facilitates."

Among the abuses uncovered long after the fact:

Secret efforts to undermine Martin Luther King as a result of his activism on behalf of racial equality

An FBI attempt to destroy a dissident political party

Improper surveillance of private citizens by the military

Domestic FBI and CIA mail-opening programs

Again, the abuses uncovered by the Church Committee -- long after most of them took place and went undetected for lack of oversight -- are far more broad than the ones I've summarized and linked.

But they suffice to make the point. There is no reason to think that the Americans who staff the government today, and the politicians who preside over them, are somehow less prone to abusing their authority when afforded the ability to act in secret, nor that they'll remain so for the foreseeable future, through unknown presidents of both parties -- an argument that no one seems willing to make and defend. So it is irrational, even foolhardy, to permit the sort of official secrecy that the Bush and Obama Administrations have shortsightedly and arrogantly championed.