In two posts Josh Marshall touches on one of my favorite hobby horses regarding motivations and behavior – absent a compelling rationale for secrecy, people usually demand it to hide incompetence. Josh points out that Cheney may be a supernaturally gifted bureaucratic infighter, but his office has a real problem keeping actual secrets under wraps.
I don’t think that this point can be emphasized enough. People usually demand secrecy in order to hide their own failures, and when you give it to them their performance only gets worse.