Soon to retire from PBS, Bill Moyers addressed the Society of Professional Journalists on Sept. 11 2004 in NYC. He called the governmental secrecy “contagious, scandalous and toxic.”

“There have been more than 1,200 presumably terrorist-related arrests,” Moyers said, “and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered.”

Moyers said the zeal for secrecy “adds up to a victory for the terrorists.” Those who planned and carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “aimed their atrocity at possessing our psyche in order to deprive us of the trust and confidence required for democracy to work.

“By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind, they hoped to panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press — that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.”

He gave several examples of journalists who lost their lives because serious careful and honest journalism matters.

The greatest moments in the history of the press, Moyers said, “came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.”

I disliked Moyers for years – felt he had become kind of nambly-pambly and he had very nearly ruined Joseph Campbell for me… but in the last few years, he has really stepped up the plate. "Now with Bill Moyers" and "Frontline" are my two favorite television shows. I’m sorry to see that he is so close to retiring – I hope he has bigger plans!

More examples of secrecy from Moyers posted at Common Dreams:

President Bush’s chief of staff ordered a review that lead to 6,000 documents being pulled from government Web sites.

The Department of Defense banned photos of military caskets being returned to the United States.

Vice President Dick Cheney kept his energy task force records secret “to hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron and other energy moguls.”

The CIA asks a new question during its standard employer polygraph exam: “Do you have friends in the media?”

Secret federal court hearings have been held without any public record of when or where, or who was tried.

When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged provisions of the Patriot Act, it was prohibited from telling anyone about it.

The Washington Post reported that in recent years, judicial committees acting in secret stripped information nearly 600 times from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.