By Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian Weekly, June 8, 2007

8 Jun 2007 // Anyone new to Washington might wonder why there is such a huge security presence outside a wooded area known as the Naval Observatory grounds. While everyone knows that the president lives in the White House, it is less well-known that No 1 Observatory Circle has been the residence of the vice-president since 1974.

The current occupant, Dick Cheney, has played host there to various world leaders, including the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.That these leaders and other VIPS have visited is a matter of public record. Not a matter of public record are the thousands of others who have been coming and going while Cheney has been vice-president.

Cheney has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent such information reaching the public domain. According to government documents the secret service routinely destroys five of eight categories of information relating to visitors to Cheney's residence. In a little-noticed legal action last week the justice department filed documents in court aimed at preventing visitor logs from being made public. The justice department was responding to legal demands by the liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

The clash provides an important insight into the way that both Cheney and George Bush view executive power. This is, according to Washington journalists, the most secretive administration in US history.

In relation to the legal action, Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: "It is important that the president be able to receive candid advice from his staff and other members of the administration. To ensure that he receives candid advice, it is essential as a general matter that the advice remains confidential." That seems reasonable.

But the Bush-Cheney administration goes further than that: it is secretive in an obsessive way that runs counter to the whole spirit of US government, where the presumption is nearly always balanced in favour of disclosure rather than withholding information.

Although Bill Clinton also attempted to block the details of the visitor books during the Lewinsky affair, he failed. Since 2001 government lawyers, acting on behalf of Cheney and Bush, have defined the visitor books as presidential records because the White House, unlike other departments, is not required to respond to Freedom of Information requests.

This matters because the question should be: what is it that Cheney wants to hide?

It may be he does not want the public to know which industry lobbyists or dissident groups have gone through the gates of No 1 Observatory Circle. Having that information in the public domain would show who might have had an influence in the formulation of policy. This matters when trying to understand why the Bush administration decided on an energy policy favourable to the oil industry or embarked on the war in Iraq.

The latest legal moves are part of a consistent pattern of the Bush-Cheney administration. In 2004 the supreme court heard a request to have the names of Cheney's energy task force made public. Soon after taking office Bush had put Cheney, a former energy industry executive, in charge of the task force which, after a series of private meetings in 2001, produced recommendations favourable to the industry, such as expanded oil and gas drilling on public land.

The Sierra Club, one of the main environmental champions in the US, sued for the right to know who was at the meetings. One of the supreme court judges, Justice Antonin Scalia, refused to step down from hearing the case in spite of questions about his impartiality: he had been on a hunting trip with Cheney during the case. Unsurprisingly the supreme court ruled Cheney did not have to disclose the details of those on the task force.

In the latest legal action, the vice-president's office argues that guest lists should remain off-limits because they could reveal "sensitive information regarding the inner workings and deliberations" of his office and provide a "roadmap" to his decision-making. So what? Why should the public not have access to how decisions were made?

There are a host of reasons why Cheney does not want the media to know who he has been seeing. It could be just his general belief in secrecy or it could be something specific. Was the convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff a regular visitor? Or could the log-book provide details relevant to the outing of the CIA agent Valerie Plame?

Christopher Lehane, a former special assistant counsel to Clinton, said: "The question it raises is: 'What are these guys hiding?' They can live with it because they've only got a year or so left, but it doesn't do a lot for public confidence in open government."

Don't expect to be seeing the visitor list for No 1 Observatory Circle any time soon.

Nothing to hide . . . Protesters know where the vice-president lives and can protest outside his official residence, but Dick Cheney has been reluctant to release details of who visited him