EXECUTIVE DECISIONS about war and peace are increasingly made by autonomous, self-directing, and unaccountable national security elites. Lords of Secrecy sheds much-needed light on the most important national security debates of our time and offers a stark reminder of what can go wrong when government secrecy undermines citizens' rights and responsibilities. In the last decade, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has pursued new kinds of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan-yet, as Scott Horton recounts in lucid and chilling detail, the rationale for these conflicts and the way they are conducted are deliberately hidden from the American public-with devastating consequences for our democracy.