There's no need, I suppose. But the admins and mods have always had their secret fora.
I'd argue that there's a difference. Forum staff executes (and, less often, forms) the rules of the forum. We're supposed to rely on the rules first, and on personal judgement second. Often, this necessitates communicating with others to figure out whether or not Poster X really deserves a ban. If the forum staff had to discuss other members' behaviours publicly, people would be very quick to take exceptions to it. That's my justification for secrecy there.
Even the editors had a secret board.
Yeah, that was a mistake of mine. It resulted in changes being discussed only within the editor clique and brought forth things that did not meet with popular approval. That's why this forum doesn't have an editor forum, or even an "official" position of an editor - anyone can ask for a wiki account and they'll get one. As long as they edit in good faith, there should be no issue. Parsifal even had an idea of integrating logins between TFES sites so that people's forum logins work for the Wiki etc, but that probably won't happen soon, if at all. But yes, the editors weren't transparent. Mea culpa, this is now fixed.
I assume you have a secret board of your own. There's really no need for that, either. But I do think that things get done more efficiently when nobody is looking over your shoulders.
See above. It's because we deal with people's personal cases that this is actually necessary. Anything that doesn't need to be hidden, we tend to bring up in S&C.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not trying to block the idea of a private Council forum. However, I personally feel like things like this should be justified.