An undated photo of National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: Reuters

An odd thing is happening in the world’s self-declared pinnacle of democracy. No one — except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors — is allowed to know how America’s surveillance leviathan works.

For the last two years, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have tried to describe to the American public the sweeping surveillance the National Security Agency conducts inside and outside the United States. But secrecy rules block them from airing the simplest details.

Over the last few days, President Barack Obama and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have both said they welcome a national debate about the surveillance programs. But the president and senator have not used their power to declassify information that would make that debate possible.

“I flew over the World Trade Center going to Senator Lautenberg’s funeral,” Feinstein said this Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” referring to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. “And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building hitting the canopy. Part of our obligation is keeping America safe.”

Feinstein is right, but our obsession with preventing terrorist attacks is warping our political debate and threatening basic rights. Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents has exposed two destructive post-2001 dynamics: the rise of secrecy and contractors.

First, secrecy. In the initial years after September 11, the focus on thwarting another major domestic terrorist attack was understandable.  Twelve years later, there have been only two major al Qaeda-inspired terrorist attacks inside the United States: the 2009 killing of 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, and the April Boston marathon bombing that killed three. No evidence has emerged of terrorist groups infiltrating American executive, intelligence or defense agencies.

Yet documents released by Snowden show that the amount of surveillance information that the government collects is ballooning. The American public has no clear sense of how the metadata is used by the government, how long it is held and which agencies have access to it.

Photo: Reuters

The culture of secrecy that pervades Washington borders on the absurd. American officials say they cannot discuss “classified” U.S. counter-terrorism tactics that are well-known worldwide – from water-boarding to drone strikes to data mining.

The White House refuses to release the legal memo it used to justify the killing of an American citizen in a drone strike in Yemen. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court will not publish summaries of the rulings that made data mining legal. And Feinstein will not declassify a redacted version of her committee’s 6,000 page report on the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

From drone strikes to eavesdropping to torture, the American public is not allowed to know the rules and results of U.S. counterterrorism policies.

At the same time, a sprawling secrecy industrial complex does. More than 4.9 million Americans now have government security clearances. Another 1.4 million have “top secret” clearance.

As always, politics lies beneath the surface. For a Democratic or Republican president, another major terrorist attack in the United States would be politically devastating. Erring on the side of overzealous counterterrorism and under-zealous disclosure is smart politics.

But as Obama himself argued in a speech two weeks ago, the time has come for the United States to move forward. A “perpetual war,” he said, “will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.” So will perpetual fear and perpetual secrecy.

The post-2001 rise of private contractors like Snowden must end as well.  Major U.S. civilian government agencies — from the CIA to State Department — have become dependent on contractors to operate.

Instead of increasing the size of government, the Bush administration made contractors a cornerstone of the American counterterrorism effort.

Today, the federal government pays contractors $300 billion a year, according to the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. Many are believed to operate in intelligence agencies.

“The government workforce has pretty much stayed the same over the last 30 to 40 years,” Scott Amey, the group’s general counsel, told Reuters on Monday. “But we’ve supplemented that with a contractor workforce that has grown dramatically.”

Contracting has become a huge profit center for defense contractors and Wall Street alike. Snowden’s firm, Booz Allen, was purchased by the Carlyle Group in 2008. Last year, 99 percent of the Booz’s $3.8 billion in revenue came from government contracts.

The rise of Booz and Carlyle is part of a broad, long-term shift of money, talent and authority from the public sector to the private sector. The National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, all rely heavily on contractors to operate. Roughly 480,000 — one-third of the 1.4 million people with security clearances — are contractors.

Neither government nor the private sector is perfect, but they function differently. Government is inherently cautious and bureaucratic. The private sector focuses on efficiency and speed. Wherever possible, secrets and core government functions should remain in the hands of government agencies, not for-profit companies.

Yes, certain details of our counterterrorism operations must remain secret. And our elected leaders may be telling the truth when they say the NSA’s surveillance procedures are strictly limited. But our September 11-inspired culture of secrecy — where terrorists lurk in every corner — is overblown.

Redacted versions of FISA rulings, the Senate report on torture and descriptions of American drone strikes can be released without endangering our security.

Government’s most feared powers — from execution to imprisonment to spying on its citizens — must be transparent and tightly controlled. Washington must answer to the public, not tell Americans it knows best.

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David Rohde is a Reuters columnist.

Photo: Reuters

American households will be blanketed this week by a torrent of coverage, commentary and regret about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. Liberals claim that Twitter – if it had existed – could have stopped the invasion. Conservatives argue that the links between Saddam Hussein and terrorism have, in fact, been underplayed.

The glaring lesson of the war is that American ground invasions destabilize the Middle East, instead of stabilizing it. The 100,000 Iraqis who perished, the 4,500 American soldiers killed and the $1 trillion spent should have halted what Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner has called the “creeping militarization of American foreign policy.” Instead, the civilian American institutions that failed us before Iraq have grown even weaker.

The State Department is the first example. Drezner correctly argues that as the Pentagon’s budget has ballooned in the post-9/11 decade, so has its influence over American foreign policy. Too many former generals, he contends, have occupied foreign policy important positions.

That trend has slowed in the second Obama administration, but the budget, planning capabilities and training programs of the State Department are still laughably small compared with those of the U.S. military. Money equals power, influence and a seat at the table in Washington. As one former national security reporter put it to me, weak civilian institutions leads to fewer potential civilian responses to crises.

In his first major speech as secretary of state, John Kerry tried to put the size of the American civilian effort in perspective. He cited a recent poll that found most Americans believe the State Department and U.S. foreign aid programs consume 25 percent of federal spending. In fact, they receive 1 percent. (The military gets roughly 20 percent.)

Kerry’s speech got virtually no press coverage. Just as it did a decade ago, the news media – a second vital American civilian institution – is failing us. This week the media is being correctly excoriated for its failure to be more skeptical of the Bush administration’s central justification for the Iraq war: weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.

In the months before the invasion, the New York Times published a series of exaggerated WMD stories by reporter Judith Miller on its front page. At the same time, editors at the Times and other mainstream outlets largely ignored intrepid reports by Knight-Ridder newspapers that questioned the administration’s WMD claims.

Ten years later, Miller is a Fox News contributor, and the Knight-Ridder chain no longer exists. A harrowing report released by the Pew Research Center on Monday found that the full-time professional editorial staff at newspapers has declined by 24 percent since 1989. A separate analysis found that the ratio of public-relations workers to reporters grew from 1.2 to 1 in 1980 to 3.6 to 1 in 2008.

The rise of social media and citizen journalism arguably fill the void created by dwindling newspaper resources. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters argued this week that Twitter could have forced mainstream reporters to do a better job before the Iraq invasion. He cited recent cases of mainstream newspapers columnists being forced to respond to a torrent of criticism on Twitter about pieces they wrote.

Jonathan Landay, one of the Knight-Ridder reporters whose pre-invasion work questioning the WMD evidence received little attention, said social media might have made a difference. But he hesitated to say Twitter would have silenced the White House.

“Had the New York Times, Washington Post and the networks done the kind of reporting that we had, could the administration have been able to take the country to war? I don’t know,” Landay said in an email message. “But social media would have brought far more attention to our work, and perhaps more journalists would have followed our lead.”

Looking back, Landay, a former colleague and longtime friend who now reports for McClatchy, blamed the news media and American intelligence agencies. “The mainstream news media was as egregious in its failure to do its job,” he said, “as the U.S. intelligence community was in its failure to produce accurate intelligence on Iraq’s non-existent WMD.”

Today, fears of “another Iraq” dominate America’s foreign policy debate. The choice is binary. The United States can respond to a foreign policy threat by carrying out a risky ground invasion. Or it can do nothing at all. Diplomatic, economic and other non-military attempts to influence events overseas are given short shrift. Any American involvement will make the situation worse, the argument goes, and create another quagmire.

The United States, of course, should not launch another ground invasion in the Middle East. But that does not mean it should not interact in the region at all. The Arab Spring showed that people in the Middle East, in fact, desire democracy. Young Arabs, in particular, want self-determination, jobs and modernity. Washington has an interest in helping them but no inclination – and few non-military tools — to do so.

A decade after Iraq, the State Department remains the Pentagon’s Mini Me. The news media is one-third the size of the public-relations industry. And we continue to view military force as our principal means of addressing foreign policy challenges. In post-Iraq America, our foreign policy debate has devolved into an “invade or not invade” dichotomy. Far more options are available. Every country is not Iraq.

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David Rohde is a Reuters columnist.