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Oh Poppycock!
At an April 30 briefing regarding press reports that the State Department is seeking to intimidate or punish employees planning on blowing the whistle on Department incompetence surrounding the deaths at the Benghazi Consulate, deputy spokesman Patrick Ventrell said:
The State Department would never tolerate or sanction retaliation against whistleblowers on any issue, including this one. That’s an obligation we take very seriously.
To which I reply: Poppycock.
State retaliated against my whistleblowing with all the joy and energy of a dog rolling in its own poop. Have a look here, or here to start.
And by the way, any of you potential State Department whistleblowers need some advice, it is info(at)wemeantwell.com
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Bradley Manning Speaks
The Freedom of the Press Foundation released an audio recording of Bradley Manning’s statement to the military court.
By releasing this audio recording, we wish to make sure that the voice of this generation’s most prolific whistleblower can be heard—literally—by the world. Please spread his words as far as you can: on your blog, in your videos, on Twitter and on Facebook.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Why Is Obama Bashing a Whistleblower Law He Signed?
Why is Obama bashing a Whistleblower Law he signed? Because he isn’t going to actually follow the law, which tries to grant whistleblower protections to government contractors.
Mother Jones weighs in with an excellent analysis of the a new law supposedly expanding whistleblower protections for some government employees. Obama also signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which extends similar protections to defense contractors who expose waste and corruption. But the NDAA signing came with a caveat that blindsided the bill’s backers and has some in the whistleblower community up in arms: In a “signing statement,” (remember how George W. used those to circumvent the law?) Obama wrote that the bill’s whistleblowing protections “could be interpreted in a manner that would interfere with my authority to manage and direct executive branch officials,” and he promised to ignore them if they conflicted with his power to “supervise, control, and correct employees’ communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential.”
Mother Jones was also kind enough to quote me in the article as saying the signing statement “is merely another expression of [the Obama] administration’s hostile policy toward all whistleblowers…It disappoints me, and devalues my own efforts to bring transparency to the government.”
Read the full article on Mother Jones.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Jesse Ventura (Hearts) We Meant Well
Testing the old saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” former pro-wrestler former Minnesota governor and possible crazy person Jesse “The Body” Ventura has written a new book in which he reports favorably about We Meant Well and my own year-long battle with the State Department for my First Amendment rights.
For those readers unfamiliar with the Ventura oeuvre, he is the former governor of Minnesota and author of four national bestsellers, including 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read and American Conspiracies. Ventura is the host of the television show Conspiracy Theory on truTV. He says things like people shouldn’t drink fluoridated tap water, because fluoride was first added to water by the Nazis, and is added to the water because it is a chemical precursor to Prozac and designed to make us sheep in the government’s hands.
In his latest book, DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans: No More Gangs in Government
Ventura kindly mentions my story on page 120 as part of a longer rant against government crackdown on dissent. I’m not sure about the fluoride, but I kinda agree with him about the crackdown on dissent. Ventura quotes from a piece I wrote for TomDispatch.com and others about Joining the Whistleblowers’ Club.
Politics, they say, does make for strange bedfellows.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Creating Chaos: We Meant Well in Washington Diplomat Magazine
The nice people at Washington Diplomat magazine are running a nice piece on We Meant Well.
The article is mostly in Q&A format and the author, himself a former Foreign Service Officer, asked some good questions:
Q: But surely you can understand that if lots of FSOs decided to write critical books like yours while still on active duty it would create chaos?
A: I can understand that argument. But this is part of living in a free society. As Donald Rumsfeld said, “Democracy is messy.” The State Department promotes the rights of people to speak back to their governments. The Arab Spring — we want people in Syria to shout back at their government, but we won’t let our own employees do that.
Q: Did you consider resigning after or during your experience in Iraq?
A: People ask me why haven’t you resigned or if I’m a whistleblower — a Bradley Manning with a better haircut — and I don’t buy any of that stuff. I have no interest in resigning. What I did was write down what happened to me. If you came to Iraq with me, that’s what you would have seen.
You don’t have to be Bradley Manning. I think it’s reasonable for people to believe that they can write about and talk about what goes on in government. The vast majority of people in government who make the vast majority of decisions which impact us aren’t elected. They’re just people like me, and so there is an obligation for people inside the government to tell people outside the government what goes on in there.Q: Do you have regrets?
A: Not really, my career was essentially over. I’m leaving something else behind and I’m not done yet. I told the PRT story to the world. I left something so my family knows what I did in Iraq and I sent a message for my kids that some things in life are worth standing up and getting kicked in the ass for, and the State Department may yet have to change the way it looks at the writing of its employees — that part is still yet to be written.
One of the problems with the Foreign Service is we’ve never recovered from the McCarthy era. We gave up being an aggressive advocate in the foreign affairs arena during those years and we’ve never come back. It’s all about going along and play along and it rewards people who do.
A lot of things the military does have finite, measurable results. With State, the goals are amorphous — to secure friendly relations, to empower women, etc. — it’s stuff that isn’t measurable, and so it’s easy to just kind of float around.
The people who get promoted don’t have opinions; they’re the people who just do whatever they’re told. I don’t think that’s good for America.
Read the whole article online now at Washington Diplomat Magazine!
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Open Letter to Congress from Federal Whistleblowers: Strengthen Protections
Over the course of the last year or so I have met many men and women who risked their freedom, their careers and their livelihoods to expose government waste, fraud, unconstitutional domestic spying, torture and more– “blowing the whistle” as it has come to be known.Instead of talking about what is a whistleblower, maybe it is better to say why is a whistleblower. Some easy points: No one intends to do this, starts out with a plan, hides among unsuspecting bureaucrats for say 15-20 years waiting for the right moment to tear down the wall. No gray ponytails, no earrings or Grateful Dead tattoos among us. We’ve heard of Anonymous in the same way we’ve heard of Lady Gaga but don’t know either well.
We’re made. We’re made by what the government does, and what we witness. If government did what the founders expected it to do– public service– we would not be here, like the mushrooms that don’t pop up on the lawn. Unfortunately, it’ll be awhile before that happens.
The thing is, there should be more of us and not simply for the cheap reveal that the government does lots of naughty things. It probably does, but the reasons why there should be more whistleblowers is because so much of what we see is seen by so many. You have a right to know how your tax money is being spent. To allow more people to stand up and tell the public what is really going on inside government, whistleblowers need to be protected. There need to be meaningful protections for conscientious truth tellers in government. Otherwise you– the people– will know less and less about what your government really does behind closed doors, just the way the government would like things to be. Nice and quiet, nothing to see here, move along and enjoy your Hulu.
That is where this Open Letter from whistleblowers on the WPEA comes in. While Congress has provided credible rights for private sector whistleblowers, rights for government workers are weak.
Take a moment to read through the Letter, and then forward it to your Congressperson.
If you’d like to learn more about or donate to organizations that work to protect whistleblowers, both the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) are excellent places. I personally owe much to both groups for protecting me. While GAP and POGO support this letter, it is organized by whistleblowers Evy Brown and David Pardo.
Bonus: Since I published the letter above, US Marine Corps whistleblower Franz Gayl has also signed.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Senate Passes Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act
The Project for Government Oversight (POGO) details the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act that the Senate passed for the fourth time. It is now up to the House to take a break from worrying about dudes getting married and renaming Post Offices and step up.The bill (S. 743) grants federal workers the protections they need to safely report waste, fraud and abuse. Which is good news because taxpayers, who rely on whistleblowers to disclose corruption within the government, are now one step closer towards saving billions of dollars. If people inside the government don’t tell you the taxpayers what is going on, how will you know? Always important to a democracy that depends on an informed citizenry, in the current age of over-classification, whistleblowers are even more important.
POGO tells us:
To put the bill in real-world terms: it could help prevent scandals like the General Services Administration (GSA) lavish spending binge, help protect important national whistleblowers—like Peter Van Buren and Mike Helms—and encourage would-be whistleblowers to step forward in the public interest.
The bill’s significance is clear. It modernizes the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 by expanding “free speech rights, specifically covering national security and intelligence community workers, federal scientists, and Transportation Security Administration officers. The bill also will strengthen failed procedures, close loopholes, create efficiencies, and affirm lawful disclosures. For the first time, some federal whistleblowers would have a real ‘day in court,’ since the bill provides access to a jury trial in federal district court,” according to a press release by POGO and allies.
Read more on the POGO website.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
My Oath is to the Constitution, Not Hillary
My thanks to Ryan, who I don’t know and have never met, for putting together this inspiring video making clear the difference between being a government drone and pretending your oath of allegiance is to some political boss, and standing up for the fact that the oath is to the Constitution.
There is a difference between obedience to authority, which is required in an autocracy above all else, and loyalty to one’s Oath, which is required of patriots.
Watch it now:
(If the video is not embedded above, see it on YouTube)
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
April 1: Reflecting on My Image
Diplomatic Security electronic monitoring foolishly recorded the following subject interaction April 1.
Thank you for coming in Mr. Van Buren. Image Consultants, Inc. was founded to assist people in your situation, so you’ve come to the right place.
To begin, we think that you’ve lost touch with your true narrative. You need to get back in touch with what your core story is all about. We understand the temptations—the Playgirl photo shoot was probably a fun tie-in to your blog pieces, but in the end things like that just hurt you. You can’t turn against the very people who read your blog. Yes, yes, I know God made you that way, but hanging it out in public isn’t where you want to be right now. Sometimes it is OK to not say everything that is in your head. Maybe, quite often it is OK. Try an avoid the obvious train wrecks, yes?
I think however you do need to reconsider the State Department’s offer. After all, you’ve spent a good portion of your adult life there, and working for Alec Ross is not a bad career move at this stage. Yes, we know it would be as his “Special Assistant Valet” responsible primarily for dispensing hair gel, but a year or two isn’t that long in a hardship assignment like that, and look how well your last hardship tour turned out for you! We’ve heard he usually lets his assistants watch him review the Tweet drafts sent up to him by his writing staff, so that is a bonus.
Now, looking ahead, we’ve run some numbers. Your book has sold well among your extended family, with some decent sales in the Ikea niche market. Apparently the cover art colors pairs well with their Speigleflugfluf collection and people have been buying multiple copies to decoratively fill up their shelves. Our research suggests if you can cut about 40 pages from the next edition you’ll increase sales to Ikea by 10-15%, assuming no color changes to the cover of course. Turns out it won’t matter which 40 pages you cut, so we’ll recommend taking out the parts that aren’t funny. That shouldn’t be too hard, yes?
Looking ahead, let’s sift through some of the offers. I see you’ve taken our advice and stopped returning calls to Lindsey Lohan, good. Assuming you do not go with the Alec Ross gig, we feel the offer from Trader Joe’s is probably your best bet. They are ready to give up on the no blogging rule as long as you avoid talking about competitor’s prices and you do get the free Hawaiian shirt to wear at work plus the employee discount. That other offer—whistleblower at NBA games—seems sexy and cool but our polling says the $8 an hour you’ll make at Trader Joe’s will eclipse your book earnings after only two days. Kind of a sure thing.
Anyway, I know you have to run to put in some telework OT, but think it over and we’ll talk more. We’ve got the Gingrich account coming in for a makeover any minute now…
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Media Respond to State Department Firing Demand
Read more about the State Department seeking to fire me:
WUSA, Channel 9 in Washington DC
If you’d like to help, here are some ways you can help.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Speaking Truth to Power
(This article by William Astore originally appeared on Huffington Post)
When you dare speak truth to power, the reality is that power already knows the truth, doesn’t want you to share it, and will punish you for your trouble.
That’s the clear lesson from the State Department’s persecution of Peter Van Buren, who dared to tell the American people about the failures of Iraq reconstruction in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011). His “crime” was his unflattering portrayal of misguided and mismanaged U.S. projects in Iraq, from American books translated into Arabic that were never read to a high-tech chicken factory that never worked to sewerage systems that grew worse rather than better despite infusions of machinery and countless millions of dollars.
Van Buren deserves a commendation for his honesty. A true servant of the American people, his cautionary (and often wryly amusing) tale should teach us that so-called nation-building efforts are difficult to implement and even more difficult to sustain. Even more: the resource-intensive, high-tech approach of U.S. government officials and private contractors is rarely well-suited for places like Iraq and Afghanistan, whose resource- and knowledge-base is less well developed, at least by American standards. Approaches that work, Van Buren suggests, are those that are better tuned to engaging and empowering the locals within specific cultural settings, an approach rarely followed by American “experts” and corporations, eager as the latter were to make a buck while trying to show quick results.
My own experience with winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis was limited but illustrative of Van Buren’s conclusions. Back in 2004, an American official in Iraq contacted the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where I then worked, for help in translating a Peter, Paul and Mary song about tolerance. The idea was that Iraqi schoolchildren could be inculcated with a love of diversity, or at least a tolerance of the same, if they were taught the lyrics to this song. We engaged our Arabic translators, who quickly advised us that the lyrics to this touchy-feely American song would likely baffle Iraqi schoolchildren even when translated into Arabic. The American official at the other end of our conference call was very disappointed to hear that her bright idea to promote tolerance in Iraqi schools by translating feel-good anthems to diversity was a cultural non-starter.
A great strength of Van Buren’s account is to show how we Americans delude ourselves into believing that our approach and our culture can be grafted successfully onto Iraqi and Afghan situations. Intentions may often be good but results are mixed at best because U.S. providers want to show rapid progress even as they’re encouraged to allocate resources as quickly as possible (often a formidable task, given the bureaucratic red tape involved). Can-do spirit is frustrated by the realities of contractor and indigenous greed, cultural differences, and the short-term mentality of American managers who rarely occupy the same position for more than a few months.
Van Buren explains to us why the dedicated efforts of individuals like himself made so little difference in Iraq. His is a cautionary tale of waste, mismanagement, and hubris, one that should serve to discourage (or at least to inform) current efforts in Afghanistan.
It’s not that our government doesn’t want to hear that message; the powerful already know how much we’ve bungled these “reconstruction” efforts. It’s that they don’t want you the American people to know how much they’ve bungled these efforts.
Van Buren shines a light in places that many would prefer to remain dark. And that, sadly, is rarely rewarded, even less so today in an administration that’s determined to silence whistleblowers from all quarters.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
On RT.com: War on Whistleblowers
The House Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises passed a bill that severely weakens protection for corporate whistleblowers. The bill requires the whistleblower to confront the company in question first before going to a regulatory agency. Then the agency would notify the entity being accused of wrong-doing before any enforcement action is taken. Also it would legalize retaliation by the company against the whistle blowing employee. I joined RT.com to take a closer look at the rights of whistleblowers and how they’ve changed through the years.
(Follow this link if the video is not embedded above).
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Van Buren Gets Favorite Whistleblower Retaliation Career-Ender: Pulling Security Clearances
The Government Accountability Project has a new article up about my problems with my security clearance, suspended by the State Department in retaliation for a link on this blog to a document on a Wikileaks site.The author writes:
Peter Van Buren is the latest casualty of this punitive trend. The government suspended his top-secret security clearance – which he has held for 23 years – over LINKING (not LEAKING) to a WikiLeaks document on his blog and . . . surprise, surprise . . . publishing a book critical of the government.
As a whistleblower attorney, this has happened to numerous clients who have held security clearances for decades, are just a few years away from retirement, but dare to say something critical of the government. Not only do they lose their pension, but the loss of their security clearance renders them unemployed and unemployable in the intelligence community.
Like with Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Franz Gayl, and numerous GAP clients, these life-long public servants have had their security clearances suspended. Not necessarily revoked (because if its revoked, that can be challenged through federal court), but suspended, so that the action cannot be challenged.
So these folks who have been in possession of security clearances for decades suddenly “raise serious security concerns” because they criticize the government.
Read the whole article at the Government Accountability Project.
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
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