The Foreign Service Officer Who Rants Against the State Department

September 29, 2011

Tags: Atlantic, State Department, TomDispatch
Posted in: Democracy, Embassy/State, Iraq

Be sure to check out this excellent piece from the Atlantic on my troubles with the State Department. The author notes:

While Van Buren may be ratcheting up his rhetoric against State over the last 24 hours, he’s been criticizing the department and the U.S. government pretty much ever since he launched his personal blog in April as a supplement to We Meant Well. In one of his first posts, entitled “Bureaucratic Chlamydia,” Van Buren described the “half-assed nature” in which the State Department prepared “people like me to live and work in a war zone.”

A month later, Van Buren noted that while the State Department was spending millions to end web censorship overseas, it was censoring TomDispatch, the site he contributed to, in its own offices because TomDispatch ran content from WikiLeaks. Van Buren’s taken his criticism outside the blog as well. In a piece for TomDispatch in June, for example, he questioned State’s long-term plans for Iraq.

Read the whole article at the Atlantic’s web site.

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