WASHINGTON – Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren has been officially sanctioned today. Depending how one looks at it, he could be the first State Department WikiLeaks casualty, or the first who’s been punished for criticizing the agency’s performance in the war. Or both.
It doesn’t matter. Today, after 23 years as a foreign service officer, Buren was forced to turn over his Top Secret security credentials and diplomatic passport today at the Rossyln offices of the State Department right outside Washington.
Read more about Antiwar.com’s Van Buren coverage here.
According to the letter given to Van Buren this morning, he was being placed on suspension because his unwillingness to comply with rules and regulations regarding “articles and blog postings,” which “raises serious security concerns” making his access to classified material inconsistent “with the national security interests of the United States.” Basically, he did not get his published work and media appearances cleared with public affairs ahead of time. Also, the letter read, Van Buren’s “judgment in handling protected information is questionable.”
His clearance is now deemed "under suspension" until an investigation by the department is complete. Van Buren and an informal legal representative joining him Monday said this investigations could last months, even years before adjudication.
Although Van Buren’s transgressions were not spelled out in the formal letter of suspension but he is certain it was because of 1) in a personal blog posting dated August 25, Van Buren had linked to a classified cable that had already been leaked and widely circulated by WikiLeaks, 2) he refused to redact passages from his new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and 3) he refused to answer specific questions when brought in twice for "interrogation" by Department officials in the last several weeks to answer questions. Those "questions," he told Antiwar.com, included his associations. He also did not offer any of his articles on his blogs for vetting by public affairs before publishing.
All of this has convinced the department he is a threat.
Van Buren handed over his clearance and passport this morning, and spoke to Antiwar.com shortly afterwards. They are, in effect, tools of his livelihood and handing them over, he said, were akin to being "laid off," as even though his job with the department does require the security clearance and he is not traveling at this time, his status as being "under investigation" and the suspended clearance will render him radioactive with bosses and potential bosses within the department. He will likely be relegated to a job with no duties, what they call "hall walker" – a ghost – until further notice. He is expected to retire next year at this time.
It was reported in December 2010 that the White House, through the Office of Budget and Management, had put out a directive to all federal employees warning them not to access the classified documents had been published via WikiLeaks in a massive release of thousands of State Department cables that month.
"Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority," the memo said. When asked by reporters if employees’ access to the cables on their personal computers or handheld devices were also sanctioned, they were told, "Any breaches of protocols governing access to classified material are subject to applicable sanctions under long-standing and existing law."
Van Buren believes that it was his book, not his blog and the offending WikiLeaks cables, that drew the department’s ire. In his unsparing account of one year on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq, Van Buren describes how the Department, in concert with the U.S military, threw billions of dollars of US taxpayer money away through waste, fraud, and abuse, and failed to help the Iraq people maintain the most basic necessities, like clean water, health care, and sewage, despite all the funding and promises to the contrary.
Describing his time in Iraq the way he did breaks all protocol of the typically silent — and compliant — foreign service officer. But Van Buren insists that he followed procedure and not only had his manuscript combed for classified material, but handed it over to officials a year ago to be reviewed. When he did not hear back from the department after the proscribed 60 days, he went through with the project, and We Meant Well was published by Metropolitan Books, a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishers, in September.
In a fax given to Antiwar.com, Mirelle L. Zieseniss from the Department’s Pulbic Affairs Office, wrote to Macmillan Publishers on Sept. 20 charging that the publicizing and circulation of the book "have been done without authorization from the Department" and that the Department "has recently concluded that two pages of the book manuscript we have seen contain unauthorized disclosures of classified information… I respectfully request that Macmillan remove the classified portions from the book before it is published in order to avoid harm to U.S national security."
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."