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February 9, 2012 Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, In Washington, Fear the Silence, Not the Noise
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A last reminder for those of you in New York City: Jeremy Scahill and I will be onstage Friday, 6-8 pm, at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute discussing our American world (such as it is), his work, and my new book,
The United States of Fear. Hope you’ll drop by. For further information and directions on getting there,
click here. Tom]
One thing is obvious. No one ever joins the government in order to be a whistleblower or leaker. Whistleblowers are created, not born. To offer an example, as Peter Van Buren is happy to admit, before he spent a year on two forward operating bases in Iraq running a State Department provincial reconstruction team, he was “a more or less content Foreign Service Officer.” It is perhaps typical of whistleblowers and leakers that something they are privy to simply pushes them over the edge. In Van Buren’s case, it was perhaps all those late nights on some desolate base thousands of miles from his family, thinking about the mad way your taxpayer money was being squandered -- millions of dollars, for instance, going into the building of an all-Iraqi chicken-plucking factory that would never be used to pluck chickens. It was the pure madness of the American occupation and “reconstruction” -- more like deconstruction -- of Iraq, seen up close and personal, that led him to start writing his own truth-telling book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (which just happens to be both unsettling and often bizarrely hilarious because, as a writer, he’s a natural). He had the urge to offer you an insider's view of your government in action in a distant land. Think of it -- perhaps of any whistleblowing -- as an act of personal “reconstruction,” as a method of occupying yourself in a new way, even as it may also be deconstructing your career. Such acts are favors to the rest of us in what we still claim is a “democracy,” even if the money of the truly wealthy rules the day and your state, the national security one, has moved beyond all accountability into a post-legal era. Though the Obama administration has, from its first days, talked the talk of governmental openness and “sunshine,” it’s walked a very different walk. And while Van Buren hasn’t, like other whistleblowers, been brought to court or imprisoned, he has learned, once again in an up close and personal fashion, how little “our” government wants even a penlight shown on its inner workings. Consider, then, Van Buren’s view from the eye of the national security storm. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses what it means to be a governmental whistleblower, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom Silent State |
