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April 8, 2012 Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Joining The Whistleblowers' Club
The world can be a luckless place, but every
now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for
my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a
part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The “slush
pile” in a publishing house is normally the equivalent of an elephant’s
graveyard, the place prospective books go to die. It’s made up of
proposals or manuscripts arriving over the transom from potential
authors who have no literary agents, no contacts, and normally --
whether they know it or not -- no hope.
The odds for getting published that way these days must fall into the miracle category (which is why successful books from the slush pile often make the news). Peter Van Buren’s journey to publication -- and so to whistleblower status -- was among the more improbable slush-pile odysseys of our times. In 2009-2010, he was a State Department official on a godforsaken forward operating base south of Baghdad, his mind boggled by what he was seeing of the grim farce of American “reconstruction” in Iraq. He was then sending emails home to his wife in the States that would, sooner or later, become part of his Iraq manuscript, and at night wandering the Web trying to learn more about the country and situation he had been plunged into. In that process, he stumbled upon TomDispatch, began following it, and noticed that, from time to time, authors writing for the site produced books that TD then highlighted. In 2010, back in the States with a rough manuscript in hand, knowing no one in publishing nor anything about it, not even realizing I was a book editor, he sent an improbable email to the TomDispatch mail box that began: “I am a Foreign Service Officer just returned from a year in the field in Iraq (PRT leader) and I have a completed book draft. Would you be willing to read it as a possible title to publish, for a prepublication comment, and/or for a later excerpt on your site?” As it happens, I do read everything that comes in to the TomDispatch “slush pile” (though sometimes, sadly, I’m too busy to answer), because I consider it the university of my later life. Along with much appreciated encouragement, and reasonable dollops of criticism and complaint, people from around the world write me about what matters to them or tell me about lives I might otherwise never have imagined. Who could resist? Because of my busy life, I’ve nonetheless made TomDispatch a no-submissions site and normally I would simply have nixed Van Buren’s requests, but something stopped me, maybe only the fact that he had only recently returned from service in Iraq. I wouldn’t say I replied positively -- “chances are always slim” was my discouraging phrase -- but I did ask him to write me a description of his book and himself, and because I had no time just then, passed it on to Steve Fraser, my partner at our co-publishing venture at Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project. A few days later, the phone rang. It was Steve, telling me that I really did need to read Van Buren’s manuscript, that he was a natural, and it was the real McCoy. In other words, the wildest sort of online slush-pile luck turned Steve into his editor and Van Buren into a published author and so dispatched him willy-nilly into the strange, embattled world of Obama-era governmental whistleblowers. As a group, they are, after all, just about the only people inside the National Security Complex who ever get in trouble for their acts. In our era, the illegal surveillers, the torturers, the kidnappers, those who launch and pursue undeclared and aggressive wars, and those who squander taxpayer dollars all run free. Later, if they were important enough, they write their memoirs for millions of dollars, peddle their speeches for hundreds of thousands more, and live the good life. The only figures in the Complex regularly pursued as troublemakers and possible criminals turn out to be guilty of a single all-American crime: telling the citizenry what they should know about the operations of, and often enough the crimes of, the government they elected. Peter Van Buren did so with his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Now, he’s a slush-pile criminal and, thanks to the whims of serendipity, I was the one who aided and abetted his “crime.” (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses the present plight of the whistleblower, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom Left Behind |
