WikiLeaked at the State Department

by Peter Van Buren and Tom Engelhardt, September 28, 2011

It’s hardly a secret at this late date that, while the Obama administration arrived in office promoting “a new standard of openness” in government, in practice it’s cast not sunshine, but a penumbra of gloom over the workings of Washington. Talk about a closed and punitive crew.

Its Justice Department has notoriously gone after government whistleblowers and leakers, launching significantly more (largely unsuccessful) prosecutions than any of Obama’s predecessors. His people lit out with particular ferocity after WikiLeaks, and specifically Bradley Manning, the young Army private accused of passing enormous caches of Army and State Department documents to that website. In the process, the administration developed special forms of pre-punishment to torment him while he was confined, still uncharged, at a Marine brig in Quantico, Va. (It also went to ludicrous lengths to bar government officials, workers, contractors, the military, and anyone else linked to them from reading the leaked documents to which everyone else on Earth already had access.)

When it came to books by witnesses within the government or the military offering some version of critical openness, darkness has again been the order of the day. The Pentagon actually bought up and burned more or less the complete stock of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s insider’s account of Pentagon and Defense Information Agency mistakes in the invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Dark Heart (already thoroughly vetted by the Army Reserve), and forced his publisher to put out a highly redacted second edition.

More recently, the CIA took out after The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, a memoir by Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent long involved in the battle against al-Qaeda, demanding “extensive cuts.” “In fact,” wrote New York Times reporter Scott Shane, “some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the FBI and CIA, has previously been disclosed in open congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11, and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former CIA director.”

In recent weeks, a third version of this particular “national security” mania hit my radar screen. The State Department is now hassling one of its own employees whose book is being published by a venture I co-run, the American Empire Project, and who has become a regular at this site.

State has taken out after Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren, calling for redactions of information (all easily Googleable online) in his new book, published today and long ago vetted by the department, about his year running a provincial reconstruction team in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. There can’t be a more devastating (or, I must admit, enjoyable) account of the particular form of misery we brought to Iraq than his. Van Buren describes his own distinctly absurd situation in today’s post. Kafka would have blushed and Orwell would have had a hearty laugh, but evidently at the State Department no one even blinks... continued at source