The Foreign Service Journal, June 2012

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 2 FS Bloggers, Beware The saga of FSO Peter Van Buren has taken several more twists and turns since we reviewed his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi Peo- ple , in January ( www.afsa.org/fsj ). After suspending Van Buren’s secu- rity clearance for allegedly including classified material in his exposé, in March the State Department moved to separate him from the Foreign Serv- ice for cause. It alleges eight violations of department policy, including linking in his blog ( http://wemeantwell. com/blog ) to documents on Wiki Leaks; failing to clear each blog post- ing with his bosses; displaying a “lack of candor” during interviews with diplomatic security officers; and exer- cising poor judgment by criticizing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then-presidential candi- date Michelle Bachmann on his blog. Van Buren and his defenders assert that these allegations are baseless, and ask why State is so focused on his blog when many other Foreign Service per- sonnel and family members allegedly post similar material with impunity. They believe the charges mask the true motivation behind efforts to fire him: official anger in Foggy Bottom over his book. In a March 19 commentary titled “State Dept. Throws Sink + All Fix- tures but One at FSONon Grata Peter Van Buren,” the Diplopundit blog ( diplopundit.net ) recalls that last fall Principal Deputy Secretary for Public Affairs Dana Shell Smith wrote Van Buren’s publisher to request redactions of supposedly classified information from the book, which were not made. Noting the curious fact that none of the eight new charges even references that episode, Diplopundit poses a mul- tiple-choice quiz: 1. The folks over at HR forgot to in- clude the allegation fromPDAS Smith; even smart people sometimes forget, you know. 2. Somebody finally discovered that “Mogadishu” is not a classified item, and the government lawyers did not want to be laughed at all the way to court. 3. The letter to the publisher was a scare tactic that did not work … and should not have been sent. 4. All of the above. In a March 2 1 follow-up posting, “Deadly Contagion Hits Foreign Serv- ice Blogosphere,” Diplopundit lists nearly two dozen Foreign Service blogs that have suddenly gone dead in recent weeks — though it’s not clear whether “the contagion was caused by a rogue virus, or the ‘Peter Van Buren effect’ on the FS blogosphere. “It’s not even that they just stopped blogging — there are no goodbyes, and the archives are gone. Some blogs were scrubbed clean. Some have be- come online parking lots. And some have been totally deleted from the cy- berverse.” To help its members who blog, AFSA recently disseminated and posted on its Web site the following “Guidance on Personal Use of Social Media.” It contains the following ad- vice: • Read the Existing Regula- tions. The current regulations re- garding the use of social media can be found in 5 FAM 790, “Using Social Media.” Although we understand that some of these rules with their cross- references to other Foreign Affairs Manual citations are confusing, we strongly recommend that any AFSA C YBERNOTES T hey [the United States] say we will give you money, but will not specify the amount. We say give us less, but write it down. We want them to write down that America will give for Afghani- stan’s security $2 billion a year, or at least $2 billion a year. If they want to give us more, they are welcome. — Afghan President Hamid Karzai, speaking to a group of university professors and stu- dents in Kabul on April 17; Yahoo News ( www.yahoo.com)