Peter Van Buren, a 20-plus-year veteran Foreign Service officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Upon his return to the US, he published the book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, for which the Department of State began termination proceedings against him, reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials. Ultimately, through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren will retire from the State Department with his full benefits of service in September 2013. His blog, We Meant Well, continues the dialogue his book initiated with daily humor and commentary about Iraq, the Middle East, and national security.

Van Buren's commentary has also been featured on TomDispatch, The New York Times, Salon, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, MichaelMoore.com, Le Monde, The Guardian, Daily Kos, Middle East Online, Guernica, and others. He has appeared on the BBC World Service and BBC Radio, Democracy Now!, NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Fresh Air," CurrentTV, HuffPost Live, Al Jazeera, RT, ITV, Britain's Channel 4 Viewpoint, CCTV, Voice of America, and more.

Van Buren is currently working on a new book titled The People on the Bus: A Story of the #99Percent, about the social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980s. Van Buren describes the work as a blend of The Grapes of Wrath, The Wonder Years, and Bruce Springsteen songs.

Along with other federal whistleblowers, Van Buren is working closely with Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker James Spione on a new film called Silenced: Washington's War on Whistleblowers.

Non-Fiction Authors Human Rights, Middle Eastern Heritage, Keynote,