 My name is Peter Van Buren. I worked for the U.S. Department of State for 24 years, including serving in Iraq as the leader of two provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs. Our job was to spend American taxpayer money building bridges, schools, various civic projects in order to create a functioning democracy in Iraq. We failed completely. We failed the American people in the use of their taxpayer money. We failed the Iraqis in that we did as much harm as we did any good at all. And we have left the Iraqis with the country worse than it was before we began spending money and trying to help. We spent money on water filters that did not work. And we worked and engaged with some of the worst elements of Iraqi society because they were convenient to work with. The failures to help Iraq and help the Iraqi people on our part contributed to the conditions which are now unfolding even as we speak. We also insisted on imposing our cultural values on people who truly had a culture of their own dating back literally thousands of years. The bottom line, however, is that we as Americans were making decisions for the Iraqi people and using both our military might and particularly in my case, our financial power to impose the solution that we felt was best for the Iraqi people rather than involving them in sorting out these complex issues. My testimony focuses on the acts of government that were dangerous to individuals that were unintentionally malicious, that were signs of the ignorance that is brought to bear on a battlefield when the world's largest nation seeks to impose its values and cultures and of course to find its way to profit on the backs of the very most vulnerable people. Looking back at the failures of the reconstruction, it would be impossible not to include the roles of the contractors, mega corporations like Dynacor and of course KBR, the company that was connected directly to Dick Cheney and to whom a number of US government contracts were steered. We've spent more money in Afghanistan and continue to do so than we did in Iraq. The same contracting firms are active in Afghanistan and some of the same contractors, the literal same people that I worked with in Iraq have been sent to Afghanistan to do exactly what they did in Iraq. So these problems are not left to the history of Iraq war. They are continuing on a daily basis in Afghanistan and it's very difficult to imagine that they won't resurface in places like Syria and Libya. If at some point in the future the US government decides to move into those regions more intensely. In return for bringing this information to the attention of the American people, I lost my job of 24 years at the Department of State and what was done to me was designed to scare off the next person, the next man or woman inside the State Department or other government agencies who saw this waste, this fraud, this mismanagement and said, I want to speak up but look what happened to Peter. The same thing is happening inside the military on a much more severe scale of course with Chelsea Manning. Look what happens when you speak out, look what happens when you reveal war crimes. You are driven to suicide, you are imprisoned for life and the same thing covers whistleblowers that are not part of the State Department or the Iraq war. There's a spectrum the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other administration in history. And that I'm afraid is a very hard and unpleasant truth that we need to remember as we go forward into the next administration is that many of the things that we are rightfully concerned about under a President Trump, the groundwork has been laid under the current administration. There's been no commission on torture. There has been no prosecutions related to torture. There have been the codification of assassinations by drones. There have been some of the worst record on FOIA requests of any presidential administration since the beginning of the FOIA Act. The Obama administration, among other things, has reduced the number of federal staffers that are available to process FOIA requests. And regardless of how you feel about the contents of the Clinton emails, the fact that the State Department required organizations like the Associated Press to go to court in order to even reveal that information suggests the way that government now and certainly government in the next administration will block the people's right to know.