I never worked for the State Department

Reading about the XL pipeline contract study by the State Department today made me laugh.
It made me grateful for a decision I made at age 21.
When I was in undergraduate school, I was investigating and writing what eventually became an 11,500 word investigation of coal slurry pipelines, which helped lead to a bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives not to allow eminent domain for pipeliners to steal farmers' land for polluting coal slurry pipelines, which would have taken coal in Wyoming, crushed it, added water and hexavalent chromium, and dumped the resulting mess in Arkansas at the behest of MIDDLES SOUTH UTLILITIES and BECHTEL. We beat 'em, fair and square.
While I was writing the investigative article for Crossroads Magazine (formerly Coal Patrol), BECHTEL's Washington, D.C. lobbyist told me that if I published it, I would "never work for the State Department." I told her, "ma'am, I don't want to work for the State Department."
Since I was at the time a lowly undergraduate in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, she must have been "driving under the inference" that I would want to work for the State Department.
This was thre years after the Vietnam War.
Appalled after reading the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, and appalled at reading Frances' Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake and David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest while I was in high school. Thus, I declined to even take the Foreign Service Officer examination, which required one to take an oath to "support U.S. Foreign Policy." Evidently the State Department felt that was more important than the Oath in our Constitution, which requires one to support, protect and defend our Constitution.
Today, after reading about the XL pipeline study, I was again grateful that I never worked for the State Department.
President Harry S. Truman thought the State Department was peopled by pompous foppish anti-Semitic popinjays in striped pants -- pants-pressers, he called them.
Some of my college friends went to work there, and got to see the world through the eyes of the "Ugly American," some probably as CIA Agents.
Instead of going abroad to work for the State Department, I went to Appalachia, exposed wrongdoing, and later worked to help protect whistleblowers.
Damn glad I did.
Could you imagine me as an actual diplomat, which was defined by Briton Henry Wooton in the 17th century as "an honest man who is sent abroad to lie for his country?"
Today, after reading about the XL pipeline study, I am "shocked, shocked" that:
(a) The State Department awarded a contract to do what should be considered a non-delegable duty under the Delegation Doctrine and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) circulars; and
(b) The State Department Inspector General has refused to release its putative investigation of the conflict of interest invoved in State Department contracting-out work on the XL environmental study to organizations that may have organizationa conflicts of interest.
The public has a Right to Know.
Thomas Jefferson said, "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of [hu]man[kind."
Inspectors General, supposed to protect the public interest, are too often harassers of whistleblowers and ienpt coverup artists.
I have requested this evening that the State Department OIG provide the XL conflict of interest investiation NOW.
As Senator Howard Henry Baker, Jr. said during Watergate, "Coverups never work."