The "our snack room is filthy" whistle blower.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: American Foreign Service Association

The American Foreign Service Association presents four annual awards for "constructive dissent." This year there were only eight nominations for the awards, even though there are 10,000 foreign service officers. Last year, there weren't many more--17, to be exact--and the year before there were only seven.

"The problem is not that there aren't people who deserve an award, but that people don't want to be nominated," explains AFSA president J. Anthony Holmes to Nicholas Kralev of The Washington Times. "They worry about negative repercussions. There is a feeling that questioning policy is extremely risky."

This is definitely part of the problem. Discouraging dissent has been characteristic of the Bush administration. Indeed, on the same day that Kralev's article appeared, Michael Gordon had another piece in The New York Times, dealing with the harm done by the suppression of dissent at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

Although part of the problem is the Bush administration, another part is buried deep in bureaucratic culture. The foreign service is a risk-averse culture, Barbara Bergen, coordinator of the awards, tells Kralev, who reports that "[n]one...