Peter Van Buren, a foreign service officer who wrote an unflattering book about his year leading reconstruction teams in Iraq, has received the support of the American Civil Liberties Union in his effort to keep his job.

In a letter last week, the ACLU urged the State Department not to fire Van Buren and said the agency is violating his constitutional rights by trying to terminate him.

“There can be no dispute that the subject matter of Mr. Van Buren’s book, blog posts, and news articles — the reconstruction effort in Iraq — is a matter of intense public concern….the subject of a nationwide, highly contentious, and very public debate,” ACLU officials Ben Wizner and Kate Wood wrote on May 15 to Patrick F. Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management.

Read the full post at the Washington Post .