RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine you are thinking of defecting from a dictatorship. Pehaps you have important information about a plan by your country’s “supreme leader” to assassinate unfriendly American politicians. With this information you are sure the CIA will hide you and subsidize a new life in America.

Then you get second thoughts.

Your cold feet come from hearing of the following news item:

When Bill Clinton was president, his wife Hillary ordered that John Huang be brought into the Commerce Department. Huang had worked at a bank controlled by James Riady.

According to Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay, Riady had close ties with the Communist government of China. This is bad news for your plans to defect, because in the Commerce Department,

John Huang could dip into the flow of U.S. cable traffic at will. He had access to hundreds of CIA documents… He had access to information that, if revealed to a foreign power, would have exposed informants to torture or execution.

But then you think to yourself — Hillary is out of power, and Barack Obama, from what you have heard, is incorruptible and competent.  So maybe you will defect after all.

Then you read that:

In June 2015, perhaps 21 million personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) were stolen. (Before hiring applicants for sensitive positions OPM asks the neighbors of applicants what they know that could be used to blackmail him or her.)

The OPM had been warned multiple times of security vulnerabilities and failings. A March 2015 OPM Office of the Inspector General semi-annual report to Congress warned of “persistent deficiencies in OPM’s information system security program,” including “incomplete security authorization packages, weaknesses in testing of information security controls, and inaccurate Plans of Action and Milestones.

So who was in charge of the OPM?  The director was Katherine Archuleta, former National Political Director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page director of the Wall Street Journal, speaking on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, criticized the appointment of Archuleta to be “in charge of one of the most sensitive agencies” in the U.S. government, saying: “What is her experience to run something like that? She was the national political director of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She’s also the head of something called the Latina Initiative. She’s a politico, right? … That is the kind of person they have put in…”

You start thinking the U.S. government is corrupt, even if it involves national security. And if they don’t care about national security, why would they care about your security? So maybe you should not defect.

You spend a sleepless night. But then your idealism kicks in. For the sake of liberty, you must defect!

Until you read about:

Bradley Manning, the soldier who disclosed to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents.

“Amazing,” you think to yourself.  Any soldier can obtain all this classified information! This country is just not serious.

But then you read that Bradley Manning has become Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, with a sex change operation. You are enthusiastic. Only in America, a free and tolerant country, could such a thing happen. So you decide to defect.

Until, you read the following:

Hillary Clinton is likely to become the next president of the United States. As Secretary of State, she did not want her email correspondence to be on government servers, so she used a private one in her home. On this server, she sent emails, many of them classified, and when caught, deleted at least 33,000 of them.

This has to be a joke, you think. It can’t be real. You decide to stay put.

Then you think again…