RUTHFULLY YOURS

A federal judge last week excoriated the State Department for sitting on Hillary Clinton’s emails, ordering it to release batches every 30 days. The State Department deserved the rebuke, but then it is merely following the rules laid down by the least transparent Administration in history.

The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday began a two-day hearing into the extraordinary ways the Obama Administration keeps undermining the Freedom of Information Act. Enacted in 1966, FOIA allows anyone to request information about any matter from a federal agency. The agency has 20 business days to respond (10 more in unusual circumstances), and the bar is set deliberately high for what government may withhold or redact.

Shootings are up in New York this year over last, as they are in many big American cities. So are murders. But not to fret, says Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“I think it’s clear that what we have primarily here is a gang and crew problem,” the mayor said last week. “You know, for those of us who were here in the bad old days—when we had 2,000 murders or more a year—a lot of everyday citizens were getting caught in those crossfires.” He added it’s “equally troubling when, you know, individual gang members shoot other gang members, but it’s a different reality.”

Translation: If young, largely minority men are killing each other over gang turf, then the violent crime revival is no big deal. It won’t hit the trendier corners of Brooklyn.

So whatever happened to Mr. de Blasio’s campaign that “black lives matter”?

Mr. Corr is a former U.S. ambassador to Peru, Bolivia and El Salvador (1985-88). Mr. Abrams is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the Reagan administration (1985-89).
A 77-year-old Salvadoran general is deported in chains now that Americans have forgotten his good service.

It may be dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but in recent decades it often has been almost as risky to be a friend. There was Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, overthrown and assassinated by his army in 1963 after losing American support. Or the thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who assisted American troops a decade ago but are still waiting for the visas for safe haven in the U.S. The uncomfortable truth is that America has too often treated former allies as expendable.

The drama that played out this year around Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova is a reminder of what can happen when time passes and Americans forget. Gen. Vides was El Salvador’s minister of defense in the government of José Napoleón Duarte in the 1980s. Duarte was an American favorite, with plenty of backing from the Reagan administration and Democrats who understood his commitment to democracy and human rights. That included his desire to resist attacks from the communist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), who were supported by Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

Human-rights abuses were rampant when Duarte became president in 1984: Political killings by the military or death squads linked to it exceeded 800 per month in 1981, according to a RAND Corp. paper from a decade later. In an infamous attack in 1980 four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by national guard soldiers when Gen. Vides was the guard commander. But two separate investigations—by the U.S. in 1983 and an official Salvadoran “truth commission” established when the civil war ended in 1992—concluded that Mr. Vides played no role in those killings (though the latter report suggests he helped try to cover them up).

Together Duarte and Gen. Vides dramatically reduced death squad killings, which dropped to 23 a month in 1987, according to an Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis report the following year. U.S. diplomats in El Salvador during that period can attest that Duarte’s key partner in reducing abuses and taming the military was Gen. Vides. Right-wing oligarchs in El Salvador repeatedly approached the army with plans for a coup against Duarte, but Gen. Vides and other loyal senior officers blocked them.

The feeling remains that these child-rape crimes are still passed over or covered up. An independent official inquiry found failures at every level of the institutions of state. Crimes of this nature are still being kicked under the carpet — for reasons of “political correctness” — with no concern for harm done to the children. The issue is a true tinderbox.

Last week, the local council in Rotherham moved to ban anti-child grooming marches. But by even thinking of banning these marches, the members of the Rotherham council are making ones of the greatest mistakes imaginable. People will assume there is something even worse going on.

A town whose authorities allowed child-rape to go on for a decade, but which now bans marches objecting to child-rape, is setting up a whole new narrative of victimhood from which no good can possibly come. Howls of rage — especially such howls — must be protected speech, especially when they have a basis in fact.

There are some decisions so stupid that a person who lacked restraint might howl. One such case arose last week in the Britain.

When America invaded Iraq in 2003, then-President George W. Bush said our goals were to create an Iraq that had never existed before — a democratic Iraq that would be capable of defending and sustaining itself and would be an ally in our long war against terrorism.

None of those goals was achieved. But Bush remained convinced our pledge to nation building shouldn’t end and that we had to commit American troops to combat — and continue to sacrifice lives — indefinitely.

In July 2007, Bush warned against premature withdrawal from Iraq. He said that to leave before our military leaders confirmed that we were ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States, and could mean that American troops would have to return to Iraq to fight again.

In an interview on Sunday with the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah spelled out his vision for peace with Israel.

This involves creating a “new framework for negotiations”; an end to the Israeli “occupation” by 2017; and the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as its capital. For starters.

To guarantee all of the above, the leadership in Ramallah is hoping to secure a U.N. resolution to enforce these stipulations. They are also seeking other outside help, from the French, for example, who have floated an initiative to set a time frame for Israeli territorial withdrawals.

In the interview, however, Hamdallah said, “Nothing can be imposed from the outside. We need negotiations between us and the Israelis sponsored by the United States, by the U.N., by the [European Union]. We need outside intervention from the U.N., from the superpowers, from the United States. Once there is a resolution, whether the U.N. asking for Israeli withdrawal and for the establishment of the state, this has to be guaranteed by the superpowers. Otherwise, it will be just a paper.”

The Clintons and Their Royal Saudi Friends: More Dubious Donations to the Family’s Foundation
In December 2008, as Hillary Clinton prepared for the hearings that would confirm her as the next U.S. secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation disclosed a list of its donors — separated into tiers by amount given — to reassure the public and Congress that the former first lady would avoid any potential conflicts of interest in her new perch atop Foggy Bottom.

“I agree that these are matters that have to be handled with the greatest of care and transparency,” Clinton said during her confirmation hearing.

A look at one organization that made a donation in the range of $1 million to $5 million shows how the Clintons’ gestures toward transparency often revealed little. Meet Friends of Arabia, or FSA, a thinly veiled public-relations organ of the repressive Saudi regime.

In a testament to the Clinton Foundation’s confusing, tangled, and secretive finances, Friends of Saudi Arabia’s former CEO, Michael Saba, denies that the nonprofit ever made the contribution. He suggests, rather, that the group’s founders, which included members of the Saudi royal family, made the donation before filing papers with the IRS. For three years, the now-defunct FSA functioned as a propaganda tool for the Saudis, a mission that put it at odds not only with some parts of the State Department’s assessment of the regime, but also with Hillary Clinton’s attempts to position herself as a champion for women’s rights across the globe.

RELATED: ‘Clinton Cash’ Author Finds Eleven ‘Coincidences’

FSA was closely tied to the Saudi regime. A 2005 tax form identified Dr. Selwa Al-Hazzaa, head of the ophthalmology department at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, as chairman of the board. Saudi King Abdullah appointed her to the Saudi legislature in 2013, shortly after women were allowed to join the body.

FSA’s work earned the contempt of activists pushing for reforms in Saudi Arabia.

Where previous presidents fostered American strength, Obama revels in weakness.

Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.

Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.

The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.

The peacemakers, as has so often been the case, have made war of every imaginable kind more likely — and that includes military intervention in Iran. If Obama dreams of a legacy, a war his policy of appeasement promoted may well be it
Back in December 2014, former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (who served from 1973 to 1977) and George Shultz (1982 to 1989) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do”. This missive appeared a week after President Obama signed the 2013 interim nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one that purported to temporarily freeze Tehran’s decade-long advance towards military nuclear capability. Kissinger and Shultz warned that the Islamic Republic’s quest for the nuclear bomb would be enhanced by the 2013 interim agreement. On April 12, 2015, a week after Obama celebrated his latest “breakthrough” with the Mullahs of Iran, the so-called framework for a preliminary nuclear agreement, Kissinger and Shultz published a sequel in the Wall Street Journal, this time titled “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. The worst fears of the former secretaries of state appeared to be confirmed by the latest turn of events:

A strong West, united behind Washington, might have responded to Russian adventurism in Ukraine by supplying materiel, intelligence and public support. With Obama in the White House and US influence in retreat, that is one possibility Moscow need not worry about
On one level, the news, reported in The Australian on May 29, 2015, that Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had signed a decree making military losses in “special operations” during peacetime a state secret is one more marker in Russia’s reversion to its Soviet totalitarian past. On another level, Putin is seeking to sustain an utterly implausible deniability. Yet the cat is well and truly out of the bag, as the old saying goes.