Thomas Sowell on the West's Slow Suicide

Sowell quotes Solzhenitsyn in his latest piece.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became President of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the "concessions and smiles" approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Then he mentions the Obama Administration's war on the CIA:

Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration's actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words.

It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward.

Years from now, long after Barack Obama is gone, CIA agents dealing with hardened terrorists will have to worry about whether what they do to get information out of them to save American lives will make these agents themselves liable to prosecution that can destroy their careers and ruin their lives.

Maybe the CIA, in order to survive, should just start killing these suspects after they wring the info out of them. Then toss them in the river like a mob fmaily would. Dead men tell no tales, and they could find a way to keep this off the books to avoid scandalizing the ridiculous asses who don't understand that these international criminals have forfeited their rights like the Germans Sowell mentions.

German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot-- and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

What Sowell writes is so sensible and what the Obama Administration is telegraphing is indefensible. Dick Morris pointed out yesterday when he was on Prager's show that many countries have voiced a concern that they are not sure what the U. S. foreign policy currently is on a range of issues, only that generally it is the same as Bush's to the foreign observer. But in light of recent developments my guess is that it is appearing less and less coherent to a CIA agent or anyone tasked with keeping the country safer.