Bill O-Reilly on the John Adams Project

Our Texas correspondent, J-Carp, send me this link regarding this alarming and developing story.

...[T]he John Adams Project, a group of subversive Americans affiliated with the ACLU who are sneaking around taking pictures of CIA agents who may have interrogated captured al-Qaida guys in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack.

This insidious outfit believes the CIA tortured casually and the U.S.A. is a “human rights violator.”

After taking the surreptitious photos, the Adams Project then passes them on to lawyers representing incarcerated terrorists, hoping that an accused man will, in turn, accuse a CIA agent of torturing him.

This nasty business is now being investigated by the Justice Department, but the Obama administration has kept very quiet about it and, strangely, so have the media.

Very few newspapers have reported on the John Adams Project, and there is something quite disturbing about that.

Remember Valerie Plame? She was the CIA operative publicly exposed by columnist Robert Novak in an Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction controversy.

After that happened, the left-wing media went wild with indignation. How could anyone name a CIA person, thereby putting him or her in danger?

The New York Times was on fire over the story. But when faced with the facts about the John Adams Project, the Times buried the story on page A-20.

By exposing CIA agents to accused terrorists and their lawyers, the John Adams Project is obviously putting lives in jeopardy.

This is a thousand times worse than the Plame affair, which saw top Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby convicted of a felony while the press largely celebrated.

But where is the coverage of the Adams story? Where is President Obama on the issue? Why are these people being allowed to terrorize the Central Intelligence Agency?

Meanwhile, the real John Adams is turning over in his grave. Here's liberal lawyer Nina Ginsberg spouting the standard "everyone-in-the-CIA-except-Valerie-Plame-is-evil" line:

Fouad Ajami on 9/11, Obama and Afghanistan

Fouad Ajami's WSJ article is a good way to kick off our 9/11 readings. Excerpt:

No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see.

While denying that somehow the Afghanistan war "is" Vietnam—good for Mr. Ajami—he does offer parallels.

This is LBJ in 1964, from a definitive history by A.J. Langguth, "Our Vietnam," published in 2000: "I just don't think it is worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damn mess." He would prosecute what he called that "bitch of a war" with a premonition that it could wreck his Great Society programs. He knew America's mood. "I don't think the people of the country know much about Vietnam, and I think they care a hell of a lot less." Yet, he took the plunge, he would try to "cheat"—guns and butter at the same time, the war in Asia and the domestic agenda of civil rights and the Great Society. History was merciless. It begot a monumental tragedy in a land of no consequences to American security.

Wars are great clarifiers. Barack Obama's trumpet is uncertain. His call to arms in Afghanistan does not stir. He fears failure in Afghanistan, and nothing more. Having disowned Iraq, kept its cause at a distance, he is forced to fight the war in Afghanistan. So he equivocates and plays for time. Forever the campaigner, he has his eye on the public mood, the steel that his predecessor showed in 2007 when all was in the balance in Iraq is not evident in Mr. Obama.

Steel is useful in warfare, or so I've heard.

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.