Foreign Aid

I recently heard Steve Forbes say that we ought to stop sending money as foreign aid and just send each country a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Remember Steamboat Willie

 

 

Why are terrorist prisoners being released merely because we have their word or or the promise of their host country that they won't do any more bad stuff? The men in Saving Private Ryan learned this lesson the hard way when they felt a twinge of compassion for their captured German prisoner (known as Steamboat Willie) and released him. The next thing they knew he had rejoined his unit and was firing bullets at them. There are now reports that the ring leader of the attack against our consulate in Bengazi was led by a former Gitmo detainee who had been returned to Lybia under the promise that he would be kept in prison. So much for the word of an enemy. It reminds me of the story about the rattlesnake who promised a man he wouldn't bite him if he would only carry him down from the mountain heights before the temperature dropped below freezing. At the bottom of the mountain the snake bit the naive Samaritan, who exclaimed, "Hey, you promised you wouldn't bite me." To which the snake replied. "You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me down." Our enemies are our enemies, and once caught, we must never let them go." This is not the first time someone released from Gitmo has returned to the battlefield to do us hard. In the war on terror, compassion is equal to stupidity.