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E-mailProsecuting agents who saved lives
WASHINGTON
"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, allegedly went too far in frightening Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, engineer of the September 2001 massacres.
Yet, it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.
According to The Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators "produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots."
They elicited names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits that al-Qaida deemed "suitable for Western attacks" and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Iyman Faris, an al-Qaida sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from Mohammed and his associates. Other operations aborted include al-Qaida "plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge."
What were the "inhumane" techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?
The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill Mohammed's children and rape his mother. Power drills were brandished in interrogation rooms.
Were any children killed? No. Was anyone's mother raped? No. Was the power drill used? No. Was anyone executed in front of a witness to make him talk? No.
Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?
In 2004, career lawyers at Justice looked over the same reports and concluded that prosecutions would not serve the national interest. Obama has himself said he wants to move on.
Now, he and Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded: not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.
Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?
In its lead editorial Tuesday, "Following the Torture Trail," The Washington Post declaims, "The real culprits in this sordid story are the higher-ups, starting with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard Cheney who led America down the degraded path of state-sponsored torture."
But why is Obama yielding to the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals? Is that in the national interest?
In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy and the boys at Justice set up a "Get Hoffa Squad" to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It was a vendetta that succeeded.
This vendetta will not. For, on the issue of national security, as Obama will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA, who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.
Pat Buchanan is the author of the book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War.'"
