“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, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.

Yet, it seems now indisputable 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 the 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 al-Qaida deemed “suitable for Western attacks” and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.

What were the “inhumane” techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?

“Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms, while they were bound behind his back with a belt,” reports The Washington Post. “Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. Another squeezed a detainee’s neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out.”

The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM’s children and rape his mother. 

As for threatening to kill the children of our enemies, we did not do that in “The Good War.” Instead, what we did was kill them in the thousands every night in air raids over Germany and Japan.

In the Tokyo firestorm of February 1945, the Dresden raid in March, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, we killed grandparents, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, daughters and sons of the enemy in the scores of thousands on each of those days.

Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?

In its lead editorial, “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? 

On the issue of national security, as Barack 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.

(Patrick Buchanan is an independent journalist writing for Creators Syndicate.)