[BRIGADE] PJB: The Get-Cheney Squad
Published: Fri, 08/28/09
by Patrick J. Buchanan
August 28, 2009
"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 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 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.
Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is
serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and
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?
"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. 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. It
was faked, as Sean Connery faked it in "The Untouchables" to get an
underling to blab to Eliot Ness, aka Kevin Costner, about how he
could take down Al Capone's mob.
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.
Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul
Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima,
on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA
agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending,
to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?
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? Is it in Obama's
interest to tear his country apart to expose and punish these CIA
agents?
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
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.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/the-get-cheney-squad-2024