"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. Continued...