Just because one side is powerful enough to ignore the other does not invalidate the state of mind of the Children. Their actions are explained by their own mentality. The lack of overt fighting back does not alter their own position.

We're talking about people who channel. If you accept their admittedly flawed first premise, the rest follows naturally. This is hardly a fault solely to be placed at the feet of the Children of the Light. The Aes Sedai are little different. The Children's problem is they have no way to deal with such things short of getting rid of them. The knee-jerk reaction of most sisters to wolfbrothers and sniffers is suspicion. It's easy to be tolerant once you can safely establish that you outweigh them on the scale of supernatural power by several orders of magnitude.

Under suspicion, certainly. Siuan uses much more dubious links to advise the Amyrlin Seat that Cadsuane, the Aes Sedai engaged in the single most important task of any sister in the world at the time, was suspected of being a Darkfriend as well.

Eh, he was young and new. You can hardly blame them for being suspicious.

Actually, it was the Trolloc infestation that gave Ordeith's supernaturally-reinforced accusations credibility. Are we going to start evaluating Mat's attempted murder while under the influence of the Shadar Logoth dagger as a character flaw?
Who else would willingly serve the arch-minions of the Dark One?

Well, maybe if we ever saw them receiving the slightest modicum of cooperation from anyone they did not absolutely have under their thumbs, they wouldn't think they had to push so hard all the time. Recall that they DID try the peaceful approach at first, before turning to military methods. It is a valid possibility that they were driven to it by persecution of powerful individuals or groups who resented the preachers' claims that they might be harboring darkfriends, and that possibility is equally likely compared to those which reflect more poorly on them.

How benevolent could the Tower afford to be if they were not able to seize and enforce a monopoly over their specialty.

And none of this alters the issue I originally brought up. This is a massive time of change in WoT, and a lot of slates are being wiped blank. If the group that literally destroyed the world three thousand years ago can be rehabilitated and given a fresh start (with not a single individual yet shown to display the moral character of Galad Damodred or the service to the Light of Lord Captain Trom), why not the Children? I was comparing their organizations' reactions to the CURRENT similar crises, and everyone else starts bringing up old issues that they themselves are putting in the past because there are more important things to deal with (a notion that has occurred to maybe .6% of Aes Sedai).

I think the kinds of response I get to this are seriously indicative of some major mental flaws in the contemporary mindset. Whatever is going on in the popular zeitgeist, you people all get so hung up on the use of torture that you instinctively sympathize with the group that does a better job of hiding it, despite their far more egregious crimes against freedom. The suppression of other channeling organizations, and the brutalizing channelers who have no obligations or ties to their authority but choose to associate on their own are far more egregious crimes than being a bit rough when occupying a vacuum of authority. The former strike at the very concepts of personal freedom and free will and justice, whereas the worst one can quarrel with the Children over is their methods. The Tower pursues absolutely evil (with a lowercase 'e' ) goals, and because they are nice about it, that's all cool. But just because the Children become so sidetracked that they lost track of their mission in a way that just happens to touch on something held in public revulsion in contemporary society, they cannot even be given credit for their positive efforts in the current time.