3 points in the CIA torture report that ought to make conservatives livid — but probably won't

Is 21st-century American conservatism a principled, thoughtful ideology that consistently applies its ideals across a range of cases and revises its judgments in the light of confounding facts?

Or is it a thuggish, tribal mentality that places fear, ruthless power, narrow-minded nationalism, and bald-faced partisanship above consistency and principle?

If you had any doubts about the answer, the reaction of the right to the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report settles the matter.

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Want proof? Let's consider three aspects of the report that should (but in all likelihood won't) prompt serious soul-searching on the part of conservatives.

1. Your incompetent government in action.

The modern conservative movement that came to power with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 defines itself by the assertion that "government isn't the solution to our problem; it is the problem." Government is the problem because, conservatives contend, it is wasteful, inefficient, and in many cases incompetent.

But when it comes to questions of security — the local and state police, the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. military — conservatives incline toward unquestioning deference, insisting that extending their skepticism about government to these authorities (many of which, unlike the bureaucracies they gleefully denounce, deploy violence) is simply unacceptable.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a blatant contradiction. How can a government that's supposedly incapable of running an efficient and profitable postal service be entrusted to transform Iraq into a democracy?

The torture report shows beyond any reasonable doubt which side of the contradiction deserves to be vindicated. It shows the CIA to be a bunch of sadistic bumblers, brutally torturing people (sometimes innocent people) while gathering very little if any useful intelligence from it.

And here's the kicker: this is exactly what conservative ideology would predict — that is, if conservatives were willing to apply their skepticism about government consistently to everything it does. Instead, they go in the diametrically opposite direction, not only denying the mountain of evidence compiled by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but actively denouncing those who made the truth publicly available. As if the properly patriotic thing to do — the authentically conservative approach — is to promulgate consoling lies that conceal the monstrous behavior of the CIA. That pushes the contradiction so far that it lapses into utter incoherence.

2. Oops, we forgot the justification.

Let's assume you're a conservative inclined to think torture might have been justified in the years after Sept. 11 because we needed to uncover plots even bigger and deadlier than turning loaded passenger jets into guided missiles. We needed to know about plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction in American cities. The idea that the Bush administration would sit back and not do everything in its power — including morally troubling things — to gather as much information as possible about possible ticking time bombs is absurd. Of course they tortured people. If they hadn't, and terrorists had detonated a biological, chemical, or nuclear bomb in New York City or Washington D.C., it would have been a civilizational disaster. In such circumstances, it would have been morally wrong for a president not to torture terrorist subjects with crucial information.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for this argument. But note: In going beyond ordinary standards of morality and decency, and warping the law to allow actions that under normal (non-emergency) conditions would never be permitted, the Bush administration was engaging in a very high-stakes gamble. Such extreme, emergency actions can only be justified — can only be distinguished from acts of a lawless tyranny — if they do, in fact, prevent the catastrophe they were intended to forestall. The justification follows entirely from the consequences. If a nuclear blast in lower Manhattan is averted because of intelligence extracted through torture, the president who authorized it is a national hero, a great statesman. But if the torture yields next to nothing at all — or only vague intimations about a plot to blow up some gas stations — then the president may well be guilty of impeachable offenses or worse.

Yes, it really is that straightforward.

And judged by that standard, the actions authorized by President Bush make him look a lot more like a criminal than a statesman. That might seem harsh, but them's the breaks — and conservatives have not even begun to grapple with what it implies about the last one of their own to serve as commander in chief.

3. Wait, who's in charge here?

One of the strangest things to come out of the Senate's torture report is the news that President Bush received his first CIA briefing on "enhanced interrogation techniques" in April 2006 — roughly four years after those techniques began to be used on detainees. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — all them were briefed on the brutal treatment of prisoners long before the president who authorized it in the first place.

At the same time, CIA officials repeatedly exaggerated (meaning: lied about) the effectiveness of the program — and responded to evidence that the use of torture was ineffective at generating accurate and actionable intelligence by...ordering even more torture.

All of which raises the question of just who the hell was running the country from 2002 to 2006. Sure, President Bush and his leading advisers actively prosecuted the Iraq War and pursued myriad other policies in those years. But when it came to the most radical efforts to fight Islamic terrorism — the efforts that pushed the country furthest away from normal moral standards and furthest beyond accepted norms and restraints — the president of the United States decided it was a good idea to disengage and delegate everything to an unaccountable agency run by a bunch of self-regarding, ass-covering sadists.

Is there any conservative who wouldn't be outraged by such a flagrant example of irresponsibility, if presented with it in the abstract?

Is there any conservative (besides John McCain, a victim of "enhanced interrogation" at the hands of the North Vietnamese military) who won't automatically dismiss the actual torture report as a partisan stunt out to discredit members of the home team?

I'm still waiting...