Here are its core tenets:

After 9/11, the U.S. captured a lot of al-Qaeda terrorists.

Torturing them was effective in gaining important intelligence.

In the aftermath of 9/11, there was broad support for subjecting terrorists to these brutal tactics, because no one knew if more devastating attacks were imminent.

The professionals at the CIA diligently did what they thought they had to do.

This would be a lot more plausible (though still not actually true) if every last tortured prisoner was like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the attempt to portray the CIA's torture program as relatively forgivable falls apart when examined beside the facts. Let's take a smart, intellectually honest torture-opponent's assessment of CIA interrogations as our illustration of the spy agency being given too much credit. Ross Douthat begins by harkening back to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, amid the shock the attack produced and because of what seemed like an immense knowledge deficit about what our enemies were capable of doing," Americans feared that more mass casualty attacks were imminent, he argued. "This belief shaped the decisions made by senior policymakers as well as the attitudes of the general public, and it was shared by leaders of both parties, however leading Democrats prefer to cast their position nowadays."

He continued, "the pervasiveness of that belief, especially in those first anthrax days, has to shape on how we retrospectively assess the decision to push the envelope," adding, "this was a path our entire government took, with a public consensus at its back." He sees these as mitigating factors, but consider what his analysis leaves out.

* * *

"Of the 119 known detainees," the Senate intelligence committee report declares, "at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification." They "remained in custody for months after the CIA determined that they did not meet the standard," and one of these improperly detained prisoners, Abu Hudhaifa, "endured 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation and ice water baths," ABC News notes, "before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be."

In other words, even if you're someone who is inclined to give the CIA a break for torturing al-Qaeda members, there is no reason to give them a moral or legal pass for that most serious of all negligent acts save homicide: carelessly torturing an innocent. Nor is there any reason to excuse holding prisoners without cause for months. It isn't as if they thought releasing those men sooner would cause another 9/11. Isn't being so careless as to torture an innocent something worth punishing? Or is it somehow okay if the same program tortured other people who weren't innocent?