Back in the days when I was a spy there were certain things that one just did not dwell upon. Everyone who worked in the field knew that there were episodes that it would be best not to recall, either because they were embarrassing, possibly unsavory, or even, more rarely, wildly successful though at a price that one would not be willing to pay a second time around. With that kind of baggage, the expectation was that a retired officer would be best advised to live quietly on a couple acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains and take up landscape painting or breeding Labradors and not think about or try to explain the past.

But that was then, and today the new breed of intelligence officers apparently prefers to flaunt the naughty things that it has been up to. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have read the latest exculpatory effort by a gaggle of retired senior CIA officers seeking to justify torturing people. It is called Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Programs.