The CIA’s Directorate of Operations doesn’t have an acute memory. But it does have durable institutional sentiments. So here’s a guess: In a few years, few operatives in the clandestine service will remember Langley’s rebuttal to a recent Senate report on detention and harsh interrogation practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

It’s doubtful whether a soul will recall in any detail, let alone read afresh, the 6,700-page report, which is probably already at the bottom of the unread paper stacks that always litter CIA offices. It’s also a good guess that most operatives will view the “truth telling” efforts and “atonement” of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her Democratic colleagues in the same way as most of the officers I met after joining the Directorate of Operations in 1985 viewed the Church and Pike Committees’ investigations of covert action in the 1970s — as tendentious, hyperbolic, dishonest inquiries that reinforced Republican sympathies among the case-officer cadre.