WHY is Barack Obama finding it so difficult to pick a new CIA chief? According to Jeff Stein, a national-security reporter, too many candidates for the job are ruling themselves out.

Whereas in pre-9/11 times the job might have been a springboard to bigger things, now "it's a career ender" because it requires direct supervision of such contentious policies as renditions and interrogations.

"You've got to just really love it," a former top CIA official said,  "because it's too painful otherwise."

Reading between the lines here—perhaps Mr Obama and his interviewers are not telling candidates that renditions and torture will be ended under the new administration. That's not what he said during the primary or the general election. But as Eli Lake wrote this summer, Mr Obama's foreign-policy team wants to hunt down terrorists as much as it wants to maintain a moral high ground. Maintaining that high ground is mostly important insofar as it makes it easier to mollify people in rogue states. Applicants for intelligence jobs in this administration must be clued in to that.