torture -- cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. We're not going to change that. That is set. We've made a lot of progress in civilization. We're there now. But you can, under certain circumstances, you can come into this courtroom and say, I'm invoking the necessity defense. Hear me out, listen to the facts. There was a ticking bomb. We knew it; it was going to go off in 30 minutes. The facts established that. We had to do what we had to do. We hand ourselves into the hands of justice to understand our actions under the necessity defense. That accepts the responsibility of complying with law, but also understand that there are going to be circumstances where you have to have the courage and, frankly, the maturity as a nation to say, we've stepped outside of the law for a very, very good reason, and we stand and you may judge us. TOOBIN: Matt, you were in the Defense Department in the first term, right? WAXMAN: Yup. TOOBIN: When Secretary Rumsfeld was still there and when the detainee issues really first bubbled up. That's sort of why you were hired, as I recall. WAXMAN: Right. TOOBIN: When you were trying to make your judgments and give advice, what did you worry about? Did you worry about international law? Did you worry about criminal law? What was the guiding principle there? WAXMAN: This gets back to the issue I talked about before of a