Such technological tools ... are helping us now in the hot war against terrorists who would bomb this theater if they had the capacity to do so.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

Any human being has private thoughts.

Well, first of all, no professor should be able to say, I refuse to defend my position. I refuse to debate my position.

If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.

I am a man of principle. I will stick by my principles. I will tell the truth no matter where the chips fall.

In our criminal justice system, we say it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for even one innocent person to be wrongly convicted.