I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA.

Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated -- not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of government on torture. But I'm on the right side of history. There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.

I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA.

Immediately after the September 11th attacks, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in any capacity that the CIA wanted me. Four months passed before I was able to go overseas, just because my skill set was not one that was important in those really early days after the attacks.

I've never heard a White House staff say that the president was too stupid or too ill-informed to have broken the law. And that's really what it comes down to. The truth is, he leaked highly classified information that he shouldn't have leaked. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm the president. Nobody can punish me for that." It's another thing entirely to just deny that he did it. We know that he did it. And he really ought to own up to it.

The CIA has transformed from an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets, into a paramilitary organization, a paramilitary force. It's not supposed to be a paramilitary force. It's not good at it. It needs to return to its roots.

The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way.