Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow interviewed human rights attorney Scott Horton regarding the Bush-era memos that purported to provide to the CIA a justification for U.S. torture of its prisoners. Horton provided substantial criticism of the memos and of one of the authors of the memos, Jay Bybee, who currently sits in a tenured position on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals:

The clinical detail of the discussion of the torture techniques is just astonishing. You know, I think the bugs-in-the-box instance that you cited, which we really hadn’t heard anything, before the discussion of waterboarding. But just back up and put some perspective on this. These are techniques that federal prosecutors previously charged as crimes. Moreover, in prosecutions that occurred at the end of the World War II, American federal prosecutors sought the death penalty, sought capital punishment, for people who did these things. And now we see a man who is a federal judge sitting in San Francisco writing a memo saying “wink, nod, fine with me, just go right ahead and do it.” It’s just astonishing, and I think also astonishing that that individual in particular can sit as a federal judge today when the world knows that these memos have been crafted and, in fact, when he’s the subject of a pending criminal proceeding in Spain.