During a congressional investigation that occurred on the same day a video of brutal interrogation tactics being employed at Guantanamo Bay was distributed to media outlets, Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for President George W. Bush, refused to agree with the standard definition of what constitutes torture and claimed that certain aspects of exceedingly harsh treatment could be applied humanely.

Representative Jerrod Nadler, a Democrat from New York, learns that Feith truly believes it is legal and humane to make detainees undergo twenty-hour long interrogation sessions, subjecting them to personal phobias like growling dogs to instill distress, taking their clothes away and keeping a hood over their head the entire time. Feith, a leading mastermind behind these excruciating interrogation techniques, refuses to classify sleep deprivation, imposed blindness, and psychological trauma as torture, instead arguing that these practices just amount to making detainees uncomfortable.

Feith sometimes seemed to be trivializing details and avoiding specificity. Feith appeared to take issue on technicalities, making unimportant distinctions that do not lessen the extremities that define torture, such as oddly stating that having no clothes is not being naked. Such depersonalization removes humanity and Feith still says it is humane. He defends every aspect of torture, and then refuses to call it what it is.