CNN American Morning - Transcript
CNN
SHOW: AMERICAN MORNING 07:00
HEADLINE: U.S. Forces, Iraqi Police Raid Home of Ahmed Chalabi; 3-Year- Old Girl Abandoned in Baltimore
GUESTS: Susan Collins, Christopher McCabe
BYLINE: Soledad O'Brien, Bill Hemmer, Jack Cafferty, Harris Whitbeck, Elaine Quijano
HIGHLIGHT:
U.S. forces and Iraqi police today raiding the home of Ahmed Chalabi. Three-year-old Courtney needs your help was abandoned in Baltimore two weeks ago, when the man believed to be her father left her with a stranger and never came back.
BODY:
O'BRIEN: Elaine Quijano for us this morning-Elaine thanks.
Top generals were on Capitol Hill yesterday facing tough questioning about the prison abuse scandal. A Senate committee is trying to find out who knew what and when and whether orders from senior officers set the scene for the abuse.
Joining us this morning from Capitol Hill is Senator Susan Collins. She's a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Nice to see you, Senator. Thanks for joining us.
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS ®, ARMED SERVICES CMTE.: Good morning.
O'BRIEN: We heard in testimony from the three generals yesterday that there were systemic problems; that there definitely seems to be a lack of a definite sense of who was in charge.
But at the same time the generals said that the abuse was isolated and they also deny that there was any sort of culture of abuse.
Those things actually sound contradictory. Do they sound contradictory to you?
COLLINS: I think there are still many unanswered questions about who was in charge of this prison and whether the band of prisoners-I mean, guards-acted on their own or pursuant to directions from military intelligence or those up the chain of command.
O'BRIEN: So you don't necessarily agree with the generals' theory that what I sometimes call the bad apple theory. It's a handful of bad apples that sort of created this abuse and are responsible for it and it doesn't go any further than that?
COLLINS: We still don't know the answer to that question. I'm skeptical that a small group of out of control guards would chose to humiliate and abuse these prisoners in a way that was specifically calculated to be particularly offensive to Muslim men. That strikes me as too much knowledge for these guards to have.
O'BRIEN: Senator Byrd had a question for General Abazaid yesterday. I'm going to read it to you. He said, essentially, does anyone in a civilian leadership of the Pentagon need to approve the rules of interrogation operations and Gen. Abazaid answered my answer is no it is our responsibility as-telling him essentially that decisions are made by commanders in the field.
In your mind, does that answer, essentially clear any sort of high-ranking Pentagon officials including the Secretary of Defense?
COLLINS: It's still not clear in my mind whether there was some kind of directive that these detainees should be treated differently, that perhaps the Geneva Conventions did not apply to all of them because they were not technically prisoners of war. Those are among the unanswered questions that we do need to resolve.
O'BRIEN: You wrap up your interviews with the three generals or at least this part of it. Who do you want to hear from?
I mean, who do you need to talk to to get the answers to those questions because you seem to be saying there's lots of things that are unclear to you and the commission I imagine as well?
COLLINS: To me, we need to know more about the role of the intelligence agencies and military intelligence in particular.
A General Fay is doing a review of the military intelligence issues. I expect that that report will come to our committee as well as to the Pentagon. That will be a signpost for whom we should call before the committee next.
But to me, I'd like to hear more from military intelligence about their role in running this prison, in participating in the interrogations, and what directions if any they gave to the prison guards.
O'BRIEN: Senator Susan Collins of Maine joining us this morning. Nice to see you, Senator, thanks.
COLLINS: Thank you.