MSNBC Interview - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC Interview - Transcript

Msnbc Interview With Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

Subject: Interrogation Tactics Interviewer: Norah O'donnell

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MS. O'DONNELL: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat from Rhode Island and he sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as the Intelligence Committee and held hearings about this just yesterday.

Senator, good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Thank you, Norah. Thank you for inviting me onto your show.

MS. O'DONNELL: Absolutely, and of course, I want to start first with this report that's on the DailyBeast.com by our former NBC senior investigative producer with the headline, "Cheney's Role Deepens," that it came from two U.S. intelligence officials confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

If that is, in fact, true, does that disturb you?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Not only does it disturb me, but it takes the waterboarding outside of whatever protective cover the Office of Legal Counsel torture memos provide because those memos are predicated on a very specific scenario in which there has to be significant information about an imminent threat to the United States, with a short time horizon and that's the limitation of the authority the OLC memos provide.

If the motivation for doing this was to get political information connecting Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and wasn't related to a direct attack on the United States, then it falls directly under the cases that show that waterboarding is a crime in America and is stripped of all protection from the OLC memorandum.

So it's a serious situation.

MS. O'DONNELL: That's a really important point, Senator, and I am glad that you said that because this does not involve preventing an imminent attack, and, of course, there's another question about whether torture should be used or waterboarding in that case anyway. But as you point out as the OLC memos said in that case, it had to be an imminent threat.

Does it suggest that the office of the vice president was pushing these interrogation methods to find information that they wanted on, perhaps, to prove that the Iraq war was justified?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: It does suggest that. There's been some suggestion of that from Colin Powell's assistant, I think, colonel or general; I don't remember the name, Wilkerson --

MS. O'DONNELL: Colonel Wilkerson.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: There's been some suggestion of that in the Armed Services Committee report. This is yet another suggestion of it. This thing is just getting deeper and deeper.

MS. O'DONNELL: So should there be an investigation? And will Democrats there in the Senate support such an investigation to see whether or not Bush administration officials should be prosecuted?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I think the best answer to that is that there are investigations. Senator Levin is the chairman of Armed Services, has already published a very, very good report and if this was done through defense channels, I'm sure that that committee would be interested in pursuing this. To the extent that this was pursued through intelligence channels, then that is right within the orbit of Chairman Feinstein's ongoing investigation in the Senate Intelligence Committee. She is very determined. She is very able and experienced and that is going to be a very thorough and good investigation, I believe.

MS. O'DONNELL: Senator, there's also come up the issue about a truth commission when it comes to torture or these enhanced interrogation techniques and what Congress knew about those. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been questioned about whether she was complicit in these techniques because she did not protest them or raise issues. She had a big news conference today. I just want to play for you what she said because --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Sure.

MS. O'DONNELL: She's essentially accusing the CIA of misleading Congress about this waterboarding. Let's listen.

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI (D-CA) (From video.): Let's get this straight. The Bush administration has conceived a policy, the CIA comes to the Congress, withholds information about the timing and the use of this subject. This is a tactic, a diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off of those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies.

MS. O'DONNELL: Senator, let me just ask you to just comment sort of generally. If you were a member of Congress, either in the House or Senate and you had been briefed in 2002 in this case that there was waterboarding going on, do you think you should have protested? Should any member of Congress who thought this was wrong, should they have rung the alarm bells at that time?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: You have to evaluate that question in the light of the very high level of classification that was put around this program. Very likely Speaker Pelosi was not allowed to tell other members of Congress. She was probably not allowed to tell even her own staff. As a Senator, I have received briefings about matters where my staff have to leave the room --

MS. O'DONNELL: Senator, but then just --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: In the very small Group of Eight briefings, there's literally nothing that you can do without violating national security other than go back to the people who've told you they're already doing this.

MS. O'DONNELL: Except that five months --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: So I really can't find much fault there.

MS. O'DONNELL: Except that five months after the first September 4th, 2002 meeting when the CIA says it informed Congresswoman Pelosi about this waterboarding, five months later, Jane Harman was briefed on this and she did, in fact, send a letter to the CIA general counsel expressing profound concerns about the tactics. So Jane Harman did express concerns about this at the time in a letter in a private way.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: A private letter like that really doesn't have much affect on the Bush administration. So I'm glad that Chairman Harman did that, but I really think it's stretching it and quite a bit unfair to find fault with Speaker Pelosi for her actions when what she was told, first of all, was very carefully scripted and sanitized by the CIA if it's consistent with what we were told and she was put into this, sort of classification cage where she had nobody she could talk to about it, no staff, nobody to type anything. Chairman Rockefeller had to do a letter that he had to write by hand.

There is a separate problem here we need to get into later on about the extent to which members of Congress don't have the ability to declassify information and the executive branch does and the abuse of that power by the Bush administration, but that's a question for later --

MS. O'DONNELL: Interesting.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: But it's raised very much by this important issue.

MS. O'DONNELL: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat, you're great to join us. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: It's a pleasure.

END.

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