MSNBC "The Ed Show" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "The Ed Show" - Transcript

MSNBC "The Ed Show" Interview With Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) Interviewer: Ed Schultz

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MR. SCHULTZ: The Republicans are trying to make a torture story about Nancy Pelosi. That's a diversion tactic. They want to talk and take the focus off the real issue, which is whether the Bush-Cheney crowd broke the law. Now, this is important. Americans want to know the truth, really want to know the truth. Will we ever get a truth commission?

Joining me now is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He held the first and only hearing on the torture memos.

Senator, good to have you on tonight.

From the standpoint of the story is so important because they continually go after Nancy Pelosi -- where there's smoke, there's fire. Americans want to know, what has to happen for us to get a truth commission and get to the bottom of all of this?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I think that the two steps that will form the foundation for, I think, a truth commission, really, or an accountability commission becoming inevitable, one is the Office of Professional Responsibility report coming out of the Department of Justice about what went wrong at the Office of Legal Counsel that allowed such a proud and famous office to produce such rotten work in the form of the torture memos.

MR. SCHULTZ: And what's the time frame for that?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: That should be, I would say, days or weeks. I mean, they closed off the input from the subject back on May 4th, so it's been two weeks since then. And it could be any day now as a result.

The other thing is going to be the investigation that the Senate Intelligence Committee is doing under the leadership of Chairman Feinstein into the full aspects of the torture techniques -- their effectiveness, their application, the conditions of humanity and hygiene in which they were applied, all of it. And I think that will lead to very significant knowledge that we don't have now, or at least many people don't have now.

MR. SCHULTZ: Okay. So I'm hearing you say that the wheels are in motion, heading in the right direction, and you think that we're going to get a truth commission. You think that this is long from over. Is that what I'm hearing tonight?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Yeah, I think, between the OPR investigation, between what Chairman Levin has done in Armed Services, between what Chairman Feinstein is going to continue to do in Intelligence, it's going to build to a point where people are going to realize, A, they haven't been told the truth, and B, this is important enough that we should really take it out of the political realm and have somebody kind of look at the whole picture and summarize it and make recommendations for the American people.

MR. SCHULTZ: Is all this conversation about Nancy Pelosi, has it sped up or intensified anything at all with these processes that are in motion?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: It's been a side show. I think it's ramped up press interest a little bit, but it's meaningless. And the more people understand about the underlying facts, the more meaningless and silly this escapade is going to seem and the more it's going to look, I think, as if she's been the victim of a political stunt here.

MR. SCHULTZ: Okay. And why do you think the White House has been so silent on a truth commission? It would seem to me, with all this coverage and all this conversation, that they would -- do you get a sense from them which way they would go on this?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I don't have a sense on that yet. I think that the president is still dedicating all of his primary efforts to steering America out of the economic morass that President Bush left for him. He needs to clean that up. Families all over the country are depending on him. And he does not want to show that he's distracted in any way. I can appreciate that. We have one president, and we need his attention devoted to that.

We have a lot of members of the Senate, a lot of members of Congress. We have committees that have particular duties and responsibilities.

MR. SCHULTZ: Yeah.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: And I think for us to pursue our duties and responsibilities is the right thing to do, and for the president to focus on turning America around is also the right thing to do. So I don't see a real conflict there.

MR. SCHULTZ: Senator Whitehouse, good to have you on "The Ed Show" tonight. Thanks so much.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Good to be with you.

MR. SCHULTZ: You bet.

END.

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