MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

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Joining us now is Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who‘s a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees.

Senator Whitehouse, thank you so much for taking the time tonight.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), RHODE ISLAND: Glad to be with you, Alison.

STEWART: I know you have been calling for investigations into this for months. And finally, after seven months in office, the Obama administration will investigate these possible crimes. What‘s your reaction to this decision and its timing?

WHITEHOUSE: I think it‘s a great relief, a great moment for America as a country. We‘ve finally seen the rule of law brought forward in a way that it is clear and direct on this situation, which has been so sort of poisoned with personalities and politics and propaganda. It‘s a first kind of clear, bright light, and I couldn‘t be happier, couldn‘t be more relieved.

STEWART: Is this a wide enough investigation? Do you think it should include not just those who carried out the alleged crimes but those more senior administration officials who sanctioned the program?

WHITEHOUSE: I think that the Department of Justice is a very professional organization and that John Durham is a very professional prosecutor. And I am fully confident that once they are looking at this area they will follow the evidence wherever it leads.

STEWART: Can you tell me what you know about Mr. Durham? I understand he‘s quite publicity shy.

WHITEHOUSE: I used to bump into him when I was the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island and he was in the U.S. attorney‘s office in Connecticut. And we worked on some cases of common jurisdiction together in the Organized Crime Strike Force.

And he‘s very well-regarded by his peers. He‘s a very calm, steady, professional career Department of Justice prosecutor. He‘s I think a first-rate choice and he‘s got a very good grounding in this because he has been doing the investigation into the destruction of the torture tapes.

STEWART: How will Attorney General Holder‘s investigation affect the ongoing work of the Senate Intelligence Committee‘s investigation into torture?

WHITEHOUSE: I think they can go very comfortably in parallel. Because of the classified nature of a lot of what the intelligence committee is doing, there isn‘t a lot of danger of us sort of poisoning the public arena for an eventual trial down the road. Obviously, now that the potential criminal investigation is going forward, we need to make sure that we, in the Senate Intelligence Committee, are cooperating with the Department of Justice and if they ask us to—for investigative reasons—steer away from certain things and let them have the first crack at witnesses and so forth, there is good reason to do that, and we need to be respectful of the department‘s process.

STEWART: Let me ask you about this new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group to be housed at the FBI and then overseen by the National Security Council, not the CIA. Can you explain the significance of this? Why is that so significant?

WHITEHOUSE: It‘s significant, I think, because it brings for the first time, a very rigorous and serious overview to our interrogation of high-value detainees. If you set aside all of the spin and all of the nonsense that you heard out of the top layers of the Bush administration, what you really saw was—for a lot of these high-value detainees, you saw very amateurish investigation by people who knew nothing about al Qaeda, who knew nothing about interrogation, who had familiarity with antique techniques that were used by brutal tyrant regimes for propaganda purposes not for intelligence gathering purposes, and were put for reasons that are still not adequately explained into high value interrogations.

We know from testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that at least one very productive investigation was interrupted and probably ruined by the intervention of these amateurish and brutal techniques into an investigation—an interrogation that was generating absolutely first-class interrogation for our country.

STEWART: Has today‘s report and news affect your view about where we are and where we‘re headed in getting accountability for what happened during the previous administration?

WHITEHOUSE: I think all of this is a step in the right direction. I think that between the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, the exceptional work that Chairman Levin has done with his armed services committee, the work of the Department of Justice to date and obviously now continuing under this expanded authority, and the continuing general interest—I still think that the day of a thoughtful, thorough commission to look back and figure out what the heck went wrong here, why we got so far down this path before cooler heads prevailed, and what the damage was and how we can prevent it from happening again is an important goal. And I think we‘ll end up in that place.

STEWART: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of my former home state of Rhode Island—thank you so much for your time tonight.

WHITEHOUSE: Thank you, Alison.

STEWART: First, President Obama favored death panels to pull the plug on grandma, except he doesn‘t. Now, the president apparently wants to encourage veterans to move it on along to the big barracks in the sky. Navy veteran and U.S. congressman, Joe Sestak, joins us in a moment to help debunk the latest targeted scare tactic being used to keep the health care system just like it is.

And if Chuck Norris wasn‘t bad ass enough to scare you into opposing the Obama administration, would Hulk Hogan do? That‘s next.

Stay with us.

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