ABC "This Week" - Transcript - Benghazi and Syria

Interview

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RADDATZ: Thanks you for joining us this morning Senator McCain.

And joining us now, Rhode Island Democrat, Senator Jack Reed. You heard Senator McCain call Benghazi and those e-mails a cover-up.

REED: Absolutely not. The congress has already had 11 hearings on the topic, over 25,000 pieces of documentation have been provided to the Congress. In fact, the e-mails in question, I believe, were available in February in the context of the John Brennan confirmation hearing.

And more critical I think is two of the most respected Americans, Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, conducted a thorough report, assessingÉ

RADDATZ: They did not look at those e-mails. And in fact Thomas Pickering told ABC News you have to be totally naive to not believe politics was injected in some role.

REED: Well, I think what I would suggest in looking at the play-by-play, is what was going on was not so much the politics of electioneering, but the institutional sort of positioning.

Victoria Nuland, who was representing the State Department, had a long career in public service. She's not a partisan. In fact, she worked for Dick Cheney. She was, I think, very much interested in making sure that the State Department's position and their perceptionÉ

RADDATZ: So, you're saying this is an interagency problem?

REED: I think this is the classic issue of interagency battle about who will say what. And at the end I think what you had was a very sort of consensus document that avoided all of the difficult issues.

RADDATZ: So, it's acceptable for Jay Carney to originally say there was just one, small change in this? And then, we find these 12 different versions, including a very definitive statement, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack. That did not appear in there. That's acceptable?

REED: That did not appear in the talking points, but I recall when Ambassador Rice was being interviewed on one of the TV shows she essentially said there were extremist settlements. She did not contradict that.

The president's, I think, statement immediately after the events, I think a day after the event, was this was an act of terror. So, there's no attempt as I think my colleagues on the other side are suggesting that there was a story being created that there was no terrorist involvement, that terrorism was not at all an issue.

I think what was being debated and seriously, again, just a month ago Jim Clapper, the head of the intelligence community in the United States said based on his view as a professional all these years, those comments were about as fair as accurate--

RADDATZ: But let me go back to the act of terror that you say President Obama talked about the next day in the Rose Garden and that Senator McCain disputed. If the president said it was an act of terror, then why didn't that appear on the talking points?

Can the White House really have it both ways, that they say, oh wait a minute, he said act of terror, but a few days later, they take out those references. So they felt pretty confident about it if they sent the president out to say that.

REED: Well, I think -- again I think they created, through an intra-agency process, a document that everyone could agree upon. And that's almost by definition in Washington, something that is not as specific or as conclusive.

RADDATZ: So, what they did is acceptable to you?

REED: Well, what they did, I think, was try in a very chaotic situation, to come up with points that they felt confident of. They didn't want to go too far in two concepts. One, our intelligence resources or assets that you might not want to disclose. Second, there's an ongoing investigation was just beginning. Those two factors also framed the response.

But I think again, when you talk about this sort of political dynamic, when the president comes out and says quite quickly, with the authority of his office, this was an act of terror, the notion that we're somehow trying to disguise this and make it something else, I think falls away very quickly.

RADDATZ; OK. I want to move quickly to Syria. You heard Senator McCain, and he's been saying it for weeks, that there should be a no-fly zone. Would that really work? Do we really know who the rebels are?

REED: We don't have a good sense of who is on the ground and the cohesion of elements that we have been trying to support over many months. And a no-fly zone is a -- could be feasible from an operational standpoint. But it would, I think, inevitably--

RADDATZ: What would it accomplish?

REED: Well, it might accomplish very little, I fact, because with artillery, you can still fire on innocent civilians and rebels. With armored personnel carriers, you can still move forward, displace troops and they can go after civilians on the ground.

It might not accomplish a great deal, but it would give us a step further to our engagement in a very complicated civil war.

I think the best approach is a diplomatic approach at this point. I know it's always sort of -- or many times pooh-poohed as well, that's just the old sort of diplomacy is not working, but engaging -- and Secretary Kerry has been I think made a step with the Russians to get them to sit down.

RADDATZ: I want to go quickly to the red line. It's been two weeks since the United States said there was evidence that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons. We've done nothing. I know they're checking out chain of custody, but this seems like this could go on forever and we may not do anything.

Should the president do something since they appear to have used chemical weapons?

REED: I think we have to take it very seriously. I think we do have to be careful, though, because we've had situations in the past where we've acted on information that was incomplete, impartial and frankly, to the detriment of our country and national security.

We have to be careful.

I think there's several issues here.

RADDATZ: Should he have drawn that red line? Very quickly.

REED: Well, I think frankly he should have made it clear, as he did, that the use -- the systemic use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people is something the international community cannot tolerate. So, that point has to be.

Now, the question is, what do you do? You can't do it hastily. But you have to do it very deliberately. And I believe that's what the president is trying to do.

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