MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript:

Interview

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MADDOW: Colorado Senator Mark Udall is a member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that released the report yesterday.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island was on the committee as well when it voted to undertake this investigation and started on this report.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island joins us now live.

Senator Whitehouse, good to see you. Thanks for being here.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), RHODE ISLAND: Good to see you.

MADDOW: So, what Senator Udall alleged there, what he claimed today on the Senate floor is hard to hear, particularly if one of the silver linings, it feels like, is that we`re finally owning up to this and making sure it`s in the past and we`re willing to describe what happened. Is he right that there are people who are implicated in this program that are still working in high level positions?

WHITEHOUSE: Yes.

MADDOW: High enough that the White House should fire them?

WHITEHOUSE: The purpose of the report was never to cause personnel action. The purpose of the report was to chronicle what happened and to correct the two misperceptions that were being put out it wasn`t as bad as all that, and that it produced results.

Coincidentally, it happened to produce information we were not aware of, that it was the executive branch as well as Congress that was lied to or deceived about the program. But I think to focus on individuals takes you into a place where you`ve really got to bring in so much other circumstance about what they knew, what they believed, what their role was.

If somebody was told that the attorney general of the United States had said that this was legal and that their boss had said this was essential to the national security of the United States and they did not know better, that`s a very different set of facts than somebody who was involved in trying to cover up the fact that the office of legal counsel opinions were bogus and trying to suppress and order the destruction of other memos that countered them. So, it`s just too hard to get into it case by case in my view without a lot more detail.

MADDOW: It is at the same time difficult, I think it`s difficult to explain in what sense torture is illegal once it`s documented to this extent but nobody has ever been fired for it, let alone prosecuted for it. I mean, there`s a case that the only person who has ever faced any legal ramifications for torture in this country is John Kiriakou, who fashions himself as a whistleblower on this subject. He`s the only person who`s ever been prosecuted in any relation to this.

WHITEHOUSE: If you look to history we prosecuted U.S. military soldiers for waterboarding people during the Philippines insurgency. We prosecuted Japanese soldiers and I believe executed some for waterboarding Americans during World War II, and we prosecuted and jailed a Texas sheriff for waterboarding detainees back in the Reagan administration.

So, there`s some track record of doing it. It`s not that prosecuting is wrong. It`s that you can`t make a decision about who the target should be without looking in detail into individual cases.

MADDOW: The other thing that this report did d not do is make recommendations for U.S. government change, whether or not it was personnel specific, didn`t make policy change recommendations or ways to avoid something like this happening again in the absence of individual personal accountability.

Why are there no recommendations like that?

WHITEHOUSE: We wanted to get the story out. We wanted to make sure that it wasn`t lost to history and scrubbed and we wanted to correct the misimpression that this was relatively mild. I can remember hearing on testimony that this was -- waterboarding was the kind of technique that once you applied it, then you just got everything. It was unpleasant, but it was done.

So, the idea that somebody had to be waterboarded 80 or 180 times completely inconsistent with what we were told. Then you mentioned Abu Zubaydah earlier. He`s the living proof of the fact that they have been deceitful about how that torture program contributed to getting evidence from him.

As you know, you`ve had Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who was in charge of this, on your show. That all came out before they brought in the torturer --

MADDOW: Right, he provided useful information under FBI techniques which were not coercive. They started torturing him thereafter and got nothing else useful from him.

WHITEHOUSE: So, what the Cheneys, and the Haydens and other people will say is, the torture program -- I should say that the interrogation program got this evidence out. But what they don`t distinguish is the legitimate interrogation done by FBI and CIA professionals and this ham- handed, amateurish contractor run torture program which did not.

MADDOW: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, I find you to be a very clear speaker on these issues, and I always really appreciate talking about these things. Thanks, sir.

WHITEHOUSE: Good to be on your show.

MADDOW: It`s good to see you again. Thank you.

WHITEHOUSE: Thank you.

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