CBS "Face the Nation" - Transcript: Torture

Interview

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SCHIEFFER: -- and giving us your side of it.

Maine's Independent senator, Angus King, serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He supported release of this report, along with the Democrats.

Senator, glad to have you.

When the CIA says these programs worked, you said, well, what would you expect them to say?

So is this your way of saying they just misled the committee...

SEN. ANGUS KING (I), MAINE: Well...

SCHIEFFER: -- to justify what they did?

KING: You know, one of the problems with this whole project was that they asked the people who were conducting the interviews to do their own evaluation.

What's somebody going to say who they're paid $80 million, by the way. These were outside consultants who were doing the -- who were managing this interrogation process.

They said, of course, it's working.

I think there was misleading of the Committee and it's -- there's a -- it's detailed in the report, an understatement of what was actually done, overstatement of what was achieved. And it -- it's pretty clear, as John McCain said, read the report.

I -- I sat all one week in the -- in the secure facility last spring and read the 500 pages, all the 2012 notes...

SCHIEFFER: Well...

KING: -- and it's -- it's pretty -- it's pretty bad.

SCHIEFFER: Well, people misleading Congress, that's a pretty serious thing.

What should be done about this?

KING: It is serious. Well, I don't think, looking back and prosecuting and all those kinds of things is -- is productive. The important thing about this, to me, Bob, is we learn from it and we decide that we're not going to do it again because it's not what America is.

This is an exceptional country, but it's not because we're smarter or better looking or have oil deposits or grand mountains or views. It's because we're based on an ideal going back to the very origin of the country.

George Washington, in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, when he was losing that war, when he conveyed British prisoners to his people, the order was treat them with humanity and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army.

SCHIEFFER: You said that you don't think people who misled Congress ought to be -- no action should be taken at this point. I assume you also mean that for people if they did commit these practices that have since been stopped.

But do you think it is time, as some of your colleagues believe, to just kind of clean out the CIA from top to bottom?

KING: Well, I don't think that one of the things that shook me about this, because of the misleading of Congress, is how do we conduct our oversight faction if we can't fully believe what we're being told. That's how we do oversight. We call witnesses. They tell us what's going on.

If -- and -- and I think that's a very serious question here.

And how do we perform that?

I do think -- and I -- I know John Brennan and I respect John Brennan and I think John Brennan stood up in a big way this week and deserves credit for that.

On the other hand, I think as a general rule, it probably would be a good idea in the future to have leaders of the CIA come from outside of the CIA, just as we have a civilian always in charge of the Pentagon.

SCHIEFFER: So do you think John Brennan should resign then?

KING: I don't think he necessarily should resign. The president has confidence in him. And as I say, he stepped up, in my mind. And there's a very important thing say -- he said, Bob. And it goes to your first question about does it work?

For years, we've been hearing it works, it works, it works. We're still hearing it from the apologists this week. Vice President Cheney just said it again this morning.

John Brennan and the CIA official position is it's unknowable whether it works. And that, I think, is a big -- is a big change and really speaks volumes about the effectiveness of this program.

SCHIEFFER: Senator, thank you.

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