MSNBC ""Hardball With Chris Matthews" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "HARDBALL WITH CHRIS MATTHEWS" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI); SENATOR KIT BOND (R-MO)

INTERVIEWER: CHRIS MATTHEWS

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MR. MATTHEWS: Was the Bush administration devising torture tactics to get terror suspects to admit to a connection or claim a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, between Iraq, the need to invade Iraq, and what happened to us on 9/11? The Senate Armed Services Committee report has this excerpt from an Army psychiatrist, Major Paul Burney, who was assigned to interrogations at Guantanamo.

"This is my opinion. Even though they" -- the detainees -- "were giving information, and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Joining me now are two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, who's the ranking member of the committee.

I want to start with Senator Whitehouse. What do you make of this claim by a member of the intelligence community who was working on interrogating these suspects that there was a mission on the part of the interrogators to try to make a connection between Saddam Hussein and the need to attack his country and what happened to us on 9/11, which was not successful, but apparently it angered the people doing the interrogations to the point where it was not helpful?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Chris, that's an important claim because it bears on the analysis that a prosecutor would look at in making a decision about whether somebody should be charged criminally in all of this conduct.

The Office of Legal Counsel opinion set a number of predicates that were required before these different torture techniques could be applied. And it would seem -- again, this is a sort of first impression, because a prosecutor would have to look a lot harder at it -- but from the information that we have, it would seem that that might fall outside of the predicates and strip away the cover of the OLC memorandum.

MR. MATTHEWS: Well, Senator Bond, we know from the history of this war that at least a half a dozen times the vice president went over to Langley to try to push for a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. And now we find a person coming forward saying, yes, that was the pressure that was put on these prisoners to try to get them to admit to such a connection, and it was frustrated by apparent reality they couldn't find any evidence in the testimony. What do you make of this?

SEN. BOND: First, Chris, you're mixing up a report from the Armed Services Committee, which was not briefed on the CIA intelligence program. The CIA intelligence program was limited by the parameters outlined in the Office of Legal Counsel opinions. We will do a thorough investigation in our committee of how these methods were used and what information they got.

We've heard from previous directors of Central Intelligence and the current director of National Intelligence that these tactics provided valuable information. And even our 2006 work in the Intelligence Committee, unanimously approved by all members, Republican and Democrat, said this is a good program. We want to know more about it. But this has been very effective.

So we are looking at the intelligence interrogations. And to my knowledge, none of those had anything in establishing a link. The whole purpose was to gain cooperation to find out who the leaders of al Qaeda were and about planned attacks on the United States. And the director of Central Intelligence said we disrupted a plot to have a 9/11-type attack on Los Angeles.

MR. MATTHEWS: Which area --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Chris, I'm --

MR. MATTHEWS: -- of interrogation are you saying, Senator, was not involved with trying to establish a connection? Was it Army, Defense Department, or was it CIA? Which one --

SEN. BOND: None of --

MR. MATTHEWS: -- do you say was not involved?

SEN. BOND: I don't know what the Armed Services Committee has done. We are investigating the intelligence community reports. And I would say that six Republican members of the Armed Services Committee have put out a statement strongly objecting to the implications of the report and saying that it was not accurate. So they're going to have to work that one out. We are going to make our own investigation in the Intelligence Committee.

MR. MATTHEWS: Let me ask Senator Whitehouse, if you were president of the United States and you were faced with an urgent situation and you were told by your experts that a little bit of pressure on one of these prisoners might get some information -- we're not sure -- would you take the chance with coercive techniques or not? Would you?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I would be inclined not to. I have repeatedly offered amendments that would restrict the Central Intelligence Agency to the proven techniques of the Army Field Manual. I think the exercise that we are going through right now as a country with our shock, and I think also, to a degree, our shame that we are a torturing country, is proof that this is a misguided decision.

And even if there is some increment of intelligence information that's obtained, the cost of that, when you look at it from a real cost-benefit calculation with the national interest in mind, just isn't worth it. We have done great harm to our country. We've done great harm to our strength in the world. We've done great harm to our credibility. We've potentially even done great harm to our own men and women in uniform by this.

MR. MATTHEWS: So you believe personally that torture doesn't work.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Let me put it this way. We have been looking at this in the Intelligence Committee, along with Vice Chairman Bond. And as far as I would say, the jury is still very much out. We try to drill down to actual specifics, and what we hear is a lot of Bush administration bromides. I'm looking forward to drilling down to the actual specifics and finding out once and for all what, if anything, was done. But a lot of very knowledgeable people believe that there was no meaningful information that was obtained by this.

MR. MATTHEWS: Well, it seems to me, gentlemen, senators, that common sense tells you that some people would be susceptible to even the threat of torture and others would not be. Here's a man who once headed up the CIA's bin Laden unit. He wrote in yesterday's Washington Post, quote, "In a breathtaking display of self- righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their moral compass. Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president doing all that he needed to do to defend America and its citizens. Is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his ideological beliefs?"

Well, my sense is that that guy talking in that memo is an ideologue, a hard-right neocon; my hunch. It's loaded with language like that. But your thought, Senator Kit Bond --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I don't think the facts --

SEN. BOND: Hey, Chris, let's make a couple of points. Number one, we do not torture. The OLC opinions laid out things that you could do that were not torture that would bring them to a point of cooperation. As I said, directors of Central Intelligence have said it's provided very effective information, more than half the information we have on al Qaeda. And it avoided attack on Los Angeles.

MR. MATTHEWS: Right.

SEN. BOND: We will be looking into that. The thing that has hurt our country is the statements like the Senate Armed Services Committee report. We want to know, now that he's given up and ruined the technique for interrogating high-value detainees, how is the Obama administration going to get the information we need to keep our country safe?

MR. MATTHEWS: How can you say, Senator, that the denial of oxygen to a person is not torture? Denial of oxygen -- that's what waterboarding is. Why is that not torture in your vocabulary?

SEN. BOND: Because we use that same technique on over 100,000 volunteers for the Marines, the SEALs and pilots. They look very carefully at it. It is a very unpleasant tactic. I have offered legislation to ban it. But it did produce, according to what we've heard, information that kept America safe. And they were used with the same limitations that were put in use on our volunteer service members.

MR. MATTHEWS: Okay, thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri.

END.

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