MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" Interview With Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Interviewer: Rachel Maddow

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MS. MADDOW: Do you remember "O Fortuna," the very scary musical mascot of the Republican campaign against the plan to close Guantanamo?

(Videotaped clip of advertisement showing pictures of terrorists with the song "O Fortuna" playing.)

MS. MADDOW: The scary soundtrack, plus the deliberate conflation of putting suspected terrorists on trial and in prison in the U.S. with the idea of just releasing them willy-nilly onto the streets of small-town America, actually turned out to be politically effective. The "Be afraid" ad hit the inter-webs on May 5th. By May 20th, the "O Fortuna" fear index was so high, it had infected many Democrats in the United States Senate, where funding to close Guantanamo was defeated by a vote of 90 to 6. And what passed included a prohibition on transferring Guantanamo prisoners to the United States.

Now, today, House and Senate negotiators have agreed to a compromise that would allow the president to send prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States for trial for about the next four months. The compromise language only allows for trials, not for prison time, and it is only effective through September 30th. But it still looks like progress for the president, and therefore for the plan to close Guantanamo.

Joining us now is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, a member of the Judiciary Committee. He's also one of just six Senate Democrats with apparent immunity to the effects of "O Fortuna," meaning that he voted for the idea that this country can actually put really bad people on trial in this country safely.

Senator Whitehouse, it's really nice to have you here in the studio. Thanks for coming in.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Thank you. It's good to be with you.

MS. MADDOW: Have I characterized this compromise correctly? It seems to me like the president's agenda for closing Guantanamo did make a little bit of headway with this compromise.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I think it did.

MS. MADDOW: Okay.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I think it did. It's the first strike back against the politics of fear and NIMBYism and towards the very rational point of view that the United States Department of Corrections can quite easily hold very dangerous people in facilities that provide maximum security and from which there has never been an escape. And former U.S. attorneys like myself are very confident in our ability to hold people safely in these prisons. And this is a good start.

MS. MADDOW: I am actually a little bit surprised that this has not been read more politically as an attack on the character of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I was a former prison reform activist before I ever got into this line of work, and far be it from me to heap praise on any Department of Corrections or the Bureau of Prisons, but I would never imply that they're incapable of holding people safely. Clearly that's one thing that we're very good at as a country.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: They're very good at it.

MS. MADDOW: This compromise lasts only through the end of September. What do you think needs to happen legislatively or in terms of policy made from the White House? What needs to happen between now and then in order for the plan to close Guantanamo to really be on track?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I think that many of my colleagues will want to see the plan for how the Obama administration is going to handle different categories of Guantanamo detainee fleshed out a little bit more. And then I think they'll be in a position to say, "Well, I voted against the president in the 90 to 6 because there wasn't a plan, but now there's a plan and now I'm comfortable supporting the president."

MS. MADDOW: Okay. As I mentioned, you were one of six senators who didn't vote to strip away the funding for the president's plan to close Guantanamo. You were one of the six in that 90 to 6 vote. Is that a hard place to be?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: It was a small place to be.

MS. MADDOW: (Laughs.) Cozy?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: But it was a good place to be -- the chairman of the Intelligence Committee; the chairman and the number two senior of the Armed Services Committee. We had some knowledgeable people who were on the right side of that, I think.

MS. MADDOW: You are on the Intelligence Committee --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Yes.

MS. MADDOW: -- which, of course, is reviewing the treatment of high-value detainees, what's being described as an exhaustive investigation. You gave a very, very powerful speech on the Senate floor two nights ago about torture. We played a long piece of it. And you talked about the degree to which the American people have been misled on the issue.

In what way do you think that we've been misled? What do you think is wrong about the way we've been talking about and fighting about torture?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: The storyline, Rachel, has been that here are these al Qaeda terrorists who are tougher than anyone. And if you put them in front of FBI agents who have to give them Miranda warnings and inexperienced Army interrogators, they get no place. But then you turn them over to the tough, experienced CIA interrogators and then suddenly very significant information that saves lives begins to emerge.

MS. MADDOW: That sounds like the outline of the president's speech on that in September 2006. That's exactly what he said.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: And exactly what Vice President Cheney has been saying, and it's been the party line on this subject really from the very beginning.

MS. MADDOW: Yes.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: The problem is that as you drill into it, you find out that all of the different elements aren't true. You find out that the CIA was actually the amateurish organization in interrogations and the FBI agents and the military interrogators were the true trained professionals.

You find that in a case specifically mentioned by Vice President Cheney, the case of Abu Zubaydah. It was under professional interrogation by an FBI agent and a CIA agent under proper professional interrogation techniques that he gave up first so much information that the CIA scrambled a jet full of doctors to save his life, because he'd been wounded in his capture and might have been dying; second, the information that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 plot, was, in fact, behind that plot; and third, the information about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, which got Ashcroft activated in Moscow to do a press conference, it was so significant.

All of that information came out under professional interrogation. In between, he'd been turned over to the CIA private contractors for the abusive techniques, and they'd never gotten a thing. They had been shut down cold, and then he'd been given back to the FBI agent, back to regular techniques.

And the interesting thing, according to the FBI agent who actually did this investigation, is that what broke him wasn't abusive techniques. It was that he had done the research to know what his mother's pet name for him was. And when he used that name, the guy just fell apart, couldn't hold out any longer.

MS. MADDOW: This is the FBI interrogator who testified behind the screen at your hearing.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Yeah.

MS. MADDOW: The way you have described that makes me really want to know an answer to a question that nobody's been able to tell me. I've been asking a lot of different people. The remit of what the Intelligence Committee is looking at right now, looking at what happened to high-value detainees, millions of pages of documents, succeeded in getting agreements to get stuff completely unredacted.

We know it's going to be a big comprehensive look at what happened to those high-value detainees. Does it only look at what the CIA did, or will it look at the chain of command, whether or not instruction came from the White House, the Office of the Vice President, beyond the intelligence agencies?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: We're not at the stage yet in the investigation where those chain-of-command issues are yet raised. I hope very much that it will. I believe that it implicates chain-of-command issues. And I think that that's a critical question.

MS. MADDOW: But it's not what the Intelligence Committee is looking at right now, and we should not expect that will be in the Intelligence Committee's report when it comes out in six months or so?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I would not go that far. I think it's -- you have to sort of -- investigations are step by step. They're iterative.

MS. MADDOW: Yeah.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: And you have to get to a certain place before you go on. And we're not quite at that place, so that decision hasn't been made. I hope it gets made. I think it will be made. There is, I think, justification for it to be made. But it does raise additional issues about getting beyond the purview of the Intelligence Committee and into what the Bush administration contended was protected by executive privilege.

MS. MADDOW: Right.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: So conceivably other investigations, executive branch investigations, might have gotten underway by that point. And against an executive branch investigation, executive privilege doesn't apply. So I guess stand by.

MS. MADDOW: What you just said is very important. It is going to be parsed a lot by a lot of people, including me. And it clarifies more of what we should be expecting and not expecting about this and what accountability is going to look like in this country on this issue, actually more than anybody I know has said before. So thank you for that.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: One other important question is, what were the private contractors doing, and why did they have so much access that they could interrupt what was probably the most productive intelligence interrogation yet done in the global war on terror, not once but twice, even though they were unproductive? What enabled them to have that power to interrupt such a productive interrogation?

MS. MADDOW: Yeah, who were they calling in Washington when they were getting those authorizations?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Good questions to be asked.

MS. MADDOW: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, it's been a real pleasure and really useful to have you join us tonight. Thanks for coming in.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: My pleasure. Thank you.

END.

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