Interviews With Senators Feinstein, Lieberman, Graham
KING: Do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?</s>FORMER VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I do. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.</s>KING: Vice President Dick Cheney there on this program just about a month ago. President Obama's election mandate was to fix a struggling U.S. economy but as he starts his 97th day in office today national security challenges are front and center. A debate whether releasing Bush administration terror policies was a blunder and over whether some of the Bush officials should be prosecuted and fresh violence in both Iraq and Pakistan will test the new administration's military and diplomatic strategies. Joining us to talk about this and assess the president's first 100 days, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the independent, former Democrat and from South Carolina, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Chairwoman, I want to start with you. On the vice president's point, you heard the vice president say there he thinks the new administration is making the American people less safe. He also says that there are other memos not released into the public that prove his point that these controversial interrogation tactics used in limited circumstances actually produced intelligence that saved U.S. lives, including preventing an attack in your home State of California, the City of Los Angeles. Is he right?</s>FEINSTEIN: Well, I've received those memos. I asked him for them and he sent them to me. They are classified memos so I won't go into them. That's the reason why I believe the Intelligence Committee is the oversight agency for 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA. It is our responsibility to do oversight. We have access to the classified information. And we have set upon a course, a bipartisan course with a program scope, approved by the committee, to review the conditions of detention and the techniques of interrogation of each of the high value detainees. We estimate that will take six to eight months. My hope is that the public debate quells, that we have an opportunity to do our work. The committee will consider it and then we will release, most likely, findings and recommendations.</s>KING: Findings and recommendations. I want to get to the other senators but to the vice president's point he believes the documents would show that the tactics worked, saved lives.</s>FEINSTEIN: It's very hard to tell on the face, because you have to go into who learned what at the time. Now I can go into one, at least one specific case, and it's very uncertain. So we need to find these things out and we need to do it in a way that's calm and deliberative and professional, because I think all of this, on the front burner, before the public, does harm our intelligence gathering, it does harm America's position in the world. And President Obama has worked so hard now to open a new page, to go to so many countries, to say that America is now on a different course. Let us do our work and let us do it the way it should be done.</s>KING: Senator Graham, you and Senator Lieberman opposed relieving these documents even though you were critics of the interrogation tactics, you thought it would undermine the mission of the united states and the CIA and now that some are out does the former vice president have a point? If some are out, should all be out?</s>GRAHAM: Well, here is my concern, is that, one, I think it was a mistake to release the techniques that we're talking about and inform our enemy as to what may come their way. I like what Senator Feinstein said, to go through it. And there's no doubt in my mind you may have gotten some useful information out of these techniques but the other side of the story is very real. The more than America embraces these techniques like waterboarding that comes from the Inquisition, the harder to get allies to go with us into the Mid East to fight the insurgents. You inflame the opposition. Our energy uses these images against us. To say these techniques have brought about no good or no information is wrong, but also to say that it's been a net positive is wrong. There's a way to get good information in an aggressive manner to protect this nation without having to go into the Inquisition era. I believe you can do both.</s>KING: And what about going forward, Senator Lieberman? The president, in relieving these memos, you didn't like that he did, but the president's message let's look forward, not look back but then the president said I'll leave this up to my attorney general who should be prosecuted. Let's listen to Mr. Holder.</s>ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I will not permit the criminalization of policy differences. However, it is my responsibility, as the attorney general, to enforce the law. It is my duty to enforce the law. If I see evidence of wrongdoing, I will pursue it to the full extent of the law.</s>KING: Are you comfortable with that? Do you think this should be pursued and if you rule out the interrogators saying they were told, they were following orders and acting on legal advice what they were doing was right, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about the CIA director, are we talking about the attorney general in the previous administration, Secretary Rumsfeld, somebody in the White House?</s>LIEBERMAN: Yeah, no, it is not clear who we are talking about. And I think it is a mistake. I go back to what the president said at the beginning, it is time to look forward. These are top secret documents. These were lawyers, you could disagree with them but in my opinion they were trying to do what they thought would protect our country. And here is the most important point. This whole debate is moot. President Obama has prohibited these tactics from being used in interrogation, so what do we gain -- well, what do we gain, first, by releasing the memos, but, secondly, what do we gain from indicting lawyers for their opinions, if that is a possibility here, or holding a so-called Truth Commission that the reality is, it will poison the water here in Washington. It will achieve nothing.</s>LIEBERMAN: It will make it harder for the president to do some of the big things he wants to do for the country -- not just get the economy going, but get some Republican support for health care reform, energy independence and education reform. So let the Intelligence Committee do its work. That should be the end of it.</s>KING: And one of the questions in the political debate, as you well know, there are people out there saying, wait a minute. You have all these politicians -- and largely Democrats, now -- saying, you know, investigate; truth commission; investigate; we had no idea. A timeline released by your committee, Senator Feinstein, says -- and this is backed up the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee -- and then-CIA Director Porter Goss -- Pete Hoekstra -- you know, select members of Congress were briefed -- were briefed, way back at the beginning, including now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And the timeline by your committee says that they were briefed on the use of waterboarding on three detainees, Abu Zubaydah, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The now-Speaker Pelosi says, no way; she was told there were legal -- there were -- legal opinions were written but not that the tactics had been used. Is she telling the truth?</s>FEINSTEIN: Well, I can't comment on that. I wasn't there. Just four people were briefed. The full committee, including myself, were briefed in September of '06. Now, that's four years later or so. So there is a big gap. I am really strongly opposed to just certain members being briefed on something this seriously. It seems to me the whole committee should be briefed at a given time. We've been very good at retaining security, and I think it's a real disadvantage to the system just to have a few people briefed. Because it really is a notification; there is no real discussion. When you deal with the whole committee, everybody fires back questions; there's a discussion; there's a dialogue. And I think a point of view emerges.</s>KING: Well, if -- to Senator Feinstein's point, Senator Graham, if the committee, the Intelligence Committee is going to look into this, and you all think that's the more responsible, measured way to do it, should the committee also look into whether Porter Goss or Nancy Pelosi is telling the truth about what came up at those briefings?</s>GRAHAM: Well, I'll leave that up to the committee. But the point is, if a member of Congress was read into this program, does it matter? Yes, I think it matters. It's clear to me that the people who were devising these interrogation techniques were not trying to commit a crime against an individual person. They were trying to create tools for our intelligence community to get information to prevent what we all thought was going to be an imminent attack. The Geneva Convention did not apply, until 2005, to the war on terror. So I can't conceive of a statute that you could prosecute anyone under because their endeavor was not to commit a crime but to look at the law and come up with aggressive interrogation techniques to get information from an enemy that we all thought was coming after us again. So, however, if you think what they did was a crime, and you read someone into it, they're part of the crime. So I think it's ridiculous to say the lawyers were trying to break the law. They were trying to interpret the law to protect the nation. And any member of Congress that was read into the program, I don't think they have any culpability either, because what we were trying to do is defend the nation, not conspire to hurt somebody individually, but techniques to protect us all.</s>KING: I want to move on to other big challenges facing the country right now. But, before we do that and before we take a quick break, early in the Bush administration, the criticism in Congress was they never pick up the phone; they never consult us; you know, we've got some pretty smart people up here; we can help you. I'm told that this decision was anguished; the president came in inclined to release them, changed his mind a couple times during the debate and then came back in the end and decided to release them. At any point in that process -- I'll start with you, Senator Lieberman -- anybody from the White House pick up the phone and say, "What do you think?"</s>LIEBERMAN: They did not. And I can tell you, listening to what Lindsey said about looking at these decisions that were made early in the Bush administration, remembering that it was immediately after 9/11/01 there was worry about another attack imminently -- I'm proud to be the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Our enemies are out there planning and plotting to attack us every day. So, as we think about what we want to release, how much information we want to make public, what kind of mud fight we want to get into about something that happened seven years ago, we better remember that and focus on our security today, not back-biting and vendettas from a time passed.</s>KING: Quickly to you, you're the chairwoman of the committee. You're investigating these matters, anyway. Do they pick up the phone and call you?</s>FEINSTEIN: No. They did not.</s>KING: Is that a mistake?</s>FEINSTEIN: Well, if they had, I probably would have said, as I said, let us do our work first. Since the first two cases have already been done, let us do the rest of it before anything is released, so that at least the Intelligence Committee can see everything in context and make some decisions.</s>KING: All right. Much more with our Senate guests in just a moment. We ask them to lay out the stakes in the tough choices facing the United States in three major hot spots, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. "State of the Union" will be right back.