MSNBC Hardball - Transcript

MSNBC

SHOW: HARDBALL 21:00

BYLINE: Chris Matthews; Pat Buchanan; David Shuster; Carl Rochelle

GUESTS: Michael Wolff; Bob Zelnick; Richard Shelby; Bill Nelson; Mark Bowden

HIGHLIGHT:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld makes a surprise trip to Baghdad to rally the troops and address the prisoner abuse scandal. What's in and what's out when it comes to interrogating prisoners? Is it ever justifiable under international law to use hardball or coercive measures?

BODY:
MATTHEWS: Thank you, NBC's Carl Rochelle in Baghdad. Senator Bill Nelson is a Democrat from Florida and a member of the Armed Services Committee and Senator Richard Shelby is a Republican from Alabama and is former chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Senator Shelby, was this Bob Hope and Bing Crosby going to Baghdad or was this a serious effort to get to the bottom of this thing?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY, ® ALABAMA: I think it was a serious effort. I think it would be depicted as many things, though, Chris. I was with Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers yesterday at the Defense Appropriations Committee meeting most of the morning. He realizes, he, Secretary Rumsfeld, realizes that we've got a real stain on us right now and we've got some morale problems coming out of this, and we've got to get it out of the way. And I think the sooner the better. And we've got to let this investigation go wherever the facts will lead it. We cannot put up with this. This is not the American way. Actually, it's detrimental to our soldiers that serve so honorably and are serving today so honorably overseas and anywhere else in the world.

MATTHEWS: Are you confident we can have a real clearing of the air here, with a really good trial, where there's witnesses that come in, up the line, where the defense attorneys can bring the majors in and generals to come in and say what the orders were?

SHELBY: Well, I think that it is probably more-and this is just my judgment at this point-more than two or three people. Somebody created the atmosphere, the environment for this to come about. I mean, this didn't just happen overnight by one or two people. I don't believe that at all.

MATTHEWS: Do you think the American people can take the truth, if it turns out bad, that there were bad orders coming down?

SHELBY: I think the American people want the truth. We should always bring out the truth like this and go on to the next round. Because we stand for something in America. We have high values. We're not for terrorist killings, we're not for beheading people and we're not for torture.

MATTHEWS: Let me go to Senator Nelson. Senator Nelson, you saw another batch of pictures yesterday. What's your assessment as a political figure that these were systematic behavior or unsystematic misbehavior? What was it in the pictures that you could discern?

SEN. BILL NELSON, (D) FLORIDA: The most revealing, Chris, was the cell block picture that most Americans have seen where the naked prisoners are bound up and the guards are going about their business, and we saw the picture, same one, but uncropped. And you could see a lot more soldiers in the picture, and it was almost business as usual, which certainly suggested to me that they were operating, if not under direct orders, clearly under a wink and a nod, and that's where I want it to go up the chain of command. I want those responsible held accountable.

MATTHEWS: What about the pictures-now, I know you can't say exactly. But let me let you allude to them. Senator Nelson, there's pictures apparently that showed kind of odd situations, like men having some sort of either masturbation going on or male to male, some sort of closeness that would be sexual in nature. We've also heard stories there may have been American male to female sexual relations in the company or in the presence of these detainees. Is that within the ballpark of what you saw, Senator Shelby?

SHELBY: Well, you're getting close to a lot of things we saw, a lot of it we saw-well, most of it we saw was despicable, deplorable, and I can tell you a lot of it would probably remind you of some of the worst pornographic scenes you could think of.

MATTHEWS: Do you share Senator Nelson's sense that it was part of military business, that there was actually military soldiers present to the occasions where there were people walking around that suggested this was part of the regular events of life on that block?

SHELBY: I hope it was not part of the regular events. That would be up to the investigators to find out, Chris. But it's behavior that the American people, all of them, will find deplorable. We've got to get it out of our system. We've got to root it out of the armed services, because it's detrimental to our armed forces. It's detrimental to what America stands for.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask Senator Nelson about what's in and what's out in terms of American decency. "War is hell" somebody once said and the fact is we're involved in an occupation, which means we are facing a resistance, which means we have to counter an insurgency, which means we have to crack that insurgency, which means you have to get intel from people who don't want to give it to us. How do you get it?

NELSON: Well, you get it, and you can certainly use certain methods of interrogation. But they have to be within the bounds of human decency. And they also, when you're dealing with representatives of another state, they have to be according to the Geneva Convention.

MATTHEWS: Do you believe those terrorists should be covered by Geneva Convention rules?

NELSON: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear.

MATTHEWS: Should terrorists, people that are not in uniform, people that are not in any military outfit, should they be considered combatants?

NELSON: No. That is an exception. Where you have a state to state, where there is a uniformed military of a state, we're bound by the Geneva Convention. On the enemy combatants, they call them, which are not related to a state, such as the terrorists, the bin Ladens, then they're dealing with those in a different way. Although I can tell you, I've been twice to Guantanamo and I think they are adhering to the Geneva Convention there.

MATTHEWS: Well, what about the terrorists on the very prison block we're talking about at Abu Ghraib? At Abu Ghraib we're dealing with terrorists or potential terrorists. What's wrong with treating them roughly?

SHELBY: Well, I think there's a difference, Chris, a difference between treating someone roughly and interrogating them to the best of your ability. And some of the scenes I saw, I see no redeeming value as far as getting information out of people from the pictures that I saw. And I probably saw 400 frames yesterday. Maybe 500.

MATTHEWS: You know, Senator Nelson, when we first saw those pictures a lot of people thought they were souvenir pictures, people that are hot dogging it and sending pictures back to their relatives, because you can do that electronically now. Do we know whether they were souvenir pictures or they were perhaps they were actually the tools of interrogation, black mail methods to say to the prisoners "If you don't talk we're going to show those to your relatives?" Do we know what those pictures are yet?

NELSON: It could be both, Chris. But there's no excuse for lining up people in a naked position that suggests that you're going to sodomize them. And there's no excuse for the guy with the rope tied around him with his hands behind him, where they're banging his head against a steel bar. That's not any kind of behavior within the bounds of human decency that Americans should be engaged in.

MATTHEWS: We understand through the reporting, Senator Shelby, and you were on intelligence. You were chairman of intelligence. The CIA, when it comes to the top level bad guys, like Khalid Mohammed, that there is an extreme standard that applies, where you can do things that are much rougher and crueler than you can do with the lower level people. Are you familiar with that situation?

SHELBY: I'm familiar with some of it, but I have never witnessed any of the interrogations. I've been told of some of it. And there are different degrees of it. Again, the pictures, from what I saw, 400 or 500 frames, I see no-nothing coming out of that, other than cruelty, injustice and something violating the basic tenets of our values.

MATTHEWS: OK, thank you very much, Senator Nelson and Senator Shelby.