Than good intelligence. I think it doesnt tell us much that we didnt already know anyway, but it significantly endangers americans around the world. Gwen we delve into the debate about when and whether interrogations go too far. On capitol hill, a budget standoff angers liberals and conservatives. This is a ransom. This is blackmail. There was no compromise. This was a top down, jam it down your throat bill on both sides of the aisle. Gwen priorities, partisanship, and the race to avoid another government shutdown. Covering the week, mark mazzetti, National Security corespondent for the New York Times. Doyle mcmanus, columnist for the los angeles times. Jeff zeleny, senior washington correspondent for abc news. And alexis simendinger, White House Correspondent for real clear politics. Award winning reporting and nalysis covering history as it happens. Live from our nations capitol, this is Washington Week with gwen ifill. Corporate funding for Washington Week is provided by how much money do you have in your pocket right now . I have 40. 21. Could something that small make an impact on something as big as your retirement . Well, if you start putting that money toward your retirement and let it grow over time for 20, 30 years, that retirement challenge might not seem so big after all. Funding for Washington Week is also provided by the annenberg foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to pbs stations from viewers like you. Thank you. Once again, live from washington, moderator gwen ifill. Gwen good evening wed been expecting the Senate Intelligence report on torture for months. It was clear there would be some bombshells and many suggested releasing the details of c. I. A. Interrogation tactics would do more harm than good. But now its out there and we know wartime detainees were deprived of sleep, slammed against the wall, waterboarded and subjected to enemas. The documentation and the findings inclusions will make clear how this program was morally, legally, and administratively misguided, and that this nation should never again engage in these tactics. Gwen the report, endorsed by only the democrats on the committee, was as grisly as it was revealing, with the nations political fault lines again on full display. One dispute, whether the harsh tactics yielded anything. C. I. A. Director john brennan said yes. The detention and Interrogation Program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear. The cause and effect relationship between the use of e. I. T. S and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable. Gwen study shows it is knowable feinstein tweeted. Ed study shows it is null believe the c. I. H. Had info before torture. So, what are we to make of the central question, did these tactics work . Mark . The Senate Report makes a pretty compelling case that the techniques in the program had somewhat of a less of an impact than the c. I. A. Had let on in the past, that they were less central than has been portrayed in government studies, in hollywood, and in other forum. But there is a fight that is going on about this issue of effectiveness. There is kind of three camps. There is the report which says there was very little was gained from these techniques. There is the pushback from former c. I. A. Official Bush Administration officials would say these techniques were central to every counterterrorism success of the last dozen years and then you have john brennan and the white house in the middle which is the program worked, but we dont know whether the techniques themselves produced intelligence. Its a tough needle to thread for the administration. Gwen in part because and director brennan said as much, that sometimes these tactics would lead to false information and that is also true. And so they are, they are saying its absurd to say that this had no value. And former c. I. A. Director leon panetta, another Obama Administration director said this was wrong, this was torture, but dont say that we didnt get anything. So its a very sort of delicate dance that brennan and the administration as a whole are trying to do right now between these various sides. Gwen as a result, doyle, it lends itself to what washington does best which is break down among partisan lines over policy agreements. Over policy agreements, over the timing of the report, over the quality of the report, over whether they did it right. There was a lot of process involved here, but mark is right. The key question here wasnt just was some useful intelligence gotten from torture sessions. It was. Could it have been gotten some other way and is there any way of knowing that. That is what john brennan was saying was unknowable, thats what the report says is knowable. Now here is the problem. After a big National Crisis or a scandal, we have a reflex of putting together a Bipartisan Commission and in the ideal world, that by partisan commission, whoever it is, it could have been the Church Committee which was the forerunner of the Intelligence Committee in the 1970s. It could have been the 9 11 commission comes out with a set of findings and recommendations gwen and everybody agrees. Not everybody agrees. Its not complete, but you have enough big republicans and democrats that everybody says here is a national consensus. What happened here back in 2009, this process went off the rails. The republicans on the Intelligence Committee had initially endorsed the idea of a study by 2009 for a variety of reasons and there is even debate over that, they got off it and we ended up where we are. Actually, the partisanship, i was on capitol hill all week long, if you look at those votes, the committee voted 141 to start off with this in the beginning. Just in april, eight months ago, they voted 113 to declassify and release the report. That means most of the republicans joined with it. All of this partisan pushback, has it been effective, watered down the report . They had time to get their ducks in a row to rebut the report. You see a pretty coordinated campaign on tv and elsewhere to challenge the behaving facts and the fairness of the report. Youre seeing the former c. I. A. Director everywhere. Vice president chaney. Vice president chaney. They have their talking points. I think they have managed to kick up some dust here effectively enough to raise questions. It is this question of fairness that i think has resonated to some degree which is why didnt you, the committee, talk to anyone, do interviews. Gwen and why didnt they . Its a little complicated. It boils down to in the committees view that there was an ongoing federal investigation, criminal investigation of these activities. They couldnt interview people or lawyers would not have allowed their clients to be interviewed by the committee while there was ongoing criminal investigation. The republicans have challenged, yeah, that investigation had ended. You had plenty of other time to interview witnesses, so thats not a quite satisfying answer. Mark, the two central findings in the report are, one, this was an ineffective program and the second one was that officials in the administration, the Bush Administration had been lied to or misled, members of congress and at the white house. What is so interesting to me president obama did not come down on either one of those findings, in fact, didnt want to adjudicate themselves. And with brennan tried to be both supportive of the c. I. A. But not use or adopt the rebuttal that c. I. A. Director brennan wanted to use about torture itself. The president has used that word. Brennan says thats a label. Are they talking about Different Things . Can you explain the confusion about their differences of how they approached the report . Well, i think its telling that president barack obama who campaigned on ending these activities and campaigned against torture has let c. I. A. Director john brennan be the lead public face of the response. And brennan obviously has a much different audience to appeal to than obama does. Obama hasnt been very vocal on this all week, but brennan gave this speech, i think maybe the firstever Live Press Conference from c. I. A. Headquarters. And so thats been really striking. There is, this will shake out over weeks, months, and years. There is a lot in this report. I mean, there are details that those of us who have covered this for years had no idea about and there is a lot of really compelling reading about just how the program was created, the chaos that was going on in that period. They had no clue what they were doing. Gwen money that changed hands, outside of government to keep it going. I wonder, doyle, if this is anything new under the sun, maybe i have been watching too many home land but i do wonder sometimes if we make a big dustup, say this is terrible, but some version of it is still going on. We keep people with drones. A e do have a big it is peculiarityity that we have a program that killed people with drones, kills them dead and doesnt ask any questions. At one point one of the pushbacks on the Drone Program from the Intelligence Community is we would rather capture people and ask them questions, you cant get tension from a dead person. Only a very small minority of americans seem to be troubled at all by the drone strike program, even though there is pretty good evidence that as in any program that big, there is collateral damage. There are civilian casualties. Is anything like this going on in terms of the program we saw administered by c. I. A. In 2003, 2004, with secret prisons in other countries and people being subject to this kind of treatment, they say no, and i think you can be pretty sure that its not the case simply because in a sense, if you look back at all of the record on this program, the c. I. A. Never does anything without lawyers being involved. The c. I. A. Is terrified and a lot of what john brennan is talking about and the reason he wont use the word torture, theyre terrified that their professionals will be ordered to do something in the National Interest by their soupiors on the job and be prosecuted for it later. So much of what the c. I. A. Does is i will legal somewhere. They have to protect against that and it is telling that in this case, they went and found lawyers in the Justice Department at the time who said this is legal. One of the biggest criticisms all week from republicans who clearly circled the wagons and it was a top down decision to discredit the report was the timing of this report is going to threaten americans overseas. So here we are at the end of the week here, what has the Global Reaction been and are those threats warranted, was that hyped . Do we not know . So far nothing has happened. So far nothing has happened. Jeff, there has been distress in countries like poland where they had some of the black sites, some of the secret prisons. Nothing has happened so far. I think that the simplest response to that really does have to be you mean because of this report, al qaeda and isis are going to take the gloves off and start targeting americans, i certainly hope not. This is a problem though, this is one of the reasons that this issue is far from gone as a partisan football, it only takes one or two radical groups out there to lob a grenade at an American Embassy and issue a statement saying this was in revenge for what we read for the first time in that report and the whole debate is right there in front of us. Take advantage of this. Gwen thank you both very much. I get the feeling you say there is a lot more there. I have a feeling youre digging in and reading. 5,500 pages of the reports that have yet to be declassified. Happy holidays to you. The other big story that percolated all week in washington was the now annual rush to avoid a government shutdown. The federal budget has become a backdrop for all sorts of fights. Liberals said provisions in the 1. 1 trillion dollar measure helped wall street and weakened Campaign Finance limits. Conservatives argued that they should have used the mustpass bill to roll back the president s executive action on immigration. And the president angered members of his own party by urging that they pass the bill, warts and all. Had i been able to draft my own legislation, get it passed without any republican votes, i suspect it would be slightly different. That is not the circumstance we find ourselves in and i think what the American People very much are looking for is practical governance and the willingness to compromise, and thats what this bill reflects. Gwen but the real action was on the hill where the left wing of the Democratic Party and the right wing of the Republican Party took the budget fight right up to the brink again, jeff. If there is one thing congress can do, the one thing that congress can do is take things up to the brink. Gwen why are we always surprised . Less than three hours before the midnight deadline last night, i was watching to see if the bill was going to pass or not after a daylong series of back and forth, unusual drama really. Finally it passed on a vote of 219206. Only 57 democrats, though, joined with their president , with their party to get this across the finish line. The complaints were actually pretty interesting. The liberal democrats were like, why are we rolling back these wall street reforms, these dodd frank regulations. Its unwise and why are we expanding the Campaign Finance regulations, why are people giving more money, up to 10 times as much more money . It was slipped on page 1,599 of a 1,603page bill so people wouldnt see it. But, it wasnt just republicans at work here. One of president obamas own lawyers, a top democratic lawyer was involved in writing that. This was at the end of the year when everybody was throwing stuff in here. It is not resolved. The senate is still trying to work this out. They have a couple more days left to avoid a government shutdown. They keep giving themselves more time because they control the clock here. It is still very controversial. Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge against the wall street regulations being rolled back. Conservative rent are unhappy as well. Why arent we doing more to stop president obamaS Immigration order. Ted cruz is going to have his day. I talked to him tonight. I want a vote on stopping thiS Immigration order. A weekend of drama awaits on capital hill. Therapy going to pass the 1. 1 trillion spending bill. Gwen we saw nancy pelosi get very exercised on the floor the other night and she wanted to prove, among other things, she left the impression who she wants to have leverage against the white house and the president. So is there a split there . Well, there was a lot of talk today about what happened to the loving relationship between president obama and nancy pelosi. You know, there are really two ways to look at it if you read between the lines. One is that the president and the white house seemed very gleeful as we heard in the sound bite from the president about compromise, this is emblematic of what we can do to work together. On the flip side, people were thinking of president obama, it split his party. What is he doing. It made it him look weak that he was defying him. President obama is about to go out of a phase of his presidency and into a brandnew phase with the republicans in the house and senate. Some analysis was he was practicing a kind of lobbying for this not perfect, but the best of all worlds that he could get. The argument on the dodd frank, you should have seen what it looked like before, barbara, the budget chair whacked away at some of the stuff that the republicans wanted. Some of the argument is that the president has exerted his power efficiently and he is practicing for the defiance of his party probably down the road, like watch the legislation that he is going to issue a veto threat on that does have democrats on it. Thats going to be coming. Thats coming. But is it a fake fight . Is this all for show . Gwen what, a fake fight in washington . Mark no one is going to shut down. Even knows it. That is actually a very good point. A year ago the shutdown happened and it was absolutely real. It happened for 16 or 17 days. No one wants that. Elizabeth warren. She should be accused of shutting the government down. Right at this moment, it is a fake fight. Republicans want a vote to stop the immigration order which they cant do. Democrats want to vote to roll back the legislation which they cant do. It is a fake fight. The argument, if you vote this down, the deal is much worse next year. This is our last moment of power here. It would have been very unwise for the democratic interests for the House Democrats to vote it down on principal. And that i think also the president and his allies in the white house are very aware of the progressive or the populist elements of the Democratic Party because the centrists got wiped out. They understand these are the democrats were going to hear more from. Were not going to hear from them less. I want to ask both of you if this gives us any clues of what life in washington is going to be like next year with a republican majority in the senate. John boehner, the speaker ruled out a shutdown real early. Are we going to have an era of one kind of complicated messy compromise after another . Gwen you just mentioned john boehner. He is the speaker of the house last we checked. It doesnt seem like he is central to this debate. He was key to getting enough republicans on this board. It does give us a window into what is going to happen next year. Two words to keep in mind next year, regular order. What does that mean . On the senate side and the house side of the capital, they dont Appropriations Bills one at a time, department by Department Like they used to. Well see, thats what they say. No more cliffhangers, right . I dont know about that. It will be chapter by chapter. Its clear that republicans need democrats to vote with them on the spending bills. Nancy pelosi is right in the sense that they have leverage a little bit. They do need some of those democrats in the middle. Steny hoyer is a person you dont hear from a lot. He is the house whip. He got the 57 democrats together. Next year democrats are important for giving Speaker Boehner enough votes that he doesnt have on his own side. The white house today, friday, was talking about how Speaker Boehner was going to have at least, what is it, 12 more republicans in his conference and theyre kind of looking at him that 12 more might give him a little more strength, thats certainly the way theyre thinking about it. Obviously Mitch Mcconnell will have the majority and so the thought is that maybe president obama will rise a little bit beyond what peoples expectations were, maybe Speaker Boehner himself will feel more comfortable and more powerful himself with Mitch Mcconnell being by his side. A new era of bipartisanship. No, lots of news for all of us. Gwen lets parse out some of the actual bites. Where does that immigration executive order fight stand tonight . Thats what republicans were so concerned and right after that vote passed, the new House Republican whip who is a very conservative republican from louisiana, he came out in the lobby and told some of the reporters, the fight for immigration starts tonight. He was suggesting that thats the next fight. The whole government, if this all passes, is funded through next september, through september 2015 except the home land security which is where all of the immigration policy is going. Thats funded through february 27. So that is the new years surprise in january and february, those are the fights, how theyre going to fund the homeland security. Now, a lot of those things come from fees and fines and other things, so congress does not have complete control, but they want to exert their authority against the president S Immigration reform. So the evening of february 27, well be at this again . Well be right here, yeah. Gwen i also, hey, here is another piece. And this comes from being a resident of the District Of Columbia, i admit it. They decided to roll back duly voted on legalization or non whats the word, noncriminalization of marijuana, right . They decided to do that and Congress Said no, you dont have a right to do that. That just stands, right . It does stand. That is one of the many riders that are packed in the 1,600page bill that have nothing to do with keeping the government open. That is one of the ways that the republicans can exert a little bit of control, congress can exert control over the District Of Columbia which does not have stayed hood. Were saying you cannot do that. Cant implement that. Right. It effectively rolls back the wishes of the voters. That is one of the things that was a pot sweetener as they call it to get a few more republicans onboard to do Something Like that. This bill, we are still, seeking of the c. I. A. Report, we are looking through the 1603page spending bill to see what all is in here. There are so many random things. Alexis, at the white house they must be trying to recalibrate what their relationship is going to be with this congress, especially with the republican majority coming in in january. How are they acting on that . Are they sitting back and watching and chuckling to themselves or do they have plans . One of the things i thought was fascinating was that the white house got very engaged in this spending bill. I mean engaged like really engaged. Because it was losing. Well, and also because the president was the president was so persuaded that this was the best possible deal and lets go for this. So when i say really engaged, the president was making calls, the Vice President , the chief of staff in the white house was on the hill, cabinet members were calling. The outreach in the email, all of that was very, very intense. So i think that it gives the president a little bit of practice and it shows, i think, it shows that theyre willing to be engaged on legislation that the president cares vitally about. Gwen of course, there is the backlash thing, when the president is for something, everyone else is against it. You might as well do whatever as you want, i suppose . In this giant spending bills, there was lots of things that the white house said dont you like that were saving funding for the s. E. C. Gwen well be watching that, some closer than others. You have your cot set up on capitol hill. Thank you, everybody. Before we leave you tonight, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of an outstanding journalist and hero of mine. Washington post photographer michel du cille, a threetime pulitzer prizewinner, died of a heart attack while on assignment in liberia. Michel was known for his stunning work, but also for the humanity he brought to the stories he told through his camera. He was also a generous teacher, never hesitating to reach out, embrace and share knowledge. He was 58 years old. We have to go now, but as always, the conversation continues online the Washington Week webcast extra streams live at 8 30 p. M. Eastern, and you can find it all week long at pbs. Org washingtonweek. Where, among other things, well talk about how the New York Times got an early jump on that Senate Intelligence committee report. How did they, mark, ill ask you then. Keep up with developments with me and Judy Woodruff on the pbs newshour, and well see you here, next week on Washington Week. Good night. Corporate funding for Washington Week is provided by prudential additional funding is provided by the annenberg foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to pbs stations from viewers like you, thank you