Congressional Record: September 10, 2004 (Senate)
Page S9061-S9063
Intelligence Reform
Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. Mr. President, I thank my colleague and good
friend, Senator Kennedy, for his courtesy in allowing me to make these
remarks at this time.
Mr. President, this is a propitious moment.
At exactly 8:46 tomorrow--Saturday--morning, we will observe the
third anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 11 into the
North Tower of the World Trade Center.
That moment changed our Nation and our world forever--and in the
hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, we in public office undertook an important obligation.
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We vowed, in the memory of the nearly 3,000 innocent people who died
that day, to take action to prevent attacks of that magnitude from ever
happening again within our homeland.
In his speech delivered before a joint session of Congress on
September 20, 2001, President Bush put it this way:
Americans are asking, How will we fight and win this war?
We will direct every resource at our command--every means
of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of
law enforcement, every financial influence, and every
necessary weapon of war--to the disruption and to the defeat
of the global terror network.
Unfortunately, one day before the third anniversary of 9/11, we have
not met that commitment.
We have failed to adequately focus on what it will take to fight this
new threat, one that calls for new thinking and new governmental
infrastructure.
The No. 1 requirement for meaningful reform is strong and consistent
Presidential leadership.
We have seen leadership lacking at several crucial turning points in
recent history, both before September 11, 2001 and since.
I have believed for many months--since well before the final report
of the independent 9/11 Commission was released in July--that the
problems in our intelligence community are not a mystery, they are
known weaknesses that simply have yet to be fixed.
I commend the 9/11 Commission for its fine work, especially chairman
and former Governor of New Jersey Tom Kean and vice chairman and former
Congressman from Indiana Lee Hamilton.
And I am optimistic that their report has shaken our nation's leaders
out of their lethargy and caused them to focus on the need for reform
of our intelligence gathering and analysis.
But the record is clear. The 9/11 Commission's work built on a series
of commissions and studies that offered recommendations for reform of
the intelligence community going back nearly a decade.
But those recommendations were--tragically--all but ignored.
Just to mention the reports that were before the Congress and before
the President, I would date these efforts to 1995, when Congress
created the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United
States Intelligence Community, also known as the Aspin-Brown
Commission.
Its final report was issued on March 1, 1996.
Since then, there have been the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic
Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass
Destruction, also known as the Gilmore Committee, which issued the
first of its five reports in December 1999, the National Commission on
Terrorism, also known as the Bremer Commission, which issued its report
in June 2000, and the National Commission on National Security in the
21st century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, which issued
its final report in January of 2001.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the membership
of each of these commissions, which demonstrates the quality of the
individuals who studied these problems and made recommendations.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Members of independent commissions that have reviewed the
Intelligence Community:
Hart-Rudman Commission (2001): Gary Hart (co-chair), Warren
Bruce Rudman (co-chair), Anne Armstrong, Norm R. Augustine,
John Dancy, John R. Galvin, Leslie H. Gelb, Newt Gingrich,
Lee H. Hamilton, Lionel H. Olmer, Donald B. Rice, James R.
Schlesinger, Harry D. Train, Andrew Jackson Young, Jr.
Bremer Commission (2000): L. Paul Bremer (chairman),
Maurice Sonnenberg (vice chairman), Richard K. Betts, Wayne
A. Downing, Jane Harman, Fred C. Ikle, Juliette N. Kayyem,
John F. Lewish, Jr., Gardner Peckham, R. James Woolsey.
Gilmore Commission (1999): James S. Gilmore, George
Foresman, L. Paul Bremer, Michael Freeman, William Garrison,
Ellen M. Gordon, James Greenleaf, William Jenaway, William
Dallas Jones, Paul M. Maniscalco, John O. Marsh, Kathleen
O'Brien, M. Patricia Quinlisk, Patrick Ralston, William Reno,
Kenneth Shine, Alan D. Vickery, Hubert Williams. Non-voting
participants: John Hathaway, John Lombardi, Michael A.
Wermuth, Jennifer Brower.
Aspin-Brown Commission (1996): Appointed by Pres. Clinton:
Les Aspin, Warren B. Rudman, Lew Allen, Zoe Baird, Ann
Caracristi, Stephen Friedman, Anthony S. Harrington, Robert
J. Hermann, Paul D. Wolfowitz. Appointed by Congress: Hon.
Tony Coelho, David H. Dewhurst, Rep. Norman D. Dicks, Sen. J.
James Exon, Hon. Wyche Fowler, Rep. Porter Goss, Lt. Gen.
Robert E. Pursley, Sen. John Warner.
Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. Mr. President, finally, there is the report of
our own House-Senate Joint Inquiry into the intelligence failures that
surrounded 9/11, which I had the honor of co-chairing with
Representative Porter Goss.
The Joint Inquiry file our report with its 19 recommendations in
December 2002.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the names of
the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in the
107th Congress who served on the Joint Inquiry.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 107th Congress
Membership
Porter J. Goss, R--Florida, Chairman
Nancy Pelosi, D--California, Ranking Democrat
Republicans
Doug Bereuter, Nebraska
Michael N. Castle, Delaware
Sherwood L. Boehlert, New York
Jim Gibbons, Nevada
Ray LaHood, Illinois
Randy ``Duke'' Cunningham, California
Peter Hoekstra, Michigan
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia
Terry Everett, Alabama
Democrats
Sanford D. Bishop, Georgia
Jane Harman, California
Gary A. Condit, California
Tim Roemer, Indiana
Silvestre Reyes, Texas
Leonard L. Boswell, Iowa
Collin C. Peterson, Minnesota
Bud Cramer, Alabama
Timothy R. Sample, Staff Director
Michael W. Sheehy, Democratic Counsel
Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. The declassified version was released to the
public on July 24, 2003.
I filed legislation, S. 1520, September 11, the Memorial Intelligence
Reform Act, to implement those recommendations 1 week later on July 31,
2003. Each of these panels, in common, concluded major changes were
needed to better protect the American people, including such steps as
much longer human intelligence capabilities. Yet we did not see the
leadership that was needed to fully implement any of those
recommendations. Rather, when it comes to reforming our intelligence
community, our Nation's leaders can be described as lethargic, at best,
negligent, at worst.
Let me be clear, my condemnation is not directed only at the current
administration but previous administrations, as well. For instance, in
my judgment, the Clinton administration was guilty of two principal
failures. One, it did not seriously consider or initiate the changes
necessary to move our intelligence agencies into the 21st century;
second, it did not take adequate steps to wipe out the al-Qaida
training camps in Afghanistan, camps which produced thousands of
extremists trained in the effective skills of terrorism.
The blame is not totally at the White House. This Congress deserves
blame for its failure to move with a greater sense of urgency. I will
discuss those failures in a future date.
Now we have the 9/11 Commission report. We are likely to see passage
of an intelligence reform package before the election. I am convinced
the American people will recognize that valuable time has been lost in
the 3 years since September 11, 2001, and should we suffer another
terrorist strike on our land before these reforms are fully
implemented, we will not be able to dodge tough questions about why we
failed to respond sooner.
It is abundantly clear that had we heeded the lessons to be learned
from September 11, we might have avoided the embarrassing failures of
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led us into the war in
Iraq. President Bush should have exercised his full powers as Commander
in Chief in the hours immediately after September 11 by calling
together the leadership of the agencies whose failures contributed to
that tragedy. The President should, in the bluntest of terms, have
demanded a full review and a report and steps to correct these
deficiencies to be
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submitted to the Oval Office within no longer than 100 days.
The No. 1 lesson of September 11 is obvious: Our intelligence on the
terrorist threat was unreliable. It was subject to major gaps of
necessary information and analysis. Had we applied exactly those same
lessons learned as we prepared for the war in Iraq, the President would
have had less confidence in the intelligence he was being given on
issues such as weapons of mass destruction and the conditions that our
military men and women would face during and after the initial assault.
Ponder this: What a difference that would have made as we learn from
the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the problems of pre-Iraqi
war intelligence. If we do not now take action to remedy those
weaknesses, we will not be able to avoid accountability for our failure
to detect and deter the next attack.
As has been demonstrated over the past decade, the fundamental
opponent of intelligence reform is inertia and the natural tendency to
maintain the status quo. Before we can get people to reject the status
quo, there has to be, first, an agreement as to what are the problems
to which the status quo has contributed.
I have found that the medical model of first diagnosing a problem and
then prescribing a remedy to be a useful prescription with social
problems. Today, I want to give the diagnosis of our intelligence
community that a careful physician might offer. Next week, I will come
to the Senate to offer my prescription.
This is what I consider to be five major problems and challenges
facing American intelligence. One, the failure to adapt to a changing
adversary and a changing global threat environment. Just as it was
difficult 40 years earlier for the intelligence community to make the
transition from the practices of the OSS against Germany and Japan,
today's intelligence community has found it even more difficult to
shift from the cold war to the war on terror.
Our new enemy is distinctly different than we are. It is a non-nation
state, asymmetrical in the extreme. It is motivated by a religious
belief that denies the legitimacy of governments which intrude on the
direct relationship which should exist between all law and man. We are
almost deaf to the numerous, frequently arcane languages that our new
adversaries speak. As a people and as a nation, the United States has
limited expertise in their cultures. By the failure to make the
transition to this new world we inhabit and the new threats we face,
American intelligence is rendering itself less and less capable of
bringing the security which our citizens need and deserve.
A second failure is the repeated instances in which the intelligence
community did not provide effective, strategic intelligence. In the
summer of 2001, intelligence was reporting to American decisionmakers
that, yes, al-Qaida was something of a threat to U.S. interests, but
outside the country, not inside the homeland of the United States. So
while we spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fortify our embassies
abroad, we did virtually nothing to increase the safety of domestic
commercial aviation.
As the planning for the war was intensifying in the winter and spring
of 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz reached two conclusions which were validated by intelligence,
much of which came from the intelligence agencies within the Department
of Defense. They claimed that after the war the U.S. troops would be
received as liberators and that the Iraqi people would shower our
troops with flowers, as the American soldiers had been welcomed in
Paris in 1944. They went on to say that the Iraqis would turn on the
faucets of that nation's oil riches and pay for the occupation and
rebuilding of their nation. Sadly, of course, neither of these
projections has come true.
The third failure is the failure to establish within the intelligence
community broad priorities and then to deploy the resources of the
intelligence community behind those priorities. In December of 1998,
former CIA Director George Tenet declared terrorism was the
intelligence community's primary target, that America was at war with
al-Qaida.
The problem is that within the CIA and the other intelligence
agencies few heard the battle cry and even fewer responded.
Rather than set up intelligence systems to validate convenient
political notions, we need a system that pursues mutually agreed-upon
priorities
Fourth, the intelligence community has not implemented the policies
necessary to recruit, train, reward or sanction, maintain the talents
or diversify its human intelligence capabilities.
The U.S. human intelligence at the end of the cold war has been
described as very deep in our knowledge of the Soviet target, almost
ignorant about everything else.
In the places where we most need human intelligence, such as in the
Middle East and Central Asia, we are woefully deficient.
The intelligence community's current recruitment and training
regimes, which rely heavily on college campus career days, has been
inadequate to overcome this handicap.
We are confronting terrorists with a band of men and women who are
enthusiastic to perform the challenging intellectual work of an analyst
or the dangerous undertaking of an operative, but often lack the
necessary skills to be effective.
In my opinion, we need to rethink our system of intelligence
recruitment, training, and performance evaluation.
The fifth failure is the failure to realize that many of the most
important decisions made by the intelligence community that were
previously described as tactical have now become strategic.
Unfortunately, the level and perspective of those tasking the
gathering of that intelligence has not changed, often with highly
adverse consequences.
One of the reasons that congressional oversight of the intelligence
community exists is because in 1960, in the days before a planned
summit between President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita
Krushvchev, the Soviet Union downed an American U-2 spy plane.
The tension surrounding the plane's mission and its downing aborted
the summit, and that enraged Senator Mike Mansfield. This is what
Senator Mansfield said:
Not a single member of the Cabinet nor the President
exercised any direct control whatsoever over the ill-fated U-
2 flight at the critical moment at which it was launched.
He continued that the decision to undertake the flight
``owes its origin more to bureaucratic inertia, lack of
coordination and control and insensitivity to its potential
cost than it does to any conscious decision of politically
responsible leadership.''
In other words, a tactical blunder had set back a strategic goal.
Today, even more than in 1960, tactical intelligence gathering
operations need to show an appreciation--a greater appreciation than is
true today--for their strategic implications.
Mr. President, it has been 3 years since we suffered the horror of
September 11. The time to act is long since past.
In future days, I will discuss recommendations to address what I
think are the major challenges we face, and to urge the courage and
commitment, will and urgency, to protect the American people in the way
that we failed to do on September 11, 2001.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
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