Congressional Record, Volume 150 Issue 118 (Monday, September 27, 2004)

[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 118 (Monday, September 27, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9756-S9759]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE REFORM ACT OF 2004--Continued

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Fitzgerald). The Senator from Maine.
Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, I rise today to speak to the monumental
issue before us, the most profound, sweeping reform of our entire
intelligence community in nearly 60 years, 3 years after the worst
attack ever on American soil. As a member of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, I welcome this opportunity to discuss
critical issues I believe must be addressed this year.
First, I thank the majority leader for his timely action and
steadfast leadership ensuring that we have this legislation before us
and we will complete action before we adjourn.
I also want to recognize my colleague, the chair of the Governmental
Affairs Committee, the Senator from Maine, Ms. Collins, for her
exceptional and tireless work over the past 2 months to produce this
comprehensive legislation to reform our intelligence community, to
rightly reflect the sense of urgency that this legislation deserves and
certainly one we should consider. I applaud her for undertaking this
historic effort and for guiding this legislation through her committee
on a bipartisan basis.
As well, I want to express my appreciation to the ranking member,
Senator Lieberman, for his efforts in bringing us to this day. It truly
was an enormous undertaking that was assigned to the Governmental
Affairs Committee, and I want to thank them for all they have done to
begin this debate this week on the intelligence reform bill.
As we begin these deliberations, I cannot help but be reminded that
while the intelligence community reform has unquestionably taken on a
new urgency, it is simply not a new issue. Since the first Hoover
Commission in 1949, studies have been conducted, commissions have been
established, and reports have been issued on how best to structure our
intelligence community. Yet in spite of the over 50 years of debate on
this issue, it was the morning of September 11 and all that followed
that has resulted in us being where we are today on the Senate floor
debating reform legislation and poised to accomplish what has alluded
so many for so long.
To say that September 11 is a seminal moment for our Nation certainly
would be an understatement. Indeed, that day will forever be etched in
our minds and our national consciousness, just as it always will
forever change the way we view the world. It was that day, more than
any before, that catapulted us into a new era in which our Nation faced
very different, more pervasive and inimical threats. It was a day that
revealed in the starkest terms the truism that intelligence is now and
must always be our best and first line of defense against a committed
enemy who knows no borders, wears no uniform, and pledges allegiance
only to causes and not states. It was a day that has proven that the
intelligence community's old structure and old ways of doing business
are insufficient for confronting the challenges of the 21st century.
But if September 11 provided the catalyst for reform, the failures in
the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs
provided even greater impetus for a major overhaul of the U.S.
intelligence community, and that time for change is now upon us.

For over a year, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has
focused intently on reviewing the prewar intelligence of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction program, the regime's ties to terrorism, Saddam
Hussein's human rights abuses, and his regime's impact on regional
stability. After the indepth analysis of 30,000 pages of intelligence
assessment, source reporting, interviewing more than 200 individuals,
the committee produced a report in early July that indisputably begs
for intelligence community restructuring.
The report revealed a stunning lack of accountability and sound
hands-on management practices throughout the community's chain of
command. This lack of leadership and poor management allowed
assumptions to go unchallenged, contributed to mischaracterizations of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, and led to significant
lapses in the intelligence community's responsibility to convey the
uncertainties behind their assessments. In short, there was a lack of
analytic rigor performed on one of the most critical and defining
issues spanning more than a decade.
During our review, we learned that much of what analysts knew about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program predated the gulf war,
leaving them with little direct knowledge of the current state of those
programs. The ``group think'' mentality that dominated analysis is just
one of the intelligence failures this report illuminates.
Intelligence community managers, collectors, and analysts believed
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a notion that dates back to
Iraq's pre-1991 efforts to retain, build, and hide those programs, and
in several circumstances the intelligence community made intelligence
information fit into preconceived notions about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction programs. From our review, we know the intelligence
community relied on sources that supported its predetermined ideas, and
we also know that there was no alternative analysis or ``red teaming''
performed on such a critical issue. We also now know that most of the
key judgments in the national intelligence estimate were overstated or
were not supported by the underlying intelligence.
For example, the intelligence community insists that Iraq had
chemical weapons. Yet this was based on a single stream of reporting.
The intelligence community based its assessment that Iraq's biological
warfare program was larger and more advanced than before the gulf war
largely on a single source to whom the intelligence community never had
direct access and with whom there were credibility problems. The
intelligence community judged that Iraq was developing a UAV probably
intended to deliver biological weapons. Yet there was significant
evidence clearly indicating that nonbiological weapons delivery
missions were more likely.
The committee's report also notes the lack of human intelligence on
the Iraqi target and reveals, as the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence
Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of
September 11, 2001, also documented, that our intelligence community is
averse to undertaking higher risk human intelligence operations,
compelling our analysts to rely on inadequate, outdated, or unreliable
intelligence.
The points raised form an inescapable indictment of the status quo.
The facts speak for themselves, and they are a significant reason we
are here today to debate issues of intelligence community reform. The
men and women, the dedicated professionals of the intelligence
community, who toil every day to protect our national security, must
have a decisive, innovative, and centralized leadership and management
structure as well as the requisite resources to perform this vital and
often daunting task. While I acknowledge the need to be cautious and
deliberate, in this era of unprecedented challenges, we must ensure our
intelligence community is poised to confront these challenges, and we
must act now. The status quo is clearly not an option.

On that note, I do happen to believe that we must create a national
intelligence director and certainly that it

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would be a significant leap forward, and that is why I commend the
committee for embracing this type of reform.
I also commend Senator Feinstein for her leadership on this issue,
and I am pleased to have joined with her several months ago, before the
release of the September 11 Commission Report, in championing this idea
of establishing a critical position, to be filled by a single person,
independent from the day-to-day responsibilities of running a single
intelligence agency and whose sole responsibility is to lead and manage
the intelligence community. I believe our perspectives on the Senate
Intelligence Committee and the work we did for more than a year and a
half on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program gave impetus to this
notion and this idea that we clearly had to embark on major
restructuring of the intelligence community.
I happen to believe that creating this central position is a
significant component in the larger imperative of overall intelligence
community reform because it simply just does not make sense today to
have one person who is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
also responsible for the entire intelligence community of the other 14
agencies. Rather, we need a national intelligence director whose
dedicated leadership will ensure that consistent priorities are set and
implemented, and that all the gears of our intelligence gathering,
analysis, and reporting are synchronized and not ad hoc.
In fact, Dr. David Kay, who is the former director of the Iraq Survey
Group, said such management changes in the intelligence community could
have resulted in a very different national intelligence estimate than
we received on Iraq weapons of mass destruction program. He noted that
failures of analytic tradecraft, culture, management, and mismanagement
of the information flow could have been alleviated with proper
management and leadership.
Indeed, I asked Dr. Kay when he came before the committee in August:

We know what went wrong. Could it have been a very
different product?
Could we have had a very different product in the NIE, if
we had changes, organizationally, that we are speaking of?

That is a question posed of Dr. Kay. He responded:

It could have been a very different product, in my
judgment.

That is a very telling and significant statement. He said the
national intelligence estimate, the estimate upon which we predicated
war, upon which we made our decisions, based on the assessments that
were included in that national intelligence estimate, could have been a
very different product if we had an entirely different type of
organization within the intelligence community.
I happen to believe that creating a national intelligence director
would also facilitate a better atmosphere of objectivity, an element
that has been sorely lacking in the intelligence community. Separating
the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from one specific
organization would better allow the other 14 intelligence community
agencies to be heard in the debates about the validity and veracity of
intelligence information and analyses that have a direct effect on our
national security.
A director of national intelligence would level the playing field
when it comes to the competition of ideas and intelligence analysis.
Currently, as the head of both the CIA, as well as the intelligence
community, the DCI is the principal intelligence adviser to the
President. This provides the CIA with unique access to policymakers.
Although the goal of this structure was to coordinate the disparate
elements of the intelligence community in order to provide the most
accurate and objective analysis, this report reveals that in practice
this arrangement actually undermines the provision of objective
analysis.
Indeed, this committee's report on Iraq concluded:

The CIA continues to excessively compartment sensitive
human intelligence reporting and fails to share important
information about [human intelligence] reporting and sources
with Intelligence Community analysts who have a need to know.

Further the report concluded that:

The CIA, in several significant instances, abused its
unique position in the [intelligence community], particularly
in terms of information sharing, to the detriment of the
[intelligence community's] prewar analysis concerning Iraq's
[weapons of mass destruction] programs.

One agency should not be able to control the presentation of
information to policymakers, nor should an agency be able to exclude
analyses from the other agencies. As the committee's report on the
prewar intelligence on Iraq reveals, the Director of Central
Intelligence was not aware of dissenting opinions within the
intelligence community on the potential use for the aluminum tubes,
despite the fact that the intelligence community had been debating the
issue for well more than a year.
Since the Director was not aware of all the views of the intelligence
agencies, he could only pass on the CIA's view to the President. This
has to change. Policymakers must be aware of all views of all
intelligence agencies on such crucial matters.
Some might say consolidating the leadership of the entire
intelligence community under a national intelligence director might
actually stifle healthy competition, that central planning will deprive
decisionmakers of a full range of intelligence. I echo what Chairman
Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton have said:

Competitive analysis is very important . . . no one can
claim that the current structure fosters competitive
analysis. Look at the Senate report on group-think with
regard to Iraq. The current system encourages, we believe,
group-think. . . .

In my view, to accomplish the task we have just discussed, the
national intelligence director should be equipped with the authority
commensurate with the responsibilities with which he is vested. We can
no longer afford to have the Intelligence Committee unable to direct
those resources.
As the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission indicated--he said in response
to another question I posed when he testified before the Intelligence
Committee with regard to George Tenet raising the red flag about the
threat from al-Qaida:

. . . a problem we have of communication between agencies .
. . one of the best illustrations that hit me when I first
heard about it is in 1998, when [the Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency] George Tenet got it. What we are
suggesting, I guess, is if you had that coordination and that
declaration of war had been made under the system we
recommend, the military, the diplomatic side, the
intelligence side, they all would have gotten it.

If you can imagine when the Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency had been talking about a major threat to the United States back
in 1998, raising a red flag, going around Washington talking to
whomever in order to get attention, to draw attention to this
tremendous threat that al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden posed, that they
were declaring war on the United States, and he could not get anyone's
attention, never, ever again should we be in a position where the
Director of Central Intelligence, now the director of the national
intelligence community, should not be able to get the attention of the
executive branch or of the Congress or of policymakers across the board
within the intelligence community because he doesn't have the power to
redirect resources or to redirect the attention or to make sure there
is a collective focus on such a major threat.
There are a number of authorities that this legislation before us
will provide the national director of intelligence. I think it is
absolutely vital and critical that the national intelligence director
have strong authority to redirect resources with respect to budget and
personnel. There is no question that we must have a director of
national intelligence who is vested with the kind of power and
authority to command a centralized organization. This is not just about
moving boxes around. It is vesting the authority within this individual
to command the direction of the resources and the decisionmaking that
is absolutely vital to establish the kind of strategic thinking across
the intelligence community that heretofore has not been present.
Some have argued that providing the national intelligence director
with these authorities equates to the loss of intelligence support to
our warfighters.

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I do not dispute the fact that any successful intelligence reform must
respect the military's necessity to maintain a robust organic tactical
intelligence capability and to have rapid access to national
intelligence assets and information.

I would argue that providing the national intelligence director with
the authorities commensurate to his responsibilities, by providing him
the ability to better coordinate and manage the entirety of our
Nation's intelligence operations, could improve national support to our
military operations, both strategically as well as tactically.
One of the national intelligence director's greatest responsibilities
will be to secure national intelligence support to our warfighters and
ensure that strategic information of tactical importance is
expeditiously delivered to our soldiers, seamen, airmen and marines.
There is no question but that the men and women of our Armed Forces
deserve and must continue to receive the best, most timely actionable
intelligence. So I believe that creating this position will also
improve the accountability within the intelligence community, an issue
that also has been a focus of mine for the past 20 years.
I saw firsthand the consequences of serious inadequacies in
accountability during my 12 years as a member of the House Foreign
Affairs International Operations Subcommittee and as chair of the
International Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.
During the 99th Congress back in 1986, I worked to bring to the State
Department an accountability review board as part of the Omnibus
Diplomatic Security and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1986. I think about those
times because accountability becomes a critical component as we ensure
that our agencies are responsive to the threats that are posed to
America, to Americans, to American interests here as well as abroad.
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I look back to that
time. That is why I think it so critical to ensure that in every phase
of the new challenges that we are facing we also incorporate the kind
of accountability that compels our policymakers, our officials, and
agencies responsive to those threats. As a member of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, I continue to see that there is a stunning lack
of accountability within the community.
The committee's review of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction is replete with information-sharing failures,
analytic failures, and collection failures. It is imperative that these
failures, many of which were identified in the Joint Inquiry into
Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist
Attacks of September 11, are not repeated. As former United Nations
weapons inspector Dr. David Kay told the Intelligence Committee at one
of our reform hearings, `` . . . intelligence reform without
accountability will not achieve the objective we all share to avoid
repeating the clearly avoidable tragedy of 9/11 and the equally
avoidable failures in analysis that marked the Iraq WMD program.''
That is why back in 1986 we created an accountability review board in
the State Department because of embassy security, because of the threat
posed by terrorists back in the 1980s. We had the Inman Report in 1983,
and we responded to that. We redesigned embassy security, both
physical, perimeter security, intelligence security, and we didn't want
any more lapses and failures in that regard. That is why we set up the
accountability review board--so we can ensure that these measures put
in place are implemented and strongly enforced.
I think the same is true here. We have to ensure there will be
accountability. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing in
1993, there was a failure of information sharing among the agencies.
Again, it was another lapse in failure among agencies. Even after 9/11
we are now examining failures again of information sharing--replete
with failure.
It seems to me that we have to redesign the system to ensure that we
have the kind of accountability we should demand rightfully of those
who are in positions of authority to implement these responsibilities
and obligations. That is why I think it is critical that we incorporate
these types of reforms which will be essential.
I concluded after my examination of what went wrong with our pre-war
assessment concerning Iraq's WMD program and the reality posed to the
military phase of Iraq that one way to prevent these lapses in the
future is to inject more accountability into the intelligence
community. That is why I introduced legislation in June to create the
office of inspector general for intelligence.
The intelligence community lacks a single, overarching intelligence
communitywide investigative entity that bridges the gap between and
among all the various agencies in order to identify problem areas to
ensure critical deficiencies are addressed before they become crises or
tragedies, and to develop and ensure the implementation of the most
efficient and effective methods of intelligence gathering and
interpretation.
What is required, in my view, is an inspector general for the entire
intelligence community. The agencies now have their own individual
inspector generals. But I happen to believe that this newly created
office would assist in instituting better management accountability and
would help the national intelligence director resolve problems within
the intelligence community.
I am very pleased that the legislation we are debating today
includes--again I thank the leadership of the chair of the committee,
Senator Collins, for including a provision to create an office of
inspector general for the entire community. That inspector general has
the ability to initiate and conduct independent investigations,
including investigating current issues within the intelligence
community, not just conduct ``lessons learned'' studies, not just a
retrospective, but prospective to identify the problems that may be
there, may be present in the intelligence community, and to have that
strategic view of what is going wrong and make sure we can also prevent
and preempt the problems before they take place.

This new office will seek to identify problem areas and identify the
most efficient and effective business practices required to ensure that
critical deficiencies can be addressed before it is too late, before we
have another intelligence failure, and before lives are lost.
In short, an inspector general who can look across the entire
community will help improve management and coordination, and
cooperation and information sharing among the intelligence agencies--
again, another dynamic that will help to ensure and enforce the kind of
information sharing that clearly has been lacking up to this point.
The inspector general also will help break down the barriers that
have perpetuated the parochial, stovepipe approaches to intelligence
community management and operations.
Again, I commend the work of the authors of this underlying bill,
Senator Collins for her dedication, and Senator Lieberman for working
together to include this recommendation of creating the inspector
general in the office of the national intelligence director.
The authors of this bill have crafted extensive language creating and
defining this vital agent of accountability. I look forward to further
working with them to complete the creation of an independent IG, and to
ensure that proper accountability to the director of the national
intelligence, to the President and to Congress, and ultimately to the
American people is carried forward.
In addition, I hope I can work with the committee on several other
issues and amendments to enhance this legislation.
For example, as I have been reviewing this legislation, and as we
look at the pre-war intelligence, it was apparent that the intelligence
community relied on forces that supported this predetermined idea and
found there was no alternative analysis or ``red teaming'' performed on
critical issues, allowing assessments to go unchallenged year after
year, and certainly for more than a decade with respect to Iraq.
While this bill includes provisions for an analysis review unit, I
also think we must consider the ability for the community to look at
alternatives in that

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area as well. It is very important to have that type of dynamic within
the intelligence community, to think out of the box, to think
creatively and innovatively and not just be confined to the assumptions
that have been carried over, to preconceived notions that were so
inherent in all of the pre-war assessments with respect to Iraq's WMD
program.
This bill also mandates that the national intelligence council
produce national intelligence estimates. I believe this process must be
made a little more automatic and transparent and a little ad hoc. I
believe that the national intelligence council should report to us what
they can do to streamline that process.
I also believe we should have the National Counterterrorism Center
report to us in a year about what they are doing and whether they are
meeting the mark. This bill already requires a report from the national
director of intelligence. But I think it would also be important to
hear from the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center the
lessons learned in the establishment of capability before we move to
set up other centers. The creation of a national intelligence director
and improving the community's accountability through the creation of an
inspector general are but two of the many issues in the ongoing debate
on intelligence community reform. Indeed, it has been an extremely
challenging year for the intelligence community and those who work in
it, one in which we saw every aspect of the intelligence process come
to the fore at one time or another.
From the tactical collection and analysis of on-the-ground
intelligence by our battlefield commanders in Iraq that led to the
capture of Saddam Hussein, to the global search for the information
that led to the exposure of Aq Khan's nuclear proliferation network, to
the decision to commit troops to the field in Iraq, it became obvious
to every American that timely and quality intelligence is imperative if
we are to be successful in defeating the forces that have pledged
themselves to the destruction of America.
I think all of these events highlight how abundantly crucial it is to
ensure that we have the leadership with the requisite authority to
ensure that the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence
information is as synchronized, accurate, and as comprehensive as it
possibly can be, and that it represents the very best judgment of the
intelligence community when it is provided to the national policymakers
who rely on that information to make the most profound of decisions.
Of course, intelligence reform must include reforming oversight of
not only the intelligence community. Ideally, this should have occurred
in tandem. Congress must not abrogate its responsibility to seriously
tackle the oversight issue. As 9/11 Commissioner Lehman said, it is
like one hand clapping, if you only do the executive branch this year.
Hopefully we will be able to pursue those initiatives shortly as well.
In the final analysis, it is apparent to me that the intelligence
structure put in place over 50 years ago was one that focused primarily
on developing intelligence to counter a military threat that is no
longer sufficient for confronting the asymmetrical threats we are now
confronting in the 21st century--a century in which our enemies no
longer make distinctions between our battlefields and our backyards.
So, therefore, we must develop a lighter and more agile intelligence
capability that can keep pace with the kind of enemy we are now
fighting--one that is elusive, one that does not need a large land-
based military capability to bring the fight to us.

This legislation will bring America the agility we require, the
ability to reform our intelligence apparatus into an adaptable
organization prepared to anticipate and prepare for future threats.
I look forward to working with my colleague again, the Senator from
Maine, who I congratulate again for bringing this most timely, this
most forthright, comprehensive, very sound framework for intelligence
reform and working with them on the issues I might propose with my
refinements and enhancements to the underlying bill.
I hope in due course of this week or the following week, however long
it takes before we adjourn, to complete this process, to pass this
legislation, not only in the Senate but the overall Congress, so the
President can sign this legislation because clearly it must be done
forthwith. This is something the American people and the future of this
Nation deserve.
I yield the floor.
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I congratulate the senior Senator from
Maine for her comments and her work on this issue. As a member of the
Intelligence Committee she has understood very early the need for
significant intelligence reform. The provisions included in the
Collins-Lieberman bill that created an inspector general for the new
national intelligence authority are the direct result of the
legislation sponsored by the senior Senator from Maine.
I thank the Senator for her expertise and her leadership. This is an
area, as she indicated, on which she has been working for many years.
We very much value her contributions to the debate.
I know of no other requests to speak tonight.

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