Congressional Record: July 19, 1999 (Senate)
Page S8777-S8796
INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2000--MOTION TO PROCEED [...] Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico has done a very good job of outlining an urgent need to change our law governing the Department of Energy. I have high praise for him and Senators Warner, Murkowski, Kyl, and, on our side, Senators Levin, Bingaman, and Lieberman, who have worked to try to fashion a piece of legislation, a law that will balance our need for secrecy and our need for security. I appreciate very much, I say to the Senator, his leadership on this and the sense of urgency that he has brought to the need to change our law. My hope is that we, at the end of the day, at the end of this debate--I do not think there is going to be very much objection to moving to this bill--my hope is that we can get a very large majority, if not a unanimous vote in support. I know the Senator from Michigan, Mr. Levin, has some amendments he wants to offer. He has talked to me a little bit about them. We will have a chance to talk about those, I guess, tomorrow when we come to it. But there is no question that the laboratories have been a tremendous source of pride and a tremendous source of discovery and a tremendous success story as far as delivering to the United States of America things that have made the United States of America more secure and more prosperous. Likewise, there is no question that over the years--over the last 20 years or so--since the Department of Energy was created, there has been sort of a gradual buildup of layers of bureaucracy that make it more and more difficult for any Secretary of Energy, whether that individual has the requisite skills or not, to know what is going on in the laboratories and to have the authority needed to manage those agencies so those laboratories, as Senator Rudman, chairman of the PFIAB says in the title of his report, can get both the best science and the best security simultaneously. We unquestionably have the best science. I am quite certain the Senator from New Mexico believes the same way I do. In visiting the labs, in particular the lab that is under question, Los Alamos, most of the people I have met there described themselves as being very conservative to extremely conservative on the question of security and expressed their concern that their reputation for keeping the United States of America safe has been damaged. Of all the people who are anxious to get the law changed so that the lab's reputation for being the world's finest both for science and security can be restored, there are no more powerful advocates of that than at Los Alamos Laboratory from Dr. Brown on down. This is an unusual opportunity because normally the intelligence authorization bill goes through almost with unanimous consent. Since I have had the opportunity a few years to come here with the chairman, with usually about 15 minutes' worth of conversation and without a lot of interest, the bill goes through. The good news this year is that it will not go through quite so quickly. It is good news because it gives us an opportunity to examine what it is this bill does and what it is this bill does not do. Unfortunately, current law does not allow us to tell the people of the United States of America either how much we spend on all of our intelligence collection, analysis, or dissemination efforts, or does it allow us to tell what the individual components of that are. I say "unfortunately" because I do believe quite strongly that we would be better off changing the law so the public did know both of those things. I believe that unless the people of the United States of America support what it is we are doing with our intelligence efforts, it is very difficult, over a long period of time, to sustain that effort. I myself am very much concerned that at the moment the general public does not either understand what it is we do on the intelligence side, or as a consequence of some very highly publicized failures are they terribly confident that we are doing a very good job of collecting intelligence, analyzing that intelligence, producing that intelligence, and then disseminating that intelligence to either warfighters or to national policymakers. I have had the good fortune of watching the men and women who do this work for a number of years. I am not only impressed with their skills, but I am impressed with their patriotism and impressed with their successes, most of which I cannot talk about on the floor this afternoon. Let me make the case, first of all, for secrecy. I think there are times when it is absolutely vital and needed. When we have warfighters on the field, as we recently had in Kosovo, we obviously can't provide the target list to the public and let people know where it is that these pilots are going to be flying. We cannot obviously provide battlefield information. Otherwise, we are going to increase the risk to these warfighters. It is always difficult in an environment where it is just the United States, let alone where there are 18 allies, to contain that intelligence and not have a terrible example of something where intelligence information got to our enemies, and as a consequence, they were better prepared, and as a consequence either we were not as successful as we wanted to be or there were casualties as a consequence. [[Page S8783]] It is a life-or-death matter that we keep these secrets. We have asked men and women to put their lives at risk, and we have to protect their interests. Otherwise, we will find it very difficult to find volunteers to go on these missions. It is needed for military operations. It is needed for some covert operations as well, where the President has signed a finding. He has asked that certain things be done, again, in the interest of the United States, overseen by the Congress. Today, I have very high praise for this administration in that regard. Since the Aldrich Ames spy incident where Aldrich Ames, traitor to his country, not only gave up U.S. secrets, he gave up secrets that led to the deaths of many men and women who were working on our behalf, this administration has increasingly come to the oversight committees, one in the House and one in the Senate that were created in 1976, with what are called notifications of errors, notifications of problems and mistakes that were made on a weekly basis. We are receiving information that the executive branch thinks we need to know in order for us to make judgments about what it is we think the United States of America ought to be doing. So there is a lot more--in fact, it feels like a fire hose at times--notifications that are occurring in both the House and the Senate committee. Indeed, our committee was notified about this particular incident in 1996, and I think we responded appropriately to it at the time. We pushed back and asked for additional counterintelligence. When I say "this particular incident," I am talking about the notification of the possibility that the Chinese had acquired what we now know in published accounts to be details about a weapons system known as the W- 88, our most sophisticated nuclear weapon, that the Chinese had acquired that through espionage in the 1980s. We were notified of that in 1996, 11 years after it was suspected to have happened. I think the committees were properly notified, and I think the committees properly responded and measured the relative threat to other things in the world and pushed back and responded, I thought, in an appropriate fashion. There was much more that we probably could have done. I will let history judge whether or not we did enough. The point is, there are secrets. As a consequence of those secrets, under law, under a resolution we have created, the Senate Committee on Intelligence and the House has done the same. Those committees have congressional responsibility for hearing these secrets and making judgments, first, about what kind of structure, what kind of budget, and what kind of operations we are going to approve. I make the case that secrecy is needed in order to maintain our security both for military and for our operations. There are sources that we use, there are methods we use, both of which must be kept secret in order for us to continue to recruit and in order for us to continue to operate with a maximum amount of safety for, again, the men and women who have chosen, as a result of their patriotic love of their country, to serve their country in these missions. We need to make certain we provide them with the secrecy needed for them to conduct their operations. However, there are times when secrecy does not equal security. It is a very important point for us to consider as we both debate this bill and try to think about how we want to write our laws and think about how we are going to do our operation. Sometimes secrecy can make security more difficult. There is a recently declassified report called the Venona Report that describes the acquisition of information about spies inside the United States during the post-World War II era. In that report, there is a very interesting moment when General Omar Bradley, who at that time was in charge of intelligence, made the decision not to inform the President of the United States that Klaus Fuchs and others were spies for the Soviet Union. The President was not informed. Secrecy was maintained. General Bradley liked President Truman; he was an Army man like himself. But he made a judgment that secrecy had to be maintained, that the commanding officer of all our forces, that the President, duly elected by the people, didn't have a need to know. So a judgment was made to preserve secrecy. I believe, as a consequence, policies didn't turn out to be as good as they should have and security was compromised as a consequence. I am not blaming General Bradley. I see it from time to time. Indeed, what caused me to talk about this was my belief that we should change the law and allow the people of the United States of America to know how much of their money we are allocating for intelligence and how much in the various categories is being allocated. I fear that all the public has are bad stories about mistakes that are being made, the most recent one being a mistake in targeting inside of Belgrade. The Chinese Embassy was mistakenly hit one block away from another target that should have been hit. A great deal of examination of that has already been done. It caused us a great deal of trouble with the Chinese Ambassador. Under Secretary of State Pickering had to make a trip to China. This all occurred at a very delicate time when we were trying to get the Chinese to agree to some changes in their policy to ascend to the WTO. It was a big embarrassment. I get asked about it all the time: What kind of so-and-so's are over there? Are we getting our money's worth? Are we wasting our money? Couldn't they just have spent $2 on a map that was readily available to show where the Chinese Embassy was? Why spend billions of dollars on all these folks if they don't even have good enough sense to use a commercially made $2 map? There are questions about the failure to predict the detonation of a nuclear weapon in India over a year ago, which was followed by a detonation by Pakistan. A third item I hear a lot is that the CIA failed to predict the end of the Soviet Union, and anybody that can't predict that doesn't deserve to get a lot of U.S. tax dollars. It is unfortunate that only the bad stories get out. First of all, on the targeting of the embassy, it was a mistake, but we were in a war, for gosh sakes. We are being asked to deliver targets, asked to identify the targets, and the operation's requirement was to minimize the casualties to the United States and our allies. Not a single American or single ally was killed during that entire operation. I consider that a mark of tremendous success. That did not occur by accident. There is no shelf of books with one saying "T" for targets in Belgrade and Kosovo. We had to develop those targets on our own and relatively late. We didn't expect the bombing operation to go on that long. We had--when I say "we," I mean the administration--the impression that possibly it would be over quicker, based upon the experience of 1995. In short, it was a tremendous success. Not only were we able to conduct that operation without a single allied casualty, but, in addition, we reversed the trend of modern warfare in the 20th century. Modern warfare in the 20th century has seen an increasing fraction of casualties that are noncombatants. I believe, in this case, except for the casualties produced by the Serbian army and their military police and their paramilitary units in Kosovo, there was also success in minimizing civilian casualties in this effort. We could not, for example, have implemented Dayton. One of the untold stories is the success of the intelligence operations. At that time, it was General Hughes who organized the takeover authority in December of 1995. It was a United Nations operation, transferred over to NATO. They worked night and day to set up a communications system that allowed us to know who was and who wasn't abiding by the Dayton agreement--a very, very complicated agreement. The people who were in charge of developing our intelligence operation read it, knew it, and disseminated it down the ranks. Everybody understood what had to be done. It was impressive that, in a very small amount of time, we were able to put together an intelligence collection and dissemination effort that enabled us to implement the Dayton agreement. There are many other examples, such as the Indian detonation of a nuclear weapon. In fact, we had the intelligence collection that predicted and prevented one about 18 months earlier. [[Page S8784]] Nobody should have been surprised. We don't really need to have intelligence officers collecting and predicting a detonation of nuclear weapons in India when the successful party in an election promised, and made a part of their campaign a promise, to detonate if they were elected, to test a nuclear weapon. Anyway, I think it is very important for me, as somebody who has been given by my leader the opportunity to sit on this committee and to observe what is going on, to attempt to correct things I thought were wrong, make decisions about how much taxpayer money to allocate, about how to respond to mistakes made and intelligence errors that occur, how to respond and correct those errors--it is very important for me to say to taxpayers that my view is that you are getting your money's worth. According to published accounts, we spend $28 billion a year. I wish I could provide that number as well as some additional details, but if that is the current dollar amount, according to published accounts, in my view, just watching what is done, the American people are getting their money's worth. There are tremendous threats in the world that our intelligence agencies collect against. They supply that intelligence to our warfighters, to our military people. Imagine what it would be like to be in charge of U.S. forces in South Korea. You have the most heavily militarized area in the world between North and South Korea. There are about 37,000 young men and women in South Korea defending against a possible attack from North Korea, and the question to their commanding officer is: What are North Korea's intentions? What are they doing? They need an answer. It is an extremely hard target to penetrate and to know what is going on. Those warfighters need to know that information. They can't operate in the dark. Our intelligence collection operators do that time in and time out, day in and day out, try to collect, process, produce, and disseminate intelligence to warfighters and the national policymakers and decisionmakers, in order that the United States of America can be as safe as it possibly can be. My view is that they have achieved a substantial success. They are not perfect; none of us are. But their substantial success deserves a very high amount of praise. Mr. President, a related problem we have with intelligence is that many people presume that the Director of Central Intelligence, who manages the CIA and other national intelligence efforts, controls it all. Not true, though the Brown commission report that was assembled after the Aldrich Ames betrayal recommended that increased authority be given to the Director of Central Intelligence to budget and select personnel for these other areas. For many reasons, these authorities were not granted the Director. The current Director, Mr. Tenet, controls far less than they realize, under law. I don't believe that is a healthy situation. We were successful 2 years ago in getting the Director, under statute, some additional authorities. But my view is that it is not enough to match authority with responsibility. We have not done that. We are holding the Director responsible for intelligence failures in many areas over which he has no real direct budget authority or personnel authority. So the distinguished Senator from New Mexico has properly identified a problem at the laboratories, as a result of the structure of the law that governs the Department of Energy, that needs to be fixed. The concern is that through some set of facts--today, we don't even know what the set of facts are--the Chinese probably acquired information about our nuclear secrets, and, as a consequence, they may have the capacity to build and deploy very dangerous weapons. They stole secrets from us, and, as a consequence, we are concerned about how to increase the secrecy of these labs. I underscore with this statement that secrecy does not in all cases equal security. There are times when secrecy will make security more difficult to achieve. My own view is that the failure under law to let the public know what our expenditures are, and how those moneys are spent, decreases our security because, unless I am mistaken in just sensing citizens' attitudes toward our intelligence agencies, they do not have a sufficient amount of confidence that they are getting their money's worth. As a consequence of that lack of confidence, I think we are having a difficult time acquiring the resources necessary in a world that is more complicated and a world that, in many ways, is more dangerous than it was prior to the end of the cold war. My hope is that this debate about the Department of Energy can occur relatively quickly, that we can get to it tomorrow, that we can resolve the remaining conflicts, and that we can get this intelligence authorization bill passed. Both the chairman and I see the year 2000 as a watershed year. We were successful last year in increasing the resources given to our intelligence checks and analysis and production and dissemination efforts. We need to continue that trend. We have been downsizing in the 1990s. I believe very strongly that that downsizing must stop if we are going to be able to honestly say yes to the American people, that we are doing all we can to keep them as safe as possible against a real range of threats which are still out there in the world. The United States of America is the leading nation on this planet. We have the strongest economy. We have the strongest military. We have the longest running democracy. We tend to take sides on issues, whether it is in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or someplace else on the planet. We clearly take sides when it comes to fighting for individual freedom--for the freedom of people in China, for the freedom of people in Russia, and throughout this planet. We put our resources and our reputation and our lives on the line. In 1996--it has been so long ago--Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia after the gulf war, flying missions and supporting missions in the southern area, were killed. We suspect a variety of possibilities as perpetrators. But they were killed not because they were in Saudi Arabia by accident; they were in Saudi Arabia defending U.S. interests, and they were killed because they were targeted by people who didn't want them in Saudi Arabia. We take sides, and, as a consequence, we are targets. We are targets as well because we have been successful. There is jealousy and hatred towards the people of the United States of America. We understand the interconnected nature of our economy and of our diplomacy throughout the world. A problem in Angola can be a problem in Omaha, NE relatively quickly. So we forward-deploy our resources. We don't just have missions in NATO or missions that involve the United Nations. We are forward- deployed throughout the world in an attempt to make the world more peaceful, more democratic, and more prosperous. It is a mission the United States of America has selected for itself. I thank God that it has. It is a mission that has resulted in enormous success. I don't know how the rest of my colleagues felt at the time, but I remember quite vividly and was very moved for moments during Joint Sessions of Congress--not that Presidents haven't moved me with their State of the Union Addresses. But far more moving to me was Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea. All four of these men came to a Joint Session of Congress and said to the representatives of the people of this country: Thank you; you have put your lives on the line for our freedom; you put your money on the line for our freedom; you stayed the course, and we are free. Since Kim Dae-jung of South Korea gave that address, if I ever ran into a man who fought in the "forgotten war" in South Korea in the 1950s, I am quick to say this. I know there are many criticisms of that war. Many people wondered whether or not it was worthwhile. Let me tell you, on behalf of the President of South Korea and the people of South Korea, that that war was worth fighting. All one has to do is look at the difference between living in freedom in South Korea--an imperfect democracy, as many are; but, nonetheless, the people of South Korea are free; their standard of living is higher; they have the liberty to practice their religion, to speak on the streets--and North Korea, which is a nation of great suffering and great anguish. Large numbers of people [[Page S8785]] are dying as a consequence of malnutrition. The country is arguably in the worst condition of any country on the face of this Earth. That didn't occur by accident. The world marketplace didn't get that done. I am a big fan of the marketplace and a big fan of what business can do. The intervention that liberated the people of South Korea was not the intervention of Sears & Roebuck; it was the intervention of American forces, American will, American blood, and American money. The people of South Korea are free as a consequence. We didn't make a decision based on the shape of their eyes or based on the color of their skin or based upon their religion. We didn't do it based upon a desire to own territory or a desire to own wealth or a desire to establish a colony. We did it based upon a desire to fight and to keep the people of South Korea free. When you take a stand such as that, as the distinguished occupant of the Chair knows--he has been in politics a very long time, an outstanding public servant--you know when you take a stand, especially on a controversial subject, you are apt to provoke some enemies; you are apt to get people organized against you. They don't agree with the position on this, that, or the other thing. The United States has enemies as a result of taking a stand and as a result of our having taken a stand throughout the world in general on behalf of freedom. We provoke animosity in many ways. We are at risk, as a consequence, not just from nation states--that is the older world where nation states were the No. 1 threat--today, it is nonnation state actors such as Osama bin Laden and other terrorists who organize themselves away from the normal powers and structures of government. Cyber warfare, biological and chemical warfare--all of these things we have discussed at length are real and present dangers to the people of the United States of America. It is certainly true that our diplomats at the State Department and our diplomats in other areas of Government have to try to use our intelligence and produce diplomatic successes, as well as to reduce threats. But the State Department, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture--throughout Government--the Congress, and the President of the United States regularly receive analysis that has occurred after checks have been done, after analysis has been done, after production has occurred, and then it is disseminated to people who make decisions all the time and, hopefully, make better decisions as a consequence of the intelligence delivered to them. My view is that this budget decline we have experienced in the 1990s needs to stop. I hope that this intelligence authorization bill will be passed by the Senate, that we can go to conference quickly with the House, and get it to the President for his signature. I have no doubt that the President, subject to our not putting things on here that the President can't support, will sign the bill. One of the things that I think undercuts our ability to do that is the continued belief we have to keep from the American people how much money is being spent. I have said that often enough now. I am not going to offer an amendment. I can count votes. I know that amendment would not succeed. But I intend to continue to make the point and try to persuade, especially my friends on the other side of the aisle, that we will increase the Nation's security by making this information publicly available to the American people. Again, the point here is that 100 percent secrecy does not always equal 100 percent security. Sometimes 100 percent secrecy can actually decrease the security, as a consequence of the right people not getting the information. As a consequence of discussions not proceeding subject to compartmentalization that prevented one key person from talking to another key person, and, as a consequence, neither one of them knew what the other was doing, the result is that a bad decision was made. I also would like to discuss an issue that, to me, is extremely important. I don't know if the Senator from New Mexico has additional things he wants to say. Does the Senator from Michigan desire to speak? Since I will be assigned to sit down for a long period of time, Senators may want to move on. I think I will have plenty of time to talk about this bill. Mr. President, I presume they would like to speak. I yield the floor. [...] Mr. KERREY. Madam President, this bill doesn't normally get a lot of attention, but because of the concern over the loss of secrets through our laboratories at the DOE, we are going to have a debate about an amendment to restructure the Department of Energy. I want to make a point that I made earlier, which is that secrecy and security are not the same thing. Sometimes secrecy equals security. Sometimes secrecy can make security more difficult, harder for us to accomplish the mission [[Page S8790]] of keeping the United States of America as secure as we possibly can. I am not going to offer an amendment to this bill, because it has been defeated pretty soundly in the past--although I must say I am tempted to do so--to disclose to the American people how much is spent on intelligence gathering. Right now, under law, we cannot do that. I want to call my colleagues' attention to what is happening. Our first vote is on cloture. I think cloture will be invoked pretty easily. Our leader is not going to hold anybody up from voting for cloture. Maybe we can go right to the bill. Listening to Senators Domenici and Levin earlier, I think they may be able to solve their differences. The vote may end up being unanimous, which is my wish. I hope we can continue to move closer together on that piece of legislation, an important piece of legislation on which Senator Domenici and others have been working. I want to call my colleagues' attention to what we do every year basically, and that is, the authorization of appropriations for the intelligence bill is very small, as a consequence of not being able to disclose to the American people what is in the bill. The House bill contains six titles. The Senate bill, which will be offered as a substitute for the House bill, also contains six titles. The first two titles are identical. Titles I and II in the House bills are identical. Then there are general provisions, and then each bill has additional things in there. But you can see the problem we have getting public support for intelligence collection. That is one step in the process of intelligence. We collect with imaging efforts, we collect with signals intercepts, we collect with human intelligence, and we have measurement intelligence. We have all sorts of various what are called INTs that are used to gather raw data. Then somebody has to take that data and analyze it. What does it mean? What does this data mean? What is the interpretation of it? Oftentimes secrecy can be a problem because one compartment may not be talking to another. This administration and others have worked to try to bring various people together so there is more consultation than there has been in the past. But oftentimes decisions have to be made very quickly. Sometimes interpretations of public information are made, and an adjustment is made. Let me be very specific. About 80 percent, in my view, of the decisions that most elected people make in Congress having to do with national security are made as a result of something they acquired in a nonclassified fashion in a TV report, in a radio report, in a newspaper report, or a published document. Staff analyze it and come and say: This is what we think is going on--about 80 percent of the information that we process. I would say that would probably be on the low side. It may be even higher than that. Indeed, the President may be in a similar situation. He may be making a decision on a very high percentage of publicly accessible information as opposed to classified information. That is quite the trend. The trend is both healthy and at times disturbing because more and more information is being made available to the public that was not available in the past. The good news is citizens have more information. They process that information. We have a lot of independent analysts out there. In a couple of years, when metering satellite photographs are available, we are going to see competing analyses being done over images. This is what I see when I take that photograph. I say this because I think it is true that it is very difficult, for any length of time for the Congress and the President to do something the public doesn't support, especially when it comes to spending their money. In this case, I just hazard a guess. I never polled on this. But certainly I take a lot of anecdotal stories on board from citizens who question whether or not they are getting their money's worth. Is all the money we are spending worthwhile when we aren't able to tell where the Chinese Embassy is in Belgrade? A $2 map would have told us where it was. When we were unable to forecast a class of facility, when we were unable to foresee that India was going to test a nuclear weapon following an election, during which the party that was successful campaigned, and their platform said, if we are elected and we come to power, we are going to test a nuclear weapon? Many failures, in short, are out in the public, and the public acquires the information. I think it has caused them to lose confidence that they are getting their money's worth. It is a real crisis for us. It is a real challenge for us because, again, if you look at the document we will be voting on sometime in the next couple of days--usually this thing goes through very quickly and we don't have much time to consider it. In an odd way, I thank the Senator from New Mexico for bringing so much attention to the Department of Energy's need for restructuring because it has given us some time to pause and look at this piece of legislation. As I said, the two most important titles, the ones you will see in almost every intelligence authorization bill, is title I and title II. Title I has five sections. It authorizes appropriations. It give us classified schedule authorization, personnel ceiling adjustment authorization, community management account authorization, and emergency supplemental appropriations. That is in the House bill. The Senate bill has four titles. It is quite revealing when you go into title I. Again, normally, if this is a Department of Defense authorization, each one of these titles would provide the detailed and specific number of how much is being spent, all the way down to the very small individual accounts that would be disclosed to the public. There would be a great debate going on. The committee report comes out. The budget comes out. The bill is reported by the Armed Services Committee. Editorials are written. Journalists and specialists say we are spending too little; we are spending too much; we need to build this weapons system, and so forth. A great public debate then ensues when the committee brings the bill up and reports it out for full consideration by the Senate. I think that debate is healthy. The public participates and helps us decide what it is we ought not be doing. Sometimes we still put things in we shouldn't and some things we should. We still make mistakes. That public debate helps us. Under this authorization, what you see in section 101 is the following: The funds are hereby authorized to be appropriated for fiscal year 2000 for the conduct of intelligence and intelligence- related activities of the following elements of the U.S. Government: the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Air Force, the Department of State, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Conference Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency--11 different Government agencies are named but no dollar figure is included. The only dollar figure in this entire budget comes in section 104 where the public learns we are authorizing $171 million to be appropriated for the Community Management Act of the Director of Central Intelligence. We have that piece of information. Later in the bill that we will be voting on, we learn $27 million is available for the National Drug Intelligence Center. Then later, a third time we get another number. We learn $209.1 million is authorized to be appropriated to the Central Intelligence Agency's retirement and disability fund for fiscal year 2000. That is all the public learns. That is all the public knows. The public does not know how much we spend in each one of these agencies, nor how much the committee is recommending in this authorization bill, nor the total amount of dollars being spent. We have had debates about this before. There are good arguments usually filed against it: This is going to deteriorate our national security; we need to maintain, in short, a secret in order to preserve national security. I have reached the opposite conclusion, that this is a situation where the preservation of a secret deteriorates our national security as a consequence, first of all, of not having a public debate about whether this is the right allocation but, most importantly, as a [[Page S8791]] consequence of deteriorating citizens' confidence that we are authorizing and appropriating the correct amount. In short, keeping this secret from the American people has caused difficulty in retaining their consensus that we ought to be spending an amount of money they do not know in order to collect, analyze, produce, and disseminate intelligence. I think that is a problem for us. Again, I have not done any polling on this, so I don't know. I typically don't poll before I make a decision, to the consternation of my staff and supporters. But my guess is, just from anecdotes, there is a deterioration of confidence. It bothers me because my term on the Intelligence Committee--thanks to the original appointment by our former Democratic leader, George Mitchell, from the great State of Maine, and also Leader Daschle's confidence in retaining me on this committee--over time my confidence has increased. Indeed, the argument in my opening statement about this bill is that we have drawn down intelligence investments in the 1990s as we have drawn down our military from roughly 2 million men and women under active duty uniform to 1.35 million. We have also drawn down our intelligence efforts to a point where I don't believe we can do all of the things that need to be done either today or in the future. As I said, I have to collect intelligence. I have to analyze the information. I have skilled people who can analyze it. These images delivered from space very often mean nothing to me when I look at them. It requires somebody who is not only skilled but can process it in a hurry and can make something of it in a hurry. In the situation with India, where we had difficulty warning the President that a test might occur, again, according to published accounts, the Indians were aware that we, first, were able to identify a year earlier they were about to test, and we warned them not to test, as a result of overhead imaging. And they took evasive measures in the future. These are very difficult things to tell. You have to hire skilled people to do it. That is the analysis. The next piece is the production. It is getting very exciting but also very complicated. There is a lot of competition with the private sector to do this production work. Back in the ice age when I was on the U.S. Navy SEAL team, we were given a map if we were going to do an operation in an area in Vietnam. We would look at a map and say: This is the area we will operate in. The map might be 10 years old. Then we would supplement that with human intelligence. Somebody would say: There are some changes here that aren't quite the same as the map. Today an image is used. It is enhanced. It is remarkable how quickly we can deliver very accurate pictures of theaters of operation to the warfighter to disseminate differently, produced in a much different way, and enable that warfighter to have a competitive edge on the battlefield. Indeed, anybody who is thinking about becoming an enemy of the United States of America knows we have tremendous capability on the intelligence side. We get warnings, and those warnings are delivered when threats begin to build. Oftentimes a mere warning enables the heading off of a potential threat that could have erupted into a serious conflict and would have resulted in a loss of lives. The effort to collect, analyze, produce, and disseminate to the right person at the right time, and to make a decision, is not only complicated, but it is also quite expensive. It is not done accidentally. I hope this year is a watershed year and we are able to authorize additional resources for our intelligence agencies. If we don't, at some point we will have a Director of Central Intelligence in the future deliver the bad news to Congress that there is something we want to do but we can't because we cannot accomplish the mission we want to accomplish--not just because of resources but also because it is getting harder and harder to do things we have in the past taken for granted, such as intercept signals, conversations, or communications of some kind between one bad person and another bad person with hostile intent against the United States. Increasingly, we are seeing a shift in two big ways away from nation states. In the old days, we could pass sanctions legislation or do something against a government that was doing something we didn't like. What do we do if Osama bin Laden starts killing Americans or narcoterrorists or cyberterrorists say they hate the United States of America and are going to take action against us? It is very difficult-- indeed, it is impossible--for diplomacy to reduce that threat. We need to intercept and try to prevent it and, very often, try to prevent it with a forceful intervention. Not only is it shifting away from the nation state, making it harder both to collect and to do the other work--the analysis, the processing and dissemination, or production of dissemination--the signals are becoming more complex and difficult to process, and they are becoming more and more encrypted. I have had conversations with the private sector, people in the software business, who say we have to change this export regimen that makes it difficult for these companies to sell encryption overseas. This administration has made tremendous accommodation within the industry to try to accommodate their need to sell to companies that are doing business all over the world. Don't doubt there is a national security issue here. There is significant interception, both on the national security side and the law enforcement side. That encryption at 128 bits or higher is actually deployed. We will find our people in the intelligence side coming back and saying: Look, I know something bad happened, and do you want to know why I didn't know? I will tell you why I didn't know. I couldn't make sense of the signal. We intercept, and all we get is a buzz and background noise. We cannot interpret it. We can't convert it. In the old days, we converted with a linguist or some other technological application. In the new world, we are being increasingly denied access to the signals. As described by the technical advisory group that was established on the Intelligence Committee, it was described as number of needles in the haystack but the haystack is getting larger and larger and harder, as a result, for the intelligence people to do the work they need to do. The chairman is moving to the floor. I know he will make a brilliant and articulate statement. Earlier, the Senator from New Mexico offered a statement on his amendment that he hopes to offer tomorrow. Senator Levin was here as well. I believe there is reason to be encouraged that we will move this bill quickly tomorrow, and reasonably encouraged, as well, that the differences which still exist on this bill can be resolved, and we can get a big bipartisan vote and move this on to conference. I yield the floor.