Natural Resources Management Act--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KING. Mr. President, I rise to discuss for a few moments reflections upon the hearing we had this week in the Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats. This is an annual hearing and is in public, at least the first part. Then there is a closed session afterward with the heads of our intelligence Agencies--the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and, of course, with the Director of National Intelligence.
This is an important hearing because it basically outlines to the American people the threats we face and the seriousness of those threats. It is an opportunity for those of us on the committee and for Members of the Senate in general to understand the nature of the threats, what the intelligence is, and what the information is that we have to help us make good policy decisions.
Good intelligence is crucial to making good decisions. We live in an incredibly complex world, and my work on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees over the past 6 years has educated me as to just how complex and difficult a lot of these issues are. I remember a long discussion about the Middle East at one of the Intelligence Committee meetings, and one of the members on the committee said that this is a really hard, complicated subject. The witness that day, who was from the CIA, said: ``Welcome to the Middle East.''
These are very difficult issues, but in order to make rational, thoughtful, important, and very results-oriented decisions based upon the information from these hearings, we have to know the facts. We have to understand what the implications are and what the likely results are but also, more fundamentally, just what is going on, on the ground. Whether you look back 50 years, 100 years, or 150 years, often our worst foreign policy misadventures have been based on one of two things--either bad intelligence or intelligence that was somehow skewed in order to meet the desires of the policymakers. If we don't have good intelligence, we can't make good decisions.
A lot of attention has been paid to the people who were testifying at that hearing--as I mentioned, the heads of the FBI and the CIA and the Directors of National Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and the National Security Agency. Yet those individuals were speaking on behalf of thousands of other people who are scattered around the world, who often risk their lives to gain the information they were sharing with us that day. It was not Dan Coats' opinion or Gina Haspel's opinion or Paul Nakasone's opinion. They were distilling and presenting to us the intelligence and the information that had been developed by their good people over the course of the past month, week, years to inform us and to inform the President of the best information available so we can make the best decisions.
After the hearing, what disturbed me was the reaction of the President of the United States. Instead of absorbing and listening to this information, he dismissed it. He not only dismissed the information, but he dismissed the messengers and said they had to go back to school or that they were being naive. Now, I don't want to be heard as having said that the intelligence community always gets it right. I know, in my having sat through hearings on Afghanistan and Syria and on many of the other difficult subjects we face, that there are mistakes made and that Dan Coats does not have a direct line to the Almighty in terms of the facts. They are not always right. Yet, if one is going to dismiss their findings, it should be based upon some additional set of facts or information from some source.
There were two things that bothered me about the President's reaction. One was he essentially dismissed the facts in a whole series of cases--of Iran and ISIS. Those were two we talked about. With regard to North Korea and Russia, basically, he said: I don't believe any of it. The problem with that is, it undermines the confidence you have in the decision-making authority at the highest level if facts don't matter. The information that is supplied is not by Dan Coats, not by Gina Haspel, not by Paul Nakasone but is the view--the distilled wisdom--of the thousands of people whose job it is, whose profession it is, to ferret out the truth.
At the beginning of the hearing, Dan Coats gave the best synopsis I have ever heard of the mission of the intelligence Agencies, of the mission of our intelligence community. It was very simple--to seek the truth and to speak the truth. That is exactly what they did at that hearing. They sought the truth through the auspices of these very professional, very thorough Agencies that are scattered throughout the world. Then they spoke the truth by telling us what they learned.
The second problem I have with the President's reaction is a little more subtle, and this goes to the heart of the relationship between the intelligence community and policymakers. The subtle message that was being sent was: Don't tell the boss things he doesn't want to hear. Don't give it to us unvarnished. Style the information; sly the information; amend the information in order to meet what is perceived to be what the boss wants to hear. Whether the boss is this President, a past President, or a future President, that is disastrous. The intelligence community has to deal in facts and information, not policy, but if the message is sent down through the ranks of ``don't give me an assessment that disagrees with where I started,'' that will start to happen.
Indeed, it is human nature. All of us want to be in the good graces of the boss. All of us want to give our superiors information they want to get. I was in law school over 50 years ago and had a friend who had been a captain in Vietnam. He told the story of being on the ground in Vietnam. There was a skirmish in which a half a dozen Viet Cong were killed. He filed his report. His report went to the division. At that point, half a dozen became 15. It went to headquarters where 15 became 50. It then went to Washington where 50 became 150. That is because Washington wanted to see higher counts. That was the perception that corrupted the process, not because people were being corrupt in the sense of being evil or of wanting to do wrong but because they were doing what is human nature, which is ``I want to please the person above me in the chain of command.''
If the President of the United States is not so subtly telling the intelligence community what he wants to hear, that will inevitably affect the quality of the product he receives, which, indeed, will also inevitably affect the quality of decisions he makes.
Again, I am not saying the intelligence community is always right. I certainly believe the President or any other policymaker, including Members of Congress who receive this information, need to review it critically--ask questions, probe and prod--and try to be sure the information is correct, but to dismiss it out of hand in a tweet, it seems to me, is dangerous. It is dangerous because it undermines the Executive's authority to make good decisions based upon the facts, and it is dangerous because it has the potential for skewing the information itself in the future. Either one of those things is a danger to national security.
If the President has facts that are different than those that are presented by the intelligence community, he should at least present them and say: This isn't consistent with what I learned at ``such and such'' a conference or what I am hearing from the State Department or from what I am hearing from Homeland Security. Yet to simply say they are naive, that they don't know what they are doing, and they should go back to school denigrates the work of thousands of loyal, patriotic Americans who are doing their level best to produce information upon which good decisions can be made.
I stand today not to say the intelligence community always gets it right but to say the intelligence community should at least get an honest hearing and that the information they present is important to this country. It is important to the President, and it is important to the Congress. The day we start encouraging them to skew the information is the day the national security of this country is at risk.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source