FISA

Floor Speech

FISA -- (Senate - August 03, 2007)

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, will the Senator from Arizona yield for a question?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I am happy to yield.

Mr. McCONNELL. Isn't it the view of the Senator from Arizona--given the wide respect across this body and in the House as well that Admiral McConnell enjoys--that we should accept his judgment as to what is needed to solve this problem? Is he not, in the view of the Senator from Arizona, the expert on this subject? And is it not clear to everyone that his primary motivation is not to get into a political fight but to protect the homeland from another attack?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, as usual, the minority leader has made an extraordinarily important point.

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the solution to this problem is at the desk. The senior Senator from Missouri, the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, and I placed a bill on the calendar earlier this week that Admiral McConnell has certified would give him and our intelligence community the ability to protect the homeland.

As Senator Bond and I pointed out earlier this week, this measure which is at the desk, which could be taken up and passed by the Senate at any time, would give the intelligence community what it needs before we go off for a month, leaving America without this additional protection. This would be a solution to the problem.

The Director of National Intelligence has pleaded with us in person about this issue which involves--as we all now know full well, whether we are on the Intelligence Committee or not--a glitch in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, commonly referred to around here as FISA, that is causing our intelligence community to miss significant, actionable intelligence.

Now, the principle behind the FISA law is the same today as it was 30 years ago. It is the principle that foreign terrorists are a legitimate--I repeat, legitimate--target for electronic surveillance. But because of changes in the way terrorists communicate, U.S. intelligence personnel are no longer able to act on this commonsense principle with the speed and the flexibility the law was originally meant to give them.

In a significant number of cases, our intelligence professionals are now in the position of having to obtain court orders to collect foreign intelligence concerning foreign targets overseas in another country. This is absolutely absurd and completely unacceptable. We have never believed the targeting of a foreign terrorist overseas should require a FISA warrant. Let me say that again. We are talking about terrorists overseas. Yet that is the outrageous situation we find ourselves in today. It would be even more outrageous not to correct this glaring problem immediately before we leave town. And we will. We will be here as long as it takes to get this right.

Congress created FISA in 1978 because it believed the terrorist threat was real. That belief has been tragically confirmed since the law was created. Intelligence officials remind us repeatedly that the threat remains real. An unclassified version of the recent National Intelligence Estimate tells us that al-Qaida is reconstituting itself and that its lethal intent is just as strong today as it was on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The legislation could not be more urgent. While the administration submitted FISA modernization language months ago--this has been languishing for months--the only legislation before us is S. 1927, the McConnell-Bond bill, a bill specifically requested by the Director of National Intelligence.

We know this bill provides our intelligence community with the necessary tools to protect our homeland. We know if we pass this measure, the President will sign it into law. We know we have a duty to pass it today to protect the American people. So why wait? Why wait? This job must be done, and done now.

The recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism contained a finding that cooperation on the part of our allies may wane as 9/11 becomes a more distant memory and perceptions of the threat tend to recede. Has that memory faded so greatly in our own minds that we would leave for an August recess without taking the reasonable step of revising this law? I certainly hope not. It would be completely unacceptable. The intelligence community assures us that al-Qaida is not taking an August break.

The principle behind our electronic surveillance has not changed since 1978. But the terrorist threat has. As we have tried to adapt to this asymmetrical threat, the terrorists have adapted too--by using increasingly modern and increasingly lethal tools and technologies against us. They have used planes and, if they get their wish, they will use chemical and even nuclear weapons. They have killed our citizens and our soldiers by the thousands. And they have shown their intent to continue to kill on an even larger scale.

We must not let these enemies of America exploit a weakness that we can identify. We understand this weakness exists, and we need to fix it. Didn't we learn this lesson after 9/11? Some have blamed our failure to prevent those attacks on a failure of imagination. Some have said it was because we did not connect the dots. Well, we will never be able to connect the dots if we cannot collect them. Failure to pass this legislation would suggest an indifference on the part of Congress about our ability to connect those very dots.

Mr. President, I hope everybody understands the threat is real; the threat is urgent. We must not, we will not, leave for recess until we pass this urgent and necessary law.

Senator Bond and I and others will have more to say about this issue during the course of the day.

I yield the floor.

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