Hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Panel 1- Strategic Planning of Intelligence Functions and the Pace of Intelligence Reform at the FBI
Interview
Hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Panel 1- Strategic Planning of Intelligence Functions and the Pace of Intelligence Reform at the FBI
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SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Senator Whitehouse.
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Gentlemen, to both of you, thank you very much for your service. As Senator Mikulski has said, it's very impressive to me not only that you have done the report -- lots of people in government are asked to do reports and do very good jobs, and then they hand off the report and they go on. You have not gone on, and I appreciate your continuing attention to this problem.
In the final report on 9/11 commission recommendations dated December 5th of 2005, which is about a little over four years of experience after the 9/11 incident, you all evaluated the creation of the FBI National Security Workforce and graded it at that point at a C. How would you grade it today?
MR. KEAN: I think I'd keep it about there, but I don't -- you may disagree.
MR. HAMILTON: Tom and I have steered away from grades since that time.
I think it's fair to say progress has been made, but the general comment here has been it's been too slow. In one area that we have had a very special interest in, and that's weapons of mass destruction, it just seems to me that the FBI has not understood the consequences of that threat sufficiently and they've handled it on a kind of business-as-usual basis when we think that it ought to be a very urgent priority.
I would not give them very good -- I wouldn't give them a C at this point on weapons of mass destruction. They do have a national security branch. That's also a work in progress. There is a lot more attention to this, surely, than there was several years back.
I guess my feeling is that this is an area where I shift the responsibility back to you. Very diligent oversight is necessary to see how effective that really is.
I'll tell you what bothers me, Senator. If you talk, as I'm sure you have, to the FBI, they'll show you a lot of charts and a lot of boxes and they'll tell you about the budgeting and all the rest of it. And I don't have any doubt about their good intentions. A lot of good conceptual work has taken place.
But what really hangs in my mind is whether it'll work. And will it be implemented effectively? And that's a very tough thing to make a judgment about, I believe. The only way I really know to test the effectiveness of all of these fancy charts is through what the military calls exercises, practice. And I think --
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: War games.
MR. HAMILTON: What?
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: War gaming.
MR. HAMILTON: Absolutely. And I think the FBI needs to do a lot more of that in order to persuade me, at least, that those charts mean something.
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: On the question of congressional oversight, you know, we can sort of peak over people's shoulders and be an eternal scold. But unless we're focusing in on where the problem really lies, it's not as helpful as it could be.
And I look at the situation -- you know, you said in your report, unless there's improvement in a reasonable period of time, Congress will have to look at alternatives. And the threat of having this taken away is a fairly serious administrative and bureaucratic threat.
The whole question of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction is a critical issue facing our country. These are issues that within the executive branch -- you could probably say they transfix the president and the vice president. There is no lack of White House attention to them. Significant resources have been shifted. And yet, you know, what gives?
We can talk about the analyst track not being a successful track. We can talk about all the turnover and the very top and why there should be seven people in five or six years. But those strike me as symptoms of something else, and it's trying to put my finger on what that something else is that is bedeviling me here as I listen to this.
MR. HAMILTON: Well, let me just mention one thing that puzzles me. Why can't we detect nuclear materials? That was a problem long before 9/11. That's been a problem for decades. And we have not yet developed in this country the ability to detect nuclear materials in containers and all the other ways it can get into the country.
A lot of research has gone into it, and I understand some progress has been made. But we're a long, long way from being able to give ourselves a high percentage of assurance that all of the things in containers that come into this country are free of nuclear materials. And, of course, what's worrisome here is that the Osama bin Laden/al Qaeda group has made it very clear this is one of their high priorities, to get nuclear bombs into this country.
So I'm puzzled, with all of this genius we have in the country, that we haven't been able to solve that problem easily in the last decade.
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: My time has expired. I thank you both.
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