The Intelligence Gap

Floor Speech

THE INTELLIGENCE GAP -- (Senate - March 07, 2008)

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, for his courtesy.

When the Senate debates the budget next week, we will hear a lot about the tax gap. This is the name given to uncollected taxes which some have said, if collected, could pay up to $300 billion in additional revenue to the Federal Treasury. I wish to talk about this in a minute, first of all to ask the question why it is, notwithstanding this so-called tax gap, we have not seen any money at all collected over the last year to fill that gap. But first I want to talk about the intelligence gap. This has to do with the critical information the United States should be collecting in pursuit of radical Islamists but is not because of burdensome and unnecessary legal restrictions--restrictions Congress has within its power to remove.

To the Senate's credit, in a bipartisan fashion, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed out a bill that I hope the House of Representatives will vote on soon. That same bill passed by a bipartisan majority of 68 Senators. That is not easy, but it does demonstrate a bipartisan consensus in this body to make sure we have our eyes open and our ears open when it comes to foreign intelligence that could detect, deter, and even defeat future terrorist attacks against the United States and our allies.

The intelligence gap is also closed not only by passing that important legislation which the House of Representatives has inexplicably sat on for the
last couple of weeks but also by providing protection against frivolous litigation against communications providers that have assisted the Nation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on a voluntary basis.

It is no secret that the Director of National Intelligence has noted that given this world of wireless communications, we need to adopt new means to intercept communications from foreign nationals to other foreign nationals which could well be directed through the infrastructure in the United States and which, unless we pass this legislation, we would not be able to intercept. The biggest problem we have, of course, is that their cooperation is entirely voluntary, and unless we protect them under this bipartisan Senate legislation from frivolous litigation, in the future not only will citizens--whether they be individuals or corporate--not cooperate, but we will be left with a fraction of the actionable intelligence necessary to detect, deter, and defeat those whose sole wish is the murder of innocent Americans.

I quote the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said:

What people have to understand here is the quality of intelligence we are going to receive is going to be degraded.

Those, of course, are not my remarks, and they are not the words of a member of the Bush administration; those are the words of Jay Rockefeller, the distinguished chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That is why this legislation passed out of the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote.

I don't know about the political implications of the Democratic House leadership's failure to act responsibly, and I am not here to talk about politics, but I do know there are serious national security interests that we face, and threats, and the majority of Democrats in the House are not taking those threats seriously enough. So rather than taking a vacation from their duties, it is past time for the House to act and to do the responsible thing. I hope Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer will call up this important bipartisan legislation and allow an up-or-down vote on the bipartisan Senate legislation that will make this Nation safer from the terrorist threats we face.

Mr. President, I have other remarks I wish to make, but I see the distinguished majority leader on the floor. I want to make sure--if he has any housekeeping business he wants to take care of, I will be glad to defer to him for that purpose and then to reclaim the floor later on. I do not want to have him necessarily have to wait.

I understand he is motioning for me to continue, and I will do that. I thank the Senator.

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