Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Defense Department Military Operations and Proposals to Reorganize the U.S. Intelligence Community

Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: DEFENSE DEPARTMENT MILITARY OPERATIONS AND PROPOSALS TO REORGANIZE THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR JOHN WARNER (R-VA)

WITNESSES: SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD; AND ACTING DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE JOHN MCLAUGHLIN; AND GENERAL RICHARD MYERS, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF; AND STEPHEN CAMBONE, UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR INTELLIGENCE

LOCATION: 325 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:
SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): Undoubtedly, the 9/11 commission has performed an important public service, but by definition their focus was on the causes of that terrible event on that terrible day.

And I think we should all be chastened by some of the testimony we've already heard here today that any solution should logically flow from the problem that has been identified, or I believe, Director McLaughlin, you said the form ought to follow the function. I think that's good advice.

But it seems to me that a number of the solutions are directed toward preventing another 9/11: for example, the National Counterterrorism Center, perhaps something that's been described as "TTIC on steroids"; the congressional oversight reform, which I think is an important subject and which it's been touched on a little bit today.

But I guess the question I have really relates to the national intelligence director, because it seems to me that in some ways what we are doing is creating a position and then trying to find things for that person to do, which to me seems like the opposite of how we ought to address it, because I do believe that we ought to let the form follow the function, or the solution logically flow from the problems that have been identified. Which leads me to the question, Director McLaughlin, specifically.

You alluded to a number of things that have happened since 9/11 which have made America safer-passage of the Patriot Act, tearing down the wall between law enforcement and intelligence authorities, creation of the Department of Homeland Security, creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. But could you tell us, sir, today what additional authority could this Congress provide to you as the director of Central Intelligence, or to the national intelligence director, that would make this country safer and which would be more likely to prevent another 9/11?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I think, you know, I would start by the things that, from where I sit, I need most at this point in the fight against terrorism. And the first thing I would say is that I need more experienced people. We've done a lot since 9/11 and in the last five or six years to build up our staff that is on the front line against terrorism, but we need still more people and we need them with experience.

The second thing I need in order to get that is still more time, in the sense that you don't produce those kinds of people overnight; they've got to be in the pipeline, they've got to be training, they've got to be in the field, they've got to learn their business. So, as much as we have improved, there's still a ways to go on that score.

Looking through the 9/11 recommendations, the things that jump out at me as things that would most improve our counterterrorism posture are things like a common intelligence-common information technology architecture for the intelligence community. At the end of the day, sharing intelligence, sharing information means moving information. I think counterterrorism, at the end of the day, is-apart from the people who fight terrorists, is all about fusing information. It's about taking the information you get from some highway patrolman in Indiana, some agent of yours in the Middle East, an overhead satellite, an intercepted conversation, and having that all come together on a desk somewhere where someone looks at it and says, "I see connections that I didn't see before."

So that means putting people together, as we have in TTIC, and to the extent that if you walk through TTIC now you would see that the thing they probably most need to deal with the 26 networks that flow into that place is a common information architecture to merge them all together so that every individual has all of that information popping up on their screen every day.

Now the-I should be brief here, but the other thing is if you want to look at these recommendations and you wanted to pick out something that would make a difference, I think a separate budget appropriation for the NFIP, for the National Foreign Intelligence Program, would make a difference; that is, separating that out so that it would have, just by virtue of its separation, fewer congressional committees to go through. It would make a lot of things simpler.

I could go on, but those are sort of the first things that occur to me.

SEN. CORNYN: I know all of us are interested in improving our intelligence outputs, and I hope we just don't look at budgetary inputs and minutiae like that when we really need to be focusing on how do we improve our intelligence and not do anything that would harm what we currently have, or the improvements that have occurred since 9/11, and perhaps other unintended results that would be detrimental to the security of our --

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: That's why I say the fusion of data is most important; if you bring it together and you see the picture and then you have the ability to act on it as we must, literally within minutes, transmitting a picture that we've developed to someone in the field who takes action. Anything that helps that fusion and transmission is critical.

SEN. CORNYN: Thank you. My time is up.