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will not combine the CIA and FBI. It would be a new agency that focuses on intelligence gathering, rather than law enforcement, and have a specific mission to protect civil liberties with new judicial review requirements, new public reporting requirements, and a new office of individual liberties.
Senate Floor Speech: Foreign Intelligence Collection Improvement Act of 2003
Senator John Edwards
February 13, 2003
Today I want to talk about homeland security. First, I will talk about the serious shortcomings in the administration's response. Then I will talk about the six bills I've introduced in this Congress to improve our homeland security, including a bill today to overhaul the way we do intelligence work here at home.
The first responsibility of any government is to protect the security of its people. Yet we live in a time when Americans feel extraordinary insecurity. We're at an elevated level of threat warning. The CIA Director says al Qaeda is "resuming the offensive." The FBI director says there are "al Qaeda cells in the United States that we have not yet been able to identify." In other words, al Qaeda cells are operating here, but we don't know who they are, where they are, or what they're doing . . .
Finally, there is the bill I've introduced today, and that I want to talk about in some detail. This bill will make fundamental changes in the way we protect Americans against international terrorists operating within our borders. This bill takes away from the FBI the responsibility to collect intelligence on foreign terrorists groups within the United States. And this bill gives that responsibility to a new Homeland Intelligence Agency. I believe this agency will do a better job protecting our safety and our basic freedoms. Let me briefly explain why.
There is no question that the FBI is full of dedicated professionals who are patriots, who serve their country with courage and conviction, who do all of us proud.
But there is also no question that the FBI made many serious mistakes before September 11. There was the Phoenix Memorandum, a memorandum about suspicious behavior at flight schools that the FBI did not follow up on. There was the Moussaoui case, where the FBI had in its possession a computer full of critical information, yet did not access the information there. There were even two hijackers who the FBI knew were threats but did not track and stop.
It's true all this was before September 11. The other day, Director Mueller told me that my criticisms understated the extent of the FBI's reforms. Well, I respect Director Mueller, and I look forward to continuing to talk with him about FBI reform. I have only the best wishes for his reform efforts.
At the same time, it would be hard to understate the seriousness of the problems we have seen.
This is not just my view; it is the view of every objective panel to look at this issue. These panels have raised serious questions about the FBI's response to terrorism, and in some instances, about the FBI's capacity to respond to terrorism:
The Markle Task Force commented: "...there is a resistance ingrained in the FBI ranks to sharing counter-terrorism information...the FBI has not prioritized intelligence analysis in the areas of counter-terrorism."
The Joint Congressional Inquiry noted: The FBI has a "history of repeated shortcomings within its current responsibility for domestic intelligence..."
The Brookings Institution went further, stating that "there are strong reasons to question whether the FBI is the right agency to conduct domestic intelligence collection and analysis."
Finally, the Gilmore Commission recently said: "the Bureau's long standing tradition and organizational culture persuade us that, even with the best of intentions, the FBI cannot soon be made over into an organization dedicated to detecting and preventing attacks rather than one dedicated to punishing them."
I believe the Gilmore Commission reached the right conclusion.
Part of the problem is bureaucratic resistance at the FBI. The FBI is full of superb public servants, but the reality is that the FBI is also a bureaucracy, and it is the nature of a bureaucracy to resist change. That's just the reality. It was only in November that the New York Times reported the FBI's number 2 official was "amazed and astounded" by the FBI's sluggish response to the terrorist threat.
Beyond the problem of bureaucratic resistance, there is a more fundamental problem with the FBI. That problem is the conflict at the base of the FBI's mission, which is a conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. These are fundamentally different functions.
Law enforcement is about building criminal cases and putting people in jail. Intelligence isn't about building a case; it's about gathering information and putting it together into a bigger picture.
The FBI has never been built for intelligence. It has always been an agency that hires people who want to be law enforcement officers, trains them to be law enforcement officers, and promotes them for succeeding as law enforcement officers. Cases have been run by field offices with little of the central coordination that is essential to combat national networks of terrorists. The FBI has regularly kept intelligence within the agency's walls rather than sharing it with other key players.
Now, the FBI says all this is changing. But with all due respect, the FBI's reforms are too little and too late. They are not enough, and because of the nature of the FBI, they cannot ever be enough.
That is why I propose today to create a Homeland Intelligence Agency, one that would be responsible for collecting foreign intelligence inside the United States, analyzing that intelligence, and getting it to the policymakers or first responders who need it. This entity isn't in the new Department of Homeland Security. It isn't in the newly announced "Terrorist Threat Integration Center." That's just about analysis. This is about collection.
I believe this agency will do a better job fighting terrorism because its sole focus will be intelligence gathering. The inherent conflict between law enforcement and intelligence will not get in the way of its work.
I also believe it will do a better job protecting our civil liberties. While we will not give the new agency any new authorities, we will place new checks on its ability to collect information about innocent people. Time and again, we have seen this administration overreach when it comes to civil liberties. That should stop, and this proposal will help stop it. We will require judicial approval before the most secretive and invasive investigations of religious and political groups. We will require greater public reporting and more internal auditing. We will establish a new and independent office of civil liberties within the new agency that is dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights of innocent Americans. So at the end of the day, we will help to fulfill America's promise --- that we are safe and free.
I think this bill is an important step to making America safer, and I look forward to working on it with colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
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