Doug Bereuter: “this Intelligence Authorization Act addresses a number of pressing intelligence needs. For example, the legislation…”

“this Intelligence Authorization Act addresses a number of pressing intelligence needs. For example, the legislation takes steps to strengthen the intelligence community's absolutely critical analytical core. In recent years, the U.S. has been forced to focus on terrorists, proliferators and drug traffickers. These are far more difficult targets to track, and frankly, the intelligence community took too long to adapt to these new threats. It did not reach out aggressively to recruit the human intelligence sources that could have provided us with invaluable information. We lost far too many skilled analysts whose job was to provide early warning. This legislation provides much-needed funding to help rebuild a dynamic, wide-ranging, global analytical capability. It is an effort for which this committee has been serving a leading role for some years now. A second important component of the Intelligence Authorization Act relates to terrorist finances. One of the major intelligence initiatives in the wake of 9/11 has been a serious effort to attack the financial assets of terrorist organizations and their supporters. Terrorist networks such as al Qaeda obviously cannot function without significant financial backing.”