Political Quotes

“Finally, Mr. President, the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, was on a television program in which he made some points related to this issue. Among other things, he said: We cannot do this mission, we cannot do this activity without the help of the private sector. Upon expiration of the Protect America Act ``the private sector partner said, `Well, wait a minute, are we now protected?' So we went through a discussion for the entire week. Now, this is the problem. We may have the authority to conduct surveillance, and we do, for example, on al-Qaida, but you can't make that actionable if you don't have something specific to load in our systems to target. So when we wanted to load new information, the private partners said, `We're not prepared to do that.' So we negotiated all week to be able to come to closure.'' The point he is making is, we are in a situation right now of grave vulnerability. Intelligence is not being collected, so there is no law under which it can be collected. The private parties with whom we must work to collect that intelligence are in a position of great vulnerability because of lack of liability protection, as a result of which there can undoubtedly arise a question as to whether they will continue to be able to perform this service for us.…”