Sam Farr: “What this amendment is all about is recognizing, America has linguists and we have language teachers and we have…”

“What this amendment is all about is recognizing, America has linguists and we have language teachers and we have language institutions but we have not brought them all together so we can make them skilled linguists. And in order to do that, I come from a district where we have a really relevant assets, relevant institutions to do that, to teach the languages. The largest foreign language school in the world is the the old Army language school now called the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and next to it a private nonprofit called the Monterey Institute of International Studies which offers the Nation's only masters degree in translation and interpretation. The committee has clearly identified one of the most acute problems in our intelligence collection efforts and that is how do you keep training and upgrading and learning how to train with the technology that we have skilled linguists.”