Joe Lieberman: “If the chairman will yield, these are very important questions the Senator from Ohio is raising. I want to assure him…”

“If the chairman will yield, these are very important questions the Senator from Ohio is raising. I want to assure him, first, that we raised the same questions during our committee's deliberation, including meetings with the heads of these national intelligence agencies that are within the Department of Defense. The Senator from Ohio is undoubtedly aware of the reality, which is that the current Director of Central Intelligence has the authority under law to convene a committee, an interagency committee, which every day apparently makes, as one witness said to us, thousands of decisions about where our signal intelligence and image intelligence assets go. In fact, one of the heads of an agency said he didn't remember a time when there was an inability to agree. There is also, clearly, in the end, both in current law, as I understand it, and in the proposal we are making, if the rare situation occurs, you have to have somebody in power to make that decision. Now it is the CIA. Under our proposal, it would be the national intelligence director.”