Gwen Graham: “we are now in a serious quandary and a quagmire in some part due to the fact this institution, and our counterpart…”

“we are now in a serious quandary and a quagmire in some part due to the fact this institution, and our counterpart across the Hall, has difficulty in effective collaboration. With that said, I want to talk about what I think is really one of the outstanding examples of what can happen when our Chamber and our friends in the House of Representatives decide there is an issue important enough to collaborate on to do something important for the people of America. We have had, over the last 15 years, a series of the most serious failures of American intelligence in our Nation's history. It didn't just start with September 11, 2001, and it didn't end with the circumstances that led to the war in Iraq. Going back over the decade of the 1990s we had the World Trade Center attack in New York, we had attacks against our embassies in Africa, we had failure to detect that India and Pakistan had become nuclear powers, we had the loss of the USS Cole in Yemen--all of those, which should have been detected, preempted, and the tragedy avoided by the effective professional work of our intelligence agencies. We didn't get what we thought we deserved. I wish to particularly commend this evening Senators Collins and Lieberman as well as Senators Roberts and Rockefeller for the outstanding leadership they have given in trying to overcome this vulnerability, this unnecessary vulnerability.”