Gwen Graham: “I am going to submit for the Record a fuller statement, but in deference to the limited time we have, I have a few brief…”

“I am going to submit for the Record a fuller statement, but in deference to the limited time we have, I have a few brief comments on what I consider to be one of the most important enactments of my 18 years in the Senate. This is an accomplishment which did not happen beginning this summer but rather has been underway for at least the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am extremely pleased we have now arrived at the point we may be in a position to enact serious intelligence reform for the first time in over 50 years. There are many important aspects of this legislation. One, it will centralize the intelligence agencies, not as an end in itself, but to create the platform from which we can then decentralize. As Senator Roberts was discussing, in 1947, the various separate military branches--there was a Secretary of the Army, there was a Secretary of the Navy--were brought together under a Secretary of Defense. Then, 39 years later, that centralized organization was decentralized into the combatant joint commands that now are the principal warfighters for America. That is exactly the process anticipated here. The only major difference is it will not take 39 years to get from centralization to decentralization. A second aspect of this bill I point out, we have much work to do in the area of human intelligence. The case could be made that both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were a product of our inadequate human intelligence capabilities.”