Saxby Chambliss: “I voted yesterday with our leadership to invoke cloture on this bill, but, frankly, I did so reluctantly because I…”

“I voted yesterday with our leadership to invoke cloture on this bill, but, frankly, I did so reluctantly because I sympathize with the comments that the Senator from Alaska, Mr. Stevens, made just yesterday and the day before relative to the fact that we are rushing into an issue that is so complex that we really need to take the time to do this right. But I understand we are at the end of this session and that we need to get this bill done and get it to conference. That is the only reason that Senator Kyl and I are willing to withdraw this amendment. Let's get it to conference and try to clean this up there. Once again, I have been reminded about the problems we have at the CIA under the leadership now of a new CIA Director whose hands are going to be tied by this particular provision that we are seeking to modify in this bill. We are concentrating, from an overall intelligence reform standpoint, on building up our collection of intelligence through human assets. But now with the creation of the civil liberties board in this bill, a political bureaucracy is being established that is going to be looking over the shoulder of every CIA agent around the world and is going to have the ability to determine whether that CIA agent violated the civil liberties of somebody in the prosecution of gathering intelligence. I think this is a very harmful provision in this bill.”