Jay Rockefeller: “I rise to support S. 1428, which is the intelligence authorization bill, and to congratulate particularly Senator Bob…”

“I rise to support S. 1428, which is the intelligence authorization bill, and to congratulate particularly Senator Bob Graham from the State of Florida for his excellent leadership on this whole matter. We all know the work of the Intelligence Committee and the work of the intelligence community, more particularly, is incredibly important at all times and, obviously, after September 11, it has become a matter of national survival in many respects. So this is an extremely important bill and a very good one. We rely on the people in the intelligence community in every way. We often do not think about it, although we have thought about it more in the last couple of months. They support the U.S. military actions in Afghanistan; they work with other countries to track down and arrest terrorists and disrupt all kinds of attacks which we may not hear about because they did not occur; they assist law enforcement agencies with the anthrax investigation; they follow the finances of terrorist organizations allowing the Department of the Treasury to freeze assets with accurate and proper information, and they are leading the hunt for the leaders of al-Qaida.”