Bob Graham

Madam President, 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. We must make a major effort to rebuild our human capabilities. This bill takes a step in that direction through emphasis on more linguistic training in the Defense bill that was the establishment of what I refer to as the intelligence equivalent of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. We need many other initiatives to fill this gaping hole in our intelligence.

The third area--and I particularly commend Senator Wyden and Senator Lott and others involved in this--is to try to make our security classifications more truly an issue of security rather than agencies trying to bury their mistakes.

In this legislation we establish a new classification board that will review decisions that are made in the executive branch to determine if there has been an excessive use of secrecy. Our former colleague, Senator Pat Moynihan, used to say that secrecy is for losers. We do not want the United States to be in that category of losers.

What we are doing today is an important step. It is not by any means the

last step. Let me mention a few things that will need to flow from our decision today. Some are rather tangential to the issue of intelligence reform. As an example, we are now requiring any visa applicant to have a face-to-face encounter with a visa agent. That may sound like an appropriate protection against inappropriate people getting access to the United States.

There are also, however, very practical matters. A country that will be of increasing significance to the United States is the country of Brazil. Brazil is a country which is the size of the continental United States plus a second Texas. It is the fourth largest country in population in the world. Today we have three places in which a person could get a visa. They are relatively close together. It would be as if the only place you could get a visa in the United States was Washington, New York, or Boston. We have to develop some strategy to make it more reasonable for persons around the world, but particularly in these large-sized nations that are so important to our economy, to be able to have reasonable access to the visa process.

The second part of this legislation relates to the United States relationship with Saudi Arabia. It points out that the Government of Saudi Arabia has not always responded promptly or fully to the United States request for assistance in the global war on Islamic terrorism.

I believe we need an enormous increase in the transparency of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and that is a goal we have been retreating from. In the joint House-Senate report on the factors that led to 9/11, an 800-page report contained 27 pages on the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11. Every one of those 27 pages was classified, so the American people in that and other instances have been denied access to the information about our relationship with Saudi Arabia. I hope the provision contained in this legislation will move us toward a greater frankness and candor in that important relationship.

Finally, this legislation places responsibility for important future actions in at least three places. One of those is the President. The President will have the responsibility for making a series of critical appointments so there will be the human beings responsible for implementing this legislation in a creative, dynamic manner.

He also must assure there is a value system in relationship to this new office and other positions which are also his responsibility to appoint. The most notable of these will be between the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense. It will require continued Presidential involvement and monitoring to assure that relationship achieves rather than frustrates the objectives of this legislation.

The new Director of National Intelligence will have enormous responsibility. He or she will have to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community, and this will be reflected in the creation of additional national intelligence centers. These are the decentralizing units that have been established in the case of terrorism and counterproliferation and will be under the directive of the DNI to establish in other emerging threat areas. The DNI must also revise current budget priorities, particularly in areas such as research and development, to reflect response to our emerging threats.

He also will have to establish communitywide personnel policies that support the recruitment, training, and retention of the most effective intelligence community personnel.

Finally, there will be a responsibility here on the Congress. In the Senate, we have taken steps to reform our oversight of intelligence. No longer will there be an 8-year term limit. No longer will intelligence budgets go through the Defense subcommittee but, rather, through their own Appropriations subcommittees.

These are good starts. But we are also going to have to look at the culture of the congressional oversight committees, focusing much more on the future and the threats that are coming at us and relatively give less of our time to constant focus on the accidents that can be seen through the rearview mirror. By its nature, the intelligence community is going to create accidents from time to time. They need to be reviewed, but we cannot afford for them to be totally consuming in terms of our oversight responsibility. It is in the future that the threats are to be found, and it is our responsibility to be able to assure the American people that our intelligence communities are capable of identifying those threats and providing information to decisionmakers to mitigate the chances that those threats will become the next Pearl Harbor or the next 9/11 tragedy.

Madam President, in conclusion, I thank all the people who have played such a significant role. Obviously, Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman deserve special notice. But there are many other people in this Chamber today, such as Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller, who have played a continuing role in seeing that our intelligence community is able to serve its responsibility to the people of America.

Thank you very much.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, which is remembered as one of the greatest intelligence failures in our country's history. The desire to prevent future Pearl Harbors helped lead to the creation of our national intelligence community in 1947.

In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a growing awareness that our national intelligence community is in need of serious reform. Despite frequent reviews of the intelligence community's failures and structural problems--including the Hart-Rudman Commission; the Gilmore Commission; the Bremer Commission; the Congressional Investigation of 9/11; and the 9/11--there has been continued reluctance and resistance to reform.

Recent intelligence failures--most notably the failure to detect the September 11 plot, and the massive intelligence failures that led us to war in Iraq--have given new exposure to the problem and new momentum to reform efforts. I am extremely pleased that we are now in a position to enact serious intelligence reform legislation for the first time in over 50 years. I consider this legislation to be one of the most important enactments of my 18 years in the U.S. Senate. There are several elements of this legislation which warrant more detailed comment.

One of the most important aspects of this legislation is the element that Senator Roberts was just discussing--the need to centralize the intelligence agencies is not an end in itself, but a platform from which we can move to decentralize.

As the United States military transformed itself from the military of San Juan Hill and the World Wars, it first needed to centralize, under the National Security Act of 1947, consolidating the secretaries of the Army and Navy into the Department of Defense, and then to decentralize, under the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 into the joint commands of the modern military. Our intelligence community needs to transform itself and move from being designed around functions--such as electronic eavesdropping, or satellite surveillance--to a focus on missions, such as counterterrorism or counterproliferation.

This legislation makes the appropriate and necessary first step of centralizing the intelligence community under a Director of National Intelligence. It also lays the foundation for the next step, which is decentralizing the intelligence community through the establishment of mission-based intelligence centers. Two are established by statute-- Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation--and the legislation gives the DNI the power to establish other centers, to focus on those current or emerging threats he or she deems to be of priority importance.

Among the shortcomings referred to earlier, one of the first and foremost is obviously an underdeveloped capacity for gathering human intelligence. Our intelligence community has come to rely too heavily on electronic eavesdropping and satellite surveillance, and human intelligence has been neglected. A case could be made that both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were the products of our inadequate human intelligence capabilities. We must make a major effort to rebuild our capabilities, and this legislation begins to address that problem.

One of the most important elements of a human intelligence program is a corps of skilled and dedicated linguists. Unfortunately, while our intelligence agencies still possess a more-than-adequate number of Russian speakers, they lack individuals proficient in the Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages that are of obvious current importance. This legislation, along with language in the Defense authorization bill that establishes a Reserve Officers Training Corps counterpart for the intelligence community, helps to address this problem as well.

The third intelligence-related item deserving particular attention is the issue of excessive classification. I want to comment senator Wyden and Senator Lott, who were very involved in this aspect of the legislation. Our intelligence community has developed an unhealthy obsession with secrecy, and this has often led to bad analysis and bad decisions. This obsession with secrecy prevented intelligence agencies that had knowledge of various elements of the 9/11 plot from ``connecting the dots'' and realizing that a major terrorist operation was being plotted on American soil. This obsession with secrecy contributed to inadequate scrutiny of intelligence relating to Iraq, and as a result we went to war because of weapons that did not exist, and terrorist connections that appear to have been imaginary.

This obsession with secrecy poses a serious and continuing threat to our national security. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, ``Secrecy is for losers.'' If we do not want to lose in our struggle with the various threats we face today, we must abandon this unhealthy obsession. This legislation addresses this problem by directing that more rational guidelines for intelligence classification be established, and that an independent board be empowered to review these decisions. This is an important first step toward abandoning this dangerous obsession, and making sure that secrecy decisions are made for reasons of national security, rather than agencies trying to bury their mistakes.

Madam President, what we are doing today is an important step, but it is not by any means the last step. Some of these steps are rather tangential to the issue of intelligence reform. For example, this legislation includes a provision requiring face-to-face interviews with visa applicants. If we are to implement this provision effectively we must seriously consider increasing the capacity of our consular service. Currently, in Brazil, visa applicants must travel to one of three large cities in order to get a visa for travel to the United States.

Since Brazil is the size of the continental United States, and these three

cities are located close together, this is the equivalent of telling Americans who wish to secure a visa to Mexico that they must first travel to either Dallas, Chicago, or Cleveland. While it is probably not cost-effective to open new consulates in every city that might need visa services, we should at lest open more visa offices, so that these interviews can be conducted without unduly inconveniencing our foreign guests.

This legislation also includes a section addressing the United States' relationship with Saudi Arabia. It points out, and I quote, that ``the Government of Saudi Arabia has not always responded to promptly or fully to United States requests for assistance in the global war on Islamist terrorism,'' and particularly cities the Saudi government's inattention to the problem of terrorist financing. I would add that we have compelling evidence to believe that Saudi interests actually played a role in financing insurgents in Iraq and earlier the 9/11 hijackers. The extent of Saudi involvement in 9/11 was detailed in a twenty-seven page section of our 2002 joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees report on the attacks of September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, every one of those twenty-seven pages was classified. This means that the American people have, in that and other instances, been denied important information about our relationship with Saudi Arabia. I hope that this intelligence reform legislation calling for more dialogue on the U.S.-Saudi relationship is heeded, and that increased attention to this relationship will lead to greater transparency and candor.

Madam President, as I said in my farewell speech yesterday, in a quote from Winston Churchill, ``This is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning''. This Churchillian wisdom also applies to what we are accomplishing today. There is more that still needs to be done as we move beyond the end of the beginning of intelligence reform.

Let me start with the President's responsibilities. The President will have the responsibility for making a series of critical appointments, and he must appoint creative, dynamic and extremely hard- working people who can be effective in the challenging new roles that we are creating. He must also ensure that the people he appoints promote a value system that is conducive to open, honest and effective intelligence gathering and analysis. And he must also manage the relationships between the new DNI and existing department and agency heads--most notably the Secretary of Defense--in order to ensure that the goals of intelligence reform are realized.

The new DNI will also have tremendous responsibility. He or she will have to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community, and this will be reflected in the National Intelligence Centers that are created to work, alongside the National Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation Centers. The DNI must also revise current budget priorities, such as the research and development budgets, and establish community-wide personnel policies that support the recruitment, training and retention of effective intelligence community personnel.

Finally, there will be a responsibility here on the Congress. In the Senate we have taken steps to reform our oversight of intelligence. Terms limits on the Intelligence Committee have been removed. By creating a new appropriation subcommittee for intelligence we have freed the intelligence budget from its previously unbreakable link to the defense budget. These are good starts. But we will also have to look at the culture of the congressional oversight committees, and make sure that they direct their attention to the front windshield of the future, and the threats that are coming at us, and spend relatively less of their time on looking through the rear view mirror at accidents that have already occurred.

By its nature, the intelligence community is going to create accidents from time to time. They need to be reviewed. But we cannot afford for them to consume all of our oversight responsibility. It is in the future that new threats are to be found, and it is our responsibility to be able to assure the American people that our intelligence community is capable of identifying those threats, and of providing information to the appropriate decision makers, in order to prevent those threats from becoming the next Pearl Harbor, or the next 9/11.

Madam President, in conclusion, I would like to note that this bill would not have been possible without an extraordinary effort by dozens of members of Congress, the Joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry members and staff, the 9/11 Commission, and, particularly, the families of the victims of 9/11.

Today is a celebration of the success of urgently needed reform, finally overcoming the inertia of the status quo. But, this is only the end of the beginning. The President, the Congress, those Americans who do and will serve the intelligence community, bear the responsibility of ensuring that the promise of enhanced security through reformed intelligence is achieved. The fulfillment of this promise will be neither quick nor easy. The most important undertakings seldom are. But the goal is worthy of our most steadfast commitment to its attainment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes to deliver a farewell address.

Mr. President, my 18-year tenure in the Senate has capped an extremely satisfying personal experience with great rewards and gratification of public service. These have been some of the most significant influences on my life. The greatest influence, of course, has been my family.

I was born into a family with good values and an admiration for education and an interest in politics. In February of 1936, my mother and father made two significant decisions. First, my father, who was a mining engineer by education and a dairy farmer by occupation, a man who had become extremely distressed at the level of underworld corruption in Dade County, FL, decided to run for the Florida State Senate to represent that county on a platform of cleaning up underworld corruption.

The second decision my parents made in February of 1936 was to have a baby. I was the happy result of that second decision. My mother says that I came by my political instincts from the womb, that she spent her whole pregnancy going to political activities and that I became addicted.

Throughout my public career, I have had the love and support of my partner of 45 years, Adele. No person in public life could have a more loving, a more caring, and a more contributing partner than I.

At one point, Adele used to be nervous in public settings. Today, I wish I had her calm, her persuasiveness, her effectiveness in public settings. Together, we have had the privilege of raising four wonderful daughters, two of whom were born after our first election to public office.

All of those qualities have been enhanced during my Senate years, including the addition of 11 grandchildren. On Thanksgiving Day I shared a special tradition with 9 of those 11 grandchildren when they joined me here at this desk on the Senate floor and observed and critiqued my skills--and lack of skills--as I carved my name into the Senate desk.

The second greatest influence is my home, the State of Florida. I thought I knew a lot about Florida as a native and as a two-term Governor, but I have learned so much more during the last 18 years. Since 1974, I have been taking different jobs, jobs alongside fellow Floridians, and as of last Thursday I have done 406 of these workdays; 214 of them have been done since I became a Member of the Senate. Even though my day job is 1,000 miles away from where many Floridians live, these workdays have been an important part of maintaining a close relationship with my fellow Floridians and reminding me what our priorities should be on their behalf here in Washington. Workdays and my experiences in Congress have taught me ways in which the Federal Government affects the lives of typical Americans and, most acutely, Floridians.

I come from a State which is marked with dramatic growth in a very fragile environment, with a close affiliation with the countries to the south of the United States, a State in which one out of five of our citizens is over the age of 65, and therefore programs such as Medicare and Social Security take on a very special significance. How we conduct a law-based immigration system with humanity intimately affects many of our people, as does the obligation to use power responsibly. All of these issues I have learned about at greater depth during my service in the Senate.

What I have also gained in my three terms here is an appreciation of the institution of the Senate and the unique role it plays in balancing our Government in order to avoid excessive power falling into the hands of any one person or governmental institution.

One of our greatest responsibilities as Members of the Senate is to assure an independent judiciary. I am especially pleased that I was able to join my Florida colleagues in the Senate in establishing and maintaining a bipartisan, merit-based process by which we recommended and confirmed applicants for the Federal judiciary.

Particularly, I am gratified by the work I did with former Senator Connie Mack. As a Democrat and as a Republican, we forwarded outstanding judicial candidates to both Democratic and Republican Presidents. Because this process was based on judicial merit, Florida nominees have been uniformly and expeditiously accepted for nomination and confirmation.

I also came to see the Senate as our country's best graduate school, offering access to private seminars with the best and the brightest, supplemented by outside organizations such as the Aspen Institute's congressional program and the InterAmerican Dialog's Focus on Hemispheric Issues.

Finally, Mr. President, as with you and your father, I came to appreciate the people of the Senate. Simply put, I enjoy being around politicians and the people who love politics, including my staff and the family of the Senate, and including the journalists who cover our activities. I value my relationship with each of my colleagues, and I wish I had the time to tell a story about each of you.

Mr. President, your father was one of the first people I met when I came into the Senate. We had a number of things in common in our background and quickly formed a friendship which was one of the most significant parts, particularly, of my early years in the Senate. My grief at his loss is diluted by the knowledge not only that he has

been followed by his son, but that his son is a person of such exemplary qualities as you represent.

I would also like to single out one of my colleagues, a non- Floridian, as representative of the over 200 people with whom I have served during my tenure in the Senate. Senator Jay Rockefeller has been very special to me. We served as Governors at the same time. Jay, as much as anyone, encouraged me to run for the Senate.

I especially treasure the relationships I have had with my congressional political mentors such as Congressman Danny Fascell and Senator, later Congressman, Claude Pepper, and my Florida colleagues in this institution: Lawton Chiles, Connie Mack, and Bill Nelson.

Bill Nelson is a man I have known for over 40 years. In each stage of his life he has been committed to public service and to excellence in the execution of that public service. It has been a joy for the last 4 years jointly representing our 17 million constituents with Bill. I greatly admire his contributions to Florida and to the Nation. I wish to Senator Nelson a long tenure in the Senate. Florida and America will be better places because of his service.

I am also hugely grateful to those who have been willing to share this journey with me, the tens of thousands of people who have worked with me in my successful statewide campaigns, and the over 1,000 people who have joined me in public service in appointive or staff positions. I regret that I do not have time today to name all of them, but illustrative of all of them I will mention a few: Buddy Shorstein, Ken Klein, and Buddy Menn, all of whom have served as chiefs of staff in the Senate; Gary Smith, Dick Burroughs, Charles Reed, Jay Hakes, and Tom Herndon, who served in a similar position when I was Governor of Florida; Mary Chiles, Ellen Roth, Lula Rodriguez, Susan McGinn, and Lydia Mount; Al Cumming and Bob Filippone; Mark Block, John Provenzano, and Paul Anderson--these wonderful people and a thousand more who have shared this joyful experience in public service.

Winston Churchill once declared:

Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the

end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

My friends, the Senate needs to regain its tradition of controlled partisanship; in other words, placing country before party. Another of my Florida political mentors, former Governor and Senator, Spessard Holland, once said that it was the jet airplane that caused the greatest change in the culture of the Senate.

Prior to the jet airplane, Senator Holland and his wife would come in the first week of January to Washington, would settle in the hotel where they would live while they were here, and they would spend the next 6 to 7 months doing the business of America. While they were doing that, they would spend time with the families of their colleagues. They would become more than just occasional colleagues. They would become genuine friends.

It was out of that development of relationships across regions and across parties that the Senate came to earn the title of ``the world's most exclusive club.'' And it was the club where the essential bond was that of common respect.

The jet airplane began to change that, because instead of staying here for a 5-day workweek and then a weekend of personal relations with the families of their colleagues, it became possible for each Member of the Senate to leave on Friday to return to their home State for whatever request was made of them. The Senator knew that and the requesting organization knew that. So it became a matter of political necessity to respond.

The effect of that was not only did the work of the Senate extend from 6 to 7 months to today's 7th of December--we have been in session now for 11 months and 1 week--it also meant that those weekends of personal relationships were largely lost.

My No. 1 suggestion in this post-jet airplane age is that we try to get back to the tradition of spending more time together as families, as Americans, rather than as Republicans and Democrats. For instance, rather than holding our traditional partisan retreats in the spring of the year, huddling as reds and blues, we should go to a retreat as a whole Senate celebrating the families of this great institution.

I point to the pending intelligence reform bill, which I hope we will pass in the next day, as an example of what can be done when we recognize that an issue is so important to our Nation that we must work together to understand the problem and then develop solutions which are driven by pragmatism, not ideology.

I suggest we apply the lessons that are being learned in developing and forming and passing intelligence reform to some of the challenges that are before us now such as reform of Social Security and Medicare, and reform of our energy policy that we as a nation would be well served.

Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1940:

I do not believe that the common denominator of our great

men in public life has not been mere allegiance to one

political party, but the disinterested devotion with which

they have strived to serve the whole country--and the

relative unimportance that they have ascribed to politics

compared with the paramount importance of government.

The Congress should also spend less time looking at the rearview mirror for the accidents behind and more time looking out of the front windshield.

Since I have served there for a decade including 18 months as chairman, I would cite the Intelligence Committee as a prime example of this institutional failure to focus ahead. Prior to September 11, the committee spent an inordinate amount of time examining a series of mistakes, of acts of treachery and of bureaucratic turf fighting. What we failed adequately to do was to look forward to the threats and challenges that our intelligence agencies needed to address before those threats and challenges resolved into a tragedy. We desperately need to apply this principle of looking out the front windshield to our accumulative deficits, budgetary deficits, trade deficits, transportation and public utilities deficits, education deficits among them. These deficits are challenges which this generation, unlike our forefathers, is ignoring because they are tough and managing them now has political downsides. But it is wrong, it is immoral to let our grandchildren do the heavy lifting because we have refused to do so.

We need to learn again the principle of federalism that our forefathers laid out for us. I come out of a Jeffersonian philosophy believing that the best governmental decisions are most likely to be made by those closest to the citizens who will be affected by those decisions. I recognize the importance of a national response to truly national issues and to the protection of the civil rights of all citizens. But America's great contribution to political thought has been federalism, the sharing of responsibility between a central government and our 50 individual States.

I am concerned that this appreciation for federalism has too frequently been situational. We at the Federal level, the national level, determine what outcome we wish to secure and then support either centralization or a distribution of power based on what has a better chance of achieving the goal we seek. We would be well advised to resist this temptation.

Daily we are learning from the headlines of Ukraine and Iraq and other countries such as America with a diverse population which are struggling to secure peace and prosperity. These foreign countries remind us of how difficult it is to hold to the model of federalism unless we are prepared to treat it with respect even when it may result in a different outcome than we would personally prefer.

Finally, we should support the institution of the Senate. Its procedures and prerogatives are not arbitrary but reflect a responsibility to balance a complex government which is designed to protect the freedoms of the people against the temptation of government becoming authoritarian.

I would like to give special recognition to Senator Robert Byrd. Frankly, when I entered this institution, Senator Byrd and I had some disagreements over how we thought the National Government should address its priorities. But over the years, I have come to gain increasing respect and admiration for his defense of the institution of the Senate precisely because it plays such a crucial role in protecting our individual freedoms.

Mine has been a wonderful life, an exciting and unpredictable journey. But

it is a journey that is not ending but, rather, taking a different course. I am planning to travel especially in Latin America to teach, to write at least one more book, to continue my years of interest in relations within the Western hemisphere and in modernizing America's intelligence capability, and finally to fulfill our responsibilities to future generational leaders through the creation of an institution that instills the values of public service of such great Floridians such as LeRoy Collins, Reubin Askew, and our former colleague Lawton Chiles.

These are things that excite me, that inspire me and to which I am convinced I can make a better contribution as a private citizen at this, the end of the beginning of my life.

Four years after he left the Presidency, President Harry Truman said:

I have seen a great many men in public life, and one of

their besetting sins is to stay in office too long.

I decided that I would not be guilty of this common failing, and that I should make way for younger men.

I extend my congratulations to the man Floridians have chosen as my successor, soon to be Senator Mel Martinez. I wish him the very best in his new role. Mel is a friend. He is a good man who has served Florida and America in many different positions of responsibility. I know the Senate will welcome him to his new home in the Senate.

We Floridians have high expectations for Senator Mel Martinez and for those who will be serving in the 109th Congress and beyond.

Goodbye, Mr. President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.