John D. Rockefeller IV

I thank Senator Johnson for his interest and support for this legislation and for his shared interest in strengthening cyber security. I also thank my colleague from South Dakota for drawing attention to the potential impact of this provision on financial regulatory authorities under the Banking Committee's jurisdiction, including those of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the prudential regulators. I would like to assure the Senator that the consensus-based voluntary process for developing cyber security standards established in Title I of this bill is not intended to alter or limit financial regulatory agencies' regulatory authority in any way. Title I, particularly new section (e)(2) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Act, encourages private entities to participate in NIST's standards development process, but is in no way a ``safe harbor'' for participants who are subject to the jurisdiction of financial regulatory agencies. An entity that participates in the standards development process established in Title I is still fully subject to the regulations, supervision, and other requirements of its financial regulatory agency. Sharing information with NIST as part of the process established in Title I is not a valid basis for withholding information from a regulator, including information about cyber threats.

NIST is the Federal government's premier science and standards agency. It is not a regulatory agency, nor is it a national or homeland security agency. NIST's unique role is to bring together knowledgeable players from government and industry and to build consensus around common technical standards. NIST has no authority to require any private entity to follow standards it develops. The cybersecurity standards development process established in Title I is therefore not a rulemaking process. It in no way imposes new or duplicative regulations on entities that are subject to the authority of financial regulatory agencies, and it in no way disturbs or diminishes agencies' authority to exercise their important oversight duties.

It is not intended to prohibit an agency from taking a regulatory action, such as an action to require an individual entity to protect against future cyber threats, if the agency independently obtains such information pursuant to other statutory or regulatory authority--even if an entity has shared this information with NIST. Nothing in this bill is intended to modify, limit, or otherwise affect the authority of the federal financial regulators under any other provision of law.

Madam President, it is my great privilege to recognize the distinguished career of John S. Pistole, on the occasion of his retirement as the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration. He has been a dedicated public servant and leader for the past 31 years. Next year, John will take on an exciting new leadership role when he returns to his alma mater, Anderson University, as its president.

I am privileged to have worked with John and received his counsel on important issues like addressing the terrorist threats facing our Nation in the post-9/11 era, and helping to guide the FBI and TSA to successfully meet the challenges brought on by those threats.

Throughout his career, John has taken on many of the most challenging roles in law enforcement. He's fought against organized crime in the FBI and led frontline counterterrorism efforts as head of the TSA. However, for a person who has had to maintain a tough exterior in these roles, John has remained thoughtful, compassionate, and courteous-- important traits which he demonstrated in his appearances before the Commerce Committee.

After earning his law degree at Indiana University in 1981 and spending 2 years in private law practice, John decided to enter public service by joining the FBI. John rose through the ranks as a special agent in Minneapolis and New York. He worked hard--first becoming a supervisor at FBI Headquarters, where he was recognized as a role model for new FBI agents, and then chosen to be an instructor at the FBI Academy. A few years later, John was recognized for his capabilities with an opportunity to teach the first sessions at a new International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest.

In the late 1990s, John got involved with the FBI's efforts to fight white-collar crime. In Indianapolis, he created task forces fighting fraud and public corruption, and was promoted to Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the Boston Field Office. When Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Rhode Island, John investigated this aviation attack that would serve as a prelude to his post-9/11 roles.

When our Nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, John had just been assigned to the Inspections Division at FBI Headquarters though he was quickly reassigned to help build FBI's Counterterrorism Division. He rose steadily through the ranks, eventually serving as the FBI's Deputy Director for more than 5 years. John's exemplary service in that role, combined with his experience in counterterrorism and excellent management of and care for the FBI workforce, culminated in 2010 when he was nominated to be the TSA Administrator.

John assumed the leadership of TSA at a time when the agency had been without a confirmed administrator for a year and a half. During this time, the agency had been grappling with the fallout from the Christmas Day attack of 2009, and had become a political and media punching bag. TSA needed a strong leader to take on the formidable task of improving the agency's stature. TSA needed to be effective in its duty to protect our Nation, while also finding a way to respond to the public outcry over onerous and invasive search procedures. TSA needed to deal with dissatisfaction within its own ranks, while navigating a tough fiscal environment. We were fortunate when John accepted the President's nomination and was confirmed by the Senate unanimously to this important role.

Under John's exceptional leadership, the TSA has maintained a compelling track record in preventing terrorist attacks against our Nation's transportation networks. The agency has taken a more risk- based approach to security so as to lessen the burden on the average American traveler. Many people point to the TSA's successful PreCheck program, which I signed up for last week, as an example of John's great work. PreCheck is popular because it makes airport security more convenient and predictable, while freeing up TSA resources so the agency can be more focused on high-risk areas.

While John was improving both TSA's effectiveness and the security experience for the traveling public, he was simultaneously focusing on improving the TSA workforce. By exemplifying the traits he expected of his officers, and by taking the time to meet with his workforce and address their concerns, he earned their loyalty.

John took important steps to implement policies that would hold TSA staff accountable, and he also demonstrated that security interests can be safeguarded while allowing officers to unionize. This was a great step forward for officers' labor rights, and has provided a constructive way to handle officers' concerns.

Appointed from outside the organization, John quickly earned the respect of TSA employees, who then supported him in reforming outdated policies. When TSA moved away from its one-size-fits-all approach, his workforce overcame many challenges to implement a more complex risk- based security process. Without the support John earned from TSA employees, that shift would not have been possible. We will always want better security and more convenience for less cost, and John has done better than anyone yet at striking the right balance.

John Pistole has long shone as a beacon of integrity in government service. Today it gives me great pleasure to commend him--and thank him--for his enormous contributions to improving the Nation's security. I am grateful for his service to this country and it is an honor to call him a friend. I wish John and his family the best as he embarks on a new chapter in his distinguished career.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in a seated position.

Madam President, I come to the floor to wholly support the comments of my colleagues, the Senator from California and the Senator from Arizona, to speak about a matter of great importance to me personally but more importantly to the country.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's entire study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program--I will just call it the program-- is the most in-depth, the most substantive oversight initiative the committee has ever taken. I doubt any committee has done more than this. It presents extremely valuable insights into crucial oversight questions and problems that need to be addressed by the CIA.

Moreover, this study exemplifies why this committee was created in the first place following the findings of the Church Committee nearly 40 years ago, and I commend my friend and the committee's leader, the Senator from California, for shepherding this landmark initiative to this point. For years, often behind closed doors, without any recognition, she has been a strong and tireless advocate, and she deserves our thanks and recognition.

It is my hope and expectation that beyond the initial release of the executive summary and findings and conclusions, that the entire 6,800 pages, with 37,500 footnotes, will eventually be made public--and I am sure it will--with the appropriate redactions. Those public findings will be critical to fully learning the necessary lessons from this dark episode in our Nation's history and to ensure that it never happens again. It has been a very long, very hard fight to get to this point. Especially in the early years of the CIA's detention program, it was a struggle for the committee to get the most basic information or any information at all about the program.

The committee's study of the detention and interrogation program is not just the story of the brutal and ill-conceived program itself; this study is also the story of the breakdown in our system of governance that allowed the country to deviate in such a significant and horrific way from our core principles. One of the profound ways that breakdown happened was through the active subversion of meaningful congressional oversight--a theme mirrored in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program during that same period.

I first learned about some aspects of the CIA's detention and interrogation program in 2003 when I became vice chair of the committee. At that point and for years after, the CIA refused to provide me or anybody else with any additional information about the program. They further refused to notify the full committee about the program's existence. My colleagues will remember there was always the Gang of 4, the Gang of 6, or the Gang of 8. They would take the chairman and vice chairman, take them to the White House, give them a flip chart, 45 minutes for the Vice President, and off he would go. Senator Roberts and I went down by car and were instructed we couldn't talk to each other on the way back from one of those meetings. It was absurd. They refused to do anything to be of assistance.

The briefings I received provided little or no insight into the CIA's program. Questions or followup requests were rejected, and at times I was not allowed to consult with my counsel. I am not a lawyer. There are legal matters involved here. They said we couldn't talk to any of our staff, legal counsel or not, or other members of the committee who knew nothing about this because they had not been informed at all.

It was clear these briefings were not meant to answer any questions but were intended only to provide cover for the administration and the CIA. It was infuriating to me to realize I was part of a box checking exercise that the administration planned to use, and later did use, so they could disingenuously claim they had--in a phrase I will never be able to forget--``fully briefed Congress.''

In the years that followed I fought and lost many battles to obtain credible information about the detention and interrogation program. As vice chair I tried to launch, as has been mentioned, a comprehensive investigation into the program, but that effort was blocked.

Later in 2005, when I fought for access to over 100 specific documents cited in the inspector general report, the CIA refused to cooperate.

The first time the full Senate Intelligence Committee was given any information about this detention program was September 2006. This was years after the program's inception and the same day the President informed the Nation.

The following year when I became chairman, the vice chairman, Kit Bond, and I agreed to push for significant additional access to the program. For heaven's sake, at least allow both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, on a full basis, to be informed about this and also to include our staff's counsel on these matters. We finally actually prevailed and got this access. I think I withheld something from them until they agreed to do that which enabled us to have much-needed hearings on the program, which we proceeded to do.

As chairman, I made sure we scrutinized it from every angle. However, the challenge of getting accurate information from the CIA persisted. It was during this period that the House and Senate considered the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act and a potential provision that set the Army Field Manual--which is the only way to go--as the standard for the entire American Government, including the CIA. This would have effectively ended the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, a term eerily sanitized in bureaucratic jargon for what, in a number of cases, amounted to torture.

As chairman, I knew the inclusion of the Army Field Manual provision would jeopardize the entire bill. I thought it might bring it down. People would think it was too soft or too radical or whatever, but I was committed to seeing the bill signed into law. In the end, it was an easy decision.

I supported including the provision to end the CIA's program because it was the right thing to do. I did it because Congress needed to send a clear signal that it did not stand by the Bush administration's policy.

The House and Senate went on to pass the bill with bipartisan votes. Although the Bush administration vetoed the bill to preserve its ability to continue these practices, it was an important symbolic moment.

In the same period, I also sent two committee staffers, as our chairwoman has indicated, to begin reviewing cables at the CIA regarding the agency's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. I firmly believed we had to review those cables, which are now the only source of important historical information on this subject, because the CIA destroyed its tapes of some of their interrogation sessions. The CIA destroyed those tapes against the explicit direction from the White House and the Director of National Intelligence.

The investigation that began in 2007 grew under Chairman Feinstein's dedication and tremendous leadership into a full study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The more the committee dug, the more the committee found, and the results we uncovered are both shocking and deeply troubling.

First, the detention and interrogation program was conceived by people who were ignorant of the topic and made it up on the fly based on the untested theories of contractors who had never met a terrorist or conducted a real-world interrogation of any kind.

Second, it was executed by personnel with insufficient linguistic and interrogation training and little, if any, real-world experience.

Moreover, the CIA was aware that some of these personnel had a staggering array of personal and professional failings--enumerated by the committee's chairman--including potentially criminal activity, that should

have disqualified them immediately not only from being interrogators but from being employed by the CIA or anybody in government.

Nevertheless, it was consistently represented that these interrogators were professionalized and carefully vetted--their term-- and that became a part of the hollow legal justification of the entire program.

Third, the program was managed incompetently by senior officials who paid little or no attention to critical details. It was rife with troubling personal and financial conflicts of interest among the small group of the CIA officials and contractors who promoted and defended it. Obviously it was in their interest to do so.

Fourth, as the chairman indicated, the program was physically very severe, far more so than any of us outside the CIA ever knew. Although waterboarding has received the most attention, there were other techniques I personally believe--one in particular--that may have been much worse.

Finally, its results were unclear at best, but it was presented to the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the media as a silver bullet that was indispensable to saving lives. That was their mantra. In fact, it did not provide the intelligence it was supposed to provide or the CIA argued that it did provide.

To be perfectly clear, these harsh techniques were not approved by anyone ever for the low-bar standard of learning useful information from detainees. These techniques were approved because the Bush officials were told, and therefore believed, that these coercive interrogations were absolutely necessary to elicit intelligence that was unavailable by any other collection method and would save American lives. That was simply not the case.

For me, personally, the arc of this story comprises more than a decade of my 30 years of work in the Senate and one of the hardest fights--I think the hardest fight--I have ever been through. Many of the worst years were during the Bush administration.

However, I did not fully anticipate how hard these last few years would be in this administration to get this summary declassified and to tell the full story of what happened. Indeed, to my great frustration, even after months of endless negotiations, significant aspects of the story remain obscured by black ink.

I have great admiration for the President, and I am appreciative of the leadership role he has taken to depart from the practices of the Bush administration on these issues. His Executive order formally ended the CIA's detention program practices, and that is a good example. It is a great example.

It was, therefore, with deep disappointment that over the course of a number of private meetings and conversations I came to feel that the White House's strong deference to the CIA throughout this process has at times worked at cross-purposes with the White House's stated interest in transparency and has muddied what should be a clear and unequivocal legacy on this issue.

While aspiring to be the most transparent administration in history, this White House continues to quietly withhold from the committee more than 9,000 documents related to the CIA's programs. I don't know why. They won't say, and they won't produce.

In addition to strongly supporting the CIA's insistence on the unprecedented redaction of fake names in the report, which obscures the public's ability to understand the important connections which are so important for weaving together the tapestry, the administration also pushed for the redaction of information in the committee's study that should not be classified, contradicting the administration's own Executive order on classification.

Let me be clear.

That order clearly states that in no case shall information fail to be declassified in order to conceal violations of law and efficiency or administrative error or prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.

In some instances, the White House asked not only that information be redacted but that the redaction itself be removed so it would be impossible for the reader to tell that something was already hidden. Strange.

Given this, looking back, I am deeply disappointed, rather than surprised, that even when the CIA inexplicably conducted an unauthorized search of the committee's computer files and emails at an offsite facility, which was potentially criminal, and even when it became clear that the intent of the search was to suppress the committee's awareness of an internal CIA review that corroborated parts of the intelligence committee's study and contradicted public CIA statements, the White House continued to support the CIA leadership, and that support was unflinching.

Despite these frustrations, I have also seen how hard Chairman Feinstein has fought against great odds, stubborn odds, protective odds, mysterious odds, which are not really clear to me. I have tried to support her thoughtful and determined efforts at every opportunity to make sure as much as of the story can be told as possible, and I am deeply proud of the product the committee ended up with.

Now it is time to move forward. For all of the misinformation, incompetence, and brutality of the CIA's program, the committee's study is not and must not be simply a backward-looking condemnation of the past. The study presents a tremendous opportunity to develop forward- looking lessons that must be central to all future activities.

The point has been made--I thoroughly agree--that the vast majority of people who work at the CIA--and there are tens and tens of thousands of them--do very good work and are working very hard and have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. But if this report had not been released, the country would have felt that everybody at the CIA-- and the world would have felt it--was involved in this program. It is important to say that that was not the case. It was just 30 or 40 people at the top. Many of the people you see on television blasting this report were intimately involved in carrying it out and setting it up.

The CIA developed the detention program in a time of great fear, anxiety, and unprecedented crisis. It is at these times of crisis when we need sound judgment, excellence, and professionalism from the CIA the most.

When mistakes are made, they call for self-reflection and scrutiny. For that process to begin, we first have to make sure there is an absolutely accurate public record of what happened. We are doing that. The public release of the executive summary and findings and conclusions is a tremendous and consequential step toward that end.

For some, I expect there will be the temptation to reject and cast doubt, to trivialize, to attack or rationalize parts of the study that are disturbing or are embarrassing. Indeed, the CIA program's dramatic divergence from the standards that we hold ourselves to is hard to reconcile. However, we must fight that shortsighted temptation to wish away the gravity of what this study found.

How we deal with this opportunity to learn and improve will reflect on the maturity of our democracy. As a country, we are strong enough to bear the weight of the mistakes we have made. As an institution, so is the Central Intelligence Agency. We must confront this dark period in our recent history with honesty and critical introspection. We must draw lessons, and we must apply those lessons as we move forward. Although it may be uncomfortable at times, ultimately we will grow stronger, and we will ensure that this never happens again.

I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.