Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, with great respect for Senator Specter, friend and colleague, I rise to oppose this amendment. I want to say that Senator Specter has been a very constructive member of the Governmental Affairs Committee, not just on this matter but on so many others that come before the committee. He has contributed substantially to the strength of the bill that is before the Senate that Senator Collins and I have offered. He and I talked quite seriously about this earlier in the year, and ultimately my conclusion was that it would construct a bridge too far. We have a crisis, which the 9/11 Commission documents, which is that we have an intelligence community, as we discussed yesterday and showed on the graphs, without a leader, without anyone in charge. It is so frustrating to the point of being infuriating to read the lengthy narrative at the beginning of the 9/11 Report to see documented the failure to connect the dots. The cases that Senator Specter mentioned-- one agency knowing something, not telling it to another agency, which might well have either kept out some of the terrorists who struck us on September 11--should have--or would have opened our eyes to the plot that was being hatched that FBI agents came face to face with, this is a system, the American intelligence community, without a leader. The most urgent recommendation, according to Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton, that the Commission makes to us is to create a strong national intelligence director and then, right alongside that, a strong counterterrorism center--connect the dots. We have done this. Senator Collins documented the various powers we have given to the national intelligence director. First, this has been a recommendation of commission after commission. Going back to the late 1940s, when the National Security Act was adopted and the Central Intelligence Agency was created, post Second World War, there was the creation of the Director of Central Intelligence who was supposed to be not just the head of the CIA but the overseer of our entire intelligence community. The position was taken but hamstrung. It was not given the power. The DCI was the same person as the head of the CIA. That contributed to the community being without a leader. In this bill we separate these two positions. We create the overarching national intelligence director, separate from the head of the CIA, and we give that national intelligence director real budget authority, personnel authority and tasking, assignment coordinating authority, which we are convinced will make us a lot safer and stronger against the threat of terrorism here at home and against Americans and others throughout the world. The Specter amendment goes further than that and would provide that not only would the national intelligence director in the underlying bill direct, oversee, and execute the budgets of these agencies, but he or she would also supervise, direct, and control their day-to-day operations. That approach would create a department in everything but name and put the national intelligence director in charge of multiple agencies on a day-to-day basis. One of the witnesses before our committee was Philip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. We asked Dr. Zelikow: Did the Commission consider creating a department of intelligence, giving the national intelligence director the powers that the Specter amendment would give? Dr. Zelikow said: Yes, the Commission considered creating such a department but decided against it on several bases. And they are the bases of my opposition to the Specter amendment. First, the current job that the Director of Central Intelligence had-- which was CIA Director, director of presumably the overall intelligence community and principle intelligence adviser to the President--was in itself more than one person could do. To give powers to the national intelligence director for day-to-day operations of the agencies under his or her control would again give more authority, more responsibility than the Commission decided was appropriate and manageable. The Commission also opted for what they considered to be a more modern management approach. They didn't want to create another big Federal bureaucracy; they wanted to create, really patterned after some very large and very successful private corporations in this country, a central management system, strong as our national intelligence director would be, with budget, personnel, tasking authority, but not top heavy, agile, and not in response or in charge of the day-to-day decisions of all of the agencies under that position. That is what we have in the approach we are taking in this bill. Senator Collins said some people will say--and you will hear of amendments on this floor, as the debate goes on, from Members and those outside the Chamber who feel the bill Senator Collins and I have put before the Senate gives the national intelligence director too much power. They will try to strip away that power or fuzz it up so that it is not clear and the status quo can remain. There will be plenty of opportunity to argue against that when those amendments are filed. But here we are in the middle of a war on terrorism, struck as we were on September 11, under a continuing threat of attack, alerts all over, particularly in Washington and New York--real concern--and to do what looks like protecting the status quo of the particular authority of existing agencies doesn't make sense. There will be those who feel our bill goes too far. I don't mean to put words into Senator Specter's mouth because he is very eloquent, but this amendment suggests we have not gone far enough. The Commission deliberately decided not to take the National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and National Reconnaissance Organization out of the Department of Defense. The Commission was concerned, Dr. Zelikow said, about the balance between national and departmental guidance, and they didn't want to tilt the balance too far away from defense. The Commission's executive director portrayed the Commission's idea of a lean, creative command center this way: Since terrorism poses such a revolutionary challenge to old ways of executive management in our national security bureaucracy, counterterrorism requires an innovative response. I believe the underlying bill does exactly that: real authority, decisionmaking authority, but lean and, may I add, mean, because the people who are threatening us are very mean. The other thing the kind of structure we have created does is make it harder for the problems that many in the Senate and Committee on Intelligence cited in its report on prewar intelligence are worried about, which is group-think. There is an increased danger that persons at the top of the daily operations of the organizations--there is a danger that you will begin to have not the competition of ideas we want to see in our intelligence community and that we feel strongly will be encouraged by the national intelligence director we are creating by the language in the bill, the focus on independence and objectivity of intelligence and by the national counterterrorism center, which is ultimately the place where everybody who knows anything about a particular problem--in this case terrorism--and maybe the director will create other centers on weapons of mass destruction for particularly problematic countries like Iran or North Korea. Everybody in the Government who knows anything about that will sit down together to share what they have collected in the way of intelligence, share their analysis of it, and then plan jointly on how to stop it, how to deal with the threat represented by those situations. So I believe Senator Specter's intentions are very good, and I admire him for them. But I think at this moment they are a bridge too far, both in the substance of where he would take us and also, frankly, in terms of the probability of any such measure passing Congress. There is an urgency to our deliberations, as we have said over and over again. I think if we reach too far, we may end up with nothing and nothing maintains the status quo, which failed us on September 11 and will fail us again unless we act. I oppose the amendment. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I ask unanimous consent to speak for not more than 1 minute.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I rise to support Senator Hutchison's amendment. It really strengthens the basic bill that we brought before the Chamber. It would reorganize our intelligence community to better deal with the threat of terrorism. We want this core proposal to be a vehicle for responding to the other recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and to close as many of the points of vulnerability that we have in America to terrorists as we possibly can. The Commission said major vulnerabilities still exist in cargo and general aviation security. This amendment would go a long way toward ending those vulnerabilities. I thank the Senator from Texas, and I urge adoption of the amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Warner, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, which the chairman of our committee and this ranking member are privileged to serve on, for his statement, his reference to sections of statute that could be compromised and indeed overridden if this amendment of the Senator from Pennsylvania were adopted. I thought that the colloquy between Senator Warner and Senator Collins was very illuminating. I hope our colleagues had a chance to listen to it because it did, I believe, ultimately explain why this is a bridge too far, a motto from the Second World War, where the troops were sent to take one bridge too far--I have the feeling that Senator Warner is going to know the background of this ``bridge too far'' reference--too far to hold the bridge and, as a result, the overall effort collapsed. I am afraid this stretches too far and it weighs down the reforms we are trying to make. I believe the colloquy between Senator Warner and Senator Collins is a great argument for the balance we have struck. We leave the line authority over these national intelligence agencies with the Defense Department. Without going into details--because it is classified--thousands of men and women in uniform serve in these agencies. So we want to leave that line authority with the Secretary of Defense but create a reporting authority to the national intelligence director because the NID will oversee the entire intelligence community. This has been a wonderful learning experience for Senator Collins and me. We met with the head of the NSA, General Hayden, and the head of the NGA, General Clapper, and it was fascinating to hear the extent to which they are not only providing day-to-day technical military intelligence to help their personnel in the field at Central Command today, and other commands, but the way in which they are also providing, because of their extraordinary capabilities, daily assistance and intelligence security to law enforcement agencies. That is the balance we tried to strike.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator for his question, my chairman of the Armed Services Committee. It is an important question, one that Senator Collins and I weighed as we went through this process of accepting the assignment from the bipartisan leadership to consider and recommend to the Senate on the 9/11 Commission Report. We both take not only our responsibility to protect America's security under the Constitution seriously, we take our membership on the Armed Services Committee seriously. We have a purpose here. We want to put somebody in charge. The 9/11 Commission Report says the intelligence community doesn't have a leader. They are not coordinating their effort. As we do that, we said we want to make sure we don't compromise the quality and availability of intelligence to our warfighters. In fact, we believe our proposal not only doesn't compromise the quality of intelligence, but will ultimately improve it because there will be better coordination. Even from within some of these agencies, national assets under the Defense Department, high officials said to us that they don't benefit, they don't think the military benefits, the warfighters benefit from the current ambiguity. Make those lines clear, and all the customers, if I can use that term, of intelligence will benefit, including the military. Senator Warner knows that in specific regard to the so-called TIARA, or tactical intelligence budget of the military, that remains totally within the Defense Department, and so do most of the joint military intelligence programs. So the answer is a resounding yes. We understand the uncertainty, the anxiety because of our bill. The 9/11 Commission recommendations represent change. It does take the budget authority and put it under the national intelligence director for national intelligence programs, including these three within the Defense Department. So we understand the anxiety. But we think we put together a balanced system that will not only first provide the No. 1 customer of intelligence, the President of the United States, with the best intelligence, with the coordinated unity of effort that he requires, but do the same for the warfighters. That is our firm belief.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, the sentence is subject to more than one interpretation. So I am not sure what the meaning of it is, but I can assure the Senator about what the intention of the underlying bill is and that is the way in which I look forward to continuing this discussion and debating any amendments the Senator might have. I found a quote that may be reassuring to the Senator. It is from General Hayden, Director of the National Security Agency, when he testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence on August 18 of this year about the 9/11 Commission recommendations. He said an empowered national intelligence director, with direct authority over the national agencies, including his own, should not be viewed as diminishing our ability or willingness to fulfill our responsibility as combat support agencies, which I found reassuring. That is certainly our intention and I hope the Senator from Virginia will find that reassuring as well. That, combined with the possibility that the administration might oppose one of the Senator's amendments, I hope will lead the Senator to reconsider.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Reserving the right to object, and I will not object, my understanding is, as the Senator said, this is not a complete bill. It was legislative language for parts of what ultimately have been covered in our bill.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I have no objection.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Absolutely.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Briefly, I thank Senator Warner for his statement in opposition to the Specter amendment and for the questions which he raised which I think have been helpful and clarifying. No doubt this discussion will continue in the days ahead. I thank the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, if I might say a word before that and then I will be happy to yield the floor to Senator Nelson. Maybe I should yield to the chairman who will probably say the same thing I will be saying. I am very grateful to the Senate majority leader and to the Senate Democratic leader for this agreement and for the pace they are setting for consideration of this bill on a bipartisan basis. These are not ordinary times. This is not ordinary legislation. It goes to the heart of our security. We want to have thoughtful debate. The chairman of the committee, Senator Collins, and I found in the committee that when we let some time for debate occur, people came to very thoughtful conclusions, totally without regard to party. The votes on all the amendments went all around the lot. I think people ultimately felt good about the process. By setting these deadlines now for amendments to be noticed and then filed, we are going to expedite exactly that kind of thoughtful consideration so we can get this done with the same feeling of, well, confidence that we are doing the right thing. We are not only doing something we need to do quickly, but we are doing it the right way. So I thank the majority leader and Senator Daschle for their help on that matter and the help they have given to Senator Collins and me.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to support the amendment of Senator Hutchison. I thank her for proposing it. She was ahead of her time because she has been on this case, along with members of the Commerce Committee, at least since March of last year, when the bill came out of the Commerce Committee; in fact, the Senate passed this bill unanimously in May of 2003. Unfortunately, there has been no action that meets up with this bill in the House. So Senator Hutchison is quite right to introduce this as an amendment to our underlying reform of the intelligence community. This is directly relevant to the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that ``major vulnerability still exists in cargo and general aviation security. These, together within adequate screening and access controls, continue to present aviation security challenges.'' That comes from the 9/11 Commission. The Commission concluded that we are safer than we were on September 11, 2001, but we are not yet safe. This underlying bill is aimed at reforming our intelligence community so we will be safe, so we can see the threats coming at us, hear them, and stop them before the terrorists are able to strike, but also that we may adopt other provisions of the 9/11 Commission report. Senator McCain and I introduced an amendment that was the first to pass a short while ago. I hope this amendment will pass as well, because it tightens existing weaknesses, loopholes in the screening of cargo transported in passenger aircraft, opening up a vulnerability that we all fear terrorists may exploit to strike at us. I thank the Senator from Texas for not only being foresighted last year in seeing this weakness in our defenses to terrorism but for coming forth and introducing this amendment. It will strengthen the bill Senator Collins and I and other members of the Governmental Affairs Committee have brought out and, therefore, I urge its adoption. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Thank you.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request which I am really happy to make. I am sure Senator Collins, if she does not know yet, will be happy to hear this. I ask unanimous consent to add Senators Feinstein and Mikulski as cosponsors of our legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, Senator Durbin is a member of the Governmental Affairs Committee. He made some very significant contributions to this bill, which we will discuss in more detail during the debate on information technology systems of our Government when it comes to dealing with national security intelligence and the board that the bill creates to guarantee while we are improving the security of our people in an age of terrorism that their liberty continues to be protected as well. I am grateful Senator Durbin has joined us as a cosponsor. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am prepared to join with Senator Collins and Senator Carper in introducing this amendment, and Senator Carper played a very active role on the committee, along with Senators Collins, Levin, and other members in devising this very balanced approach to this controversial question of the Homeland Security grant formula. It does reflect the reality of the current terrorist threat, that there are some places that are a higher probability because they contain more potential targets, or because they are just big, prominent cities. But the fact is, when you are dealing with an enemy--and we have seen this around the world--that will strike at the most vulnerable, undefended targets, not caring about consequences to human life, whoever it is--children in schools, buses, trains, families, et cetera--in some sense, every American is endangered and every community is endangered. Therefore, every State deserves some proportion of these Homeland Security grants. That balance has been struck very well, I think, in this amendment, which is the bill our committee reported out earlier. So I look forward to debating this and hopefully passing it with strong support in the coming days. I want to say two more things before I yield the floor. First, we now have, I believe, three amendments that have been filed this afternoon. This is good news. There will be a lot of amendments on this bill, and I am sure we will be on the bill for a considerable number of days. One of our colleagues said we might be on this for weeks or months. I prefer to speak in terms of days or hours, as Senator Reid prefers. But it is good we have these three amendments offered and hopefully we will go to a vote on one or maybe two of them tomorrow and begin to move forward on this proposal. That is good news. Secondly, I am delighted to ask unanimous consent to add Senator Durbin of Illinois as a cosponsor to the underlying bill.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to tell Senator Graham that Senator Collins indicated to me she does have your book on her bedside table and she finds it compelling. She does not use it to induce sleep. I want to reassure him of that. I find it compelling as well. I join her in thanking the Senator. You two were way out front in recommending quite a while ago some of the reforms that are contained in our committee's proposal. I hope the Senator knows his work cleared a path and informed the work that the committee did. I thank him for that. Amendment No. 3705

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from Florida, for a very informed statement. To restate what we said to Senator Wyden, I appreciate the experience that led our colleagues from both parties to offer this amendment. I know I speak for Senator Collins in saying, first, we want to look at the amendment in more detail; second, we want to work to see if we can come up with some way to accommodate your concerns that is agreeable to all involved. I ask unanimous consent that this amendment be set aside to allow us time to do the work we are about to do.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I also thank my friend and colleague from Oregon for a very thoughtful statement and a very thought- provoking amendment that he has offered. I know it comes out of his service and the service of the other bipartisan cosponsors on the Intelligence Committee and some experiences they have had, shall we say, which have not been satisfying, in which they have believed they and the public have been deprived of information in a timely way that did not allow them to make informed judgments. I want to say a few things after thanking Senator Wyden. One is there are members of our committee who both shared the experience of membership on the Intelligence Committee and brought it to bear on the deliberations of our committee in presenting the Collins-Lieberman proposal which is now before the Senate. That all goes to the priority on sharing of information and the independence and objectivity of intelligence, and on the responsibility of the intelligence community to Congress to provide timely and objective information. And the proposal that the committee brought out is full of provisions aimed at doing just that. Senator Collins has just indicated the central provision for which the national intelligence director is responsible is reviewing and establishing standards for classification of intelligence. Remember, in the original 9/11 Commission proposal, the national intelligence director was in the Executive Office of the President. We decided--and the Commission ultimately agreed with us--that was a bad idea; that we wanted to establish a standard of independence, openness, and objectivity. We took the position out. The national intelligence director will now be an independent agent setting these standards for classification. We have broadly adopted a transformational approach to information in which we quite explicitly say we want to go from the Cold-War-era notion that there was a need only to have information if you really needed to know, and that the priority here is on a need to share unless there is a reason not to share. That goes in some cases not to the public but to the other intelligence agencies of our Government and to State and local law enforcement intelligence agencies. Senator Levin, a member of our committee, greatly strengthened building on our requirement in the underlying bill that the national intelligence director must provide national intelligence to Congress and the President that is ``timely, objective, independent of political consideration and based on all sources available to the intelligence community.'' Senator Levin extended that to cover the director of the national terrorism center, the other national intelligence centers, the CIA Director, the National Intelligence Council, and restated the mandate to require national intelligence be timely, objective, independent of political considerations, and not shaped to serve policy considerations. We are asking that the national intelligence director have responsibilities to ensure that the appropriate officials of the U.S. Government, including, of course, Members of Congress, have access to a variety of intelligence assessments and analytical views; likewise, that the national intelligence centers have similar access. In response to the specific recommendation of your colleague, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Senator Rockefeller, we created the office of ombudsman within the national intelligence authority to serve as an independent counselor, an independent reviewer of analytical product, to address any problems of bias or lack of objectivity or politicization in the intelligence community. The same is true of national intelligence estimates, that they be provided in a way that distinguishes between analytical judgments underlying intelligence. We have a very strong provision about congressional oversight. The committee included provisions to strengthen the ability of congressional oversight to ensure independent and timely intelligence analysis; that the director of the counterterrorism center, for instance, may testify and submit comments to Congress without clearance from anyone else in the executive branch. The heads of the counterterrorism centers must provide intelligence assessments and certain other information to appropriate Members of Congress. Employees are explicitly authorized to report directly to Congress any evidence showing false statements to Congress and to an intelligence estimate. There is a real congruence of purpose here in opening up, to the extent allowed by our national security needs, the intelligence that is in the possession of our Government. I understand this amendment pushes this a step or two forward in focusing beyond what our proposal does in authorizing the national intelligence director to deal with classification standards to create this board. This is the first time I have seen the amendment. I appreciate the work that has been done on it and the purpose behind it, and with Senator Collins, I offer to sit and reason together with our respective colleagues, leaders in this field, who are the proponents of the amendment, and see if we can come to some agreement that is progressive but does not take the bill in a direction that might make it hard to adopt everything else we want to adopt. That is the practical last word I want to offer.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. Madam President, in the aftermath of September 11, we have obviously taken some very aggressive steps to improve airline security. Those were critical improvements and, in some sense, inevitable after airplanes were used to attack us on September 11. But there is a lot more to do, and not just in aviation. We have to confront threats facing all modes of transportation. I continuously meet people who express to me worries about one or another mode of transportation they use--trains, buses, et cetera-- because they are now in some sense reassured by the presence of security around air travel but miss it and are unsettled when they do not find similar measures in other modes of transportation. So we have to confront the threats from terrorists facing all modes of transportation. Otherwise, we are going to be fighting the last war while our enemies probe for other weaknesses that we have left undefended. Before I go into a little more detail on this amendment, I want to say this is the first of a series of amendments that Senator McCain, myself and others will offer on the Governmental Affairs Committee's National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, the proposal Senator Collins and I put before the Senate. Obviously, the underlying bill contains several critical reforms and focuses on matters of intelligence, which our committee took to be the charge we were given by the bipartisan leadership of the Senate. I am very proud of the way in which the Governmental Affairs Committee addressed the issues that fell within that mandate that Senator Frist and Senator Daschle gave us. Obviously, there were other important recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that fell beyond the committee's purview. In fact, it made 41 recommendations to help detect and prevent terrorist attacks on the United States or on American citizens, wherever they might be. Some of these were quite broad. Obviously, what the Committee focused on is the restructuring of the intelligence operations of the executive branch. As I indicated in an earlier statement today, those recommendations are the ones the Commission felt were most urgent because we are under the threat of attack, and we need to reorganize and focus our considerable intelligence resources. But there were other recommendations the 9/11 Commission made. For example, they urged diplomatic outreach and educational grants to the Muslim world because a realistic offer of hope and freedom to the hundreds of millions of people living in countries that are primarily Muslim can be a much greater force, a much more appealing force, than the radical extremist terrorists called to Jihad. Other recommendations were to tighten and coordinate the screening and identification systems we use to admit people into the United States of America or when we give them access to transportation systems and other key facilities within our country. Other recommendations deal with the distribution of homeland security grants or increasing security for all forms of transportation. All of those, and others, went beyond the Governmental Affairs Committee's mandate. Two or three weeks before the 9/11 Commission made its report, Senator McCain and I met with Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton, and we said to them--at that point we had no idea what the pace of the congressional reaction to the Commission report would be. We said: We are going to make you a promise. After you issue your report, our staffs and we will work hard to translate every recommendation of your report into legislative language, and introduce it so there could be a vehicle around which we could concentrate our support. We did not know at that time the Governmental Affairs Committee would be asked to take on this role by Senator Frist and Senator Daschle and that the congressional pace of reaction would quite appropriately be quick, leading us to set aside our normal August recess, have a number of hearings, and now have the bill before the Senate. Still, there are parts of the Commission report that, as I say, are not explicitly within the purview of the Governmental Affairs Committee's work and that is what the amendments of Senator McCain, others and I are intending to address; to complete the full package of reforms recommended by the 9/11 Commission after its own 20 months of hard work. Put all of this legislation together and there will be a package of reforms, both broad and deep, that will make America and Americans, wherever they are, safer and lead us to the victory in the war on terrorism that we all seek and know first must come with the use of force and any and all efforts we can make to capture and/or kill terrorists, but will take more than that as well. The amendment Senator McCain introduced today, the first of these amendments to go beyond intelligence reform in the Committee bill, deals with transportation security. It comes from our conclusion and the Commission's conclusion that we need to look at protecting our transportation systems the way a general looks at protecting supply lines. A well-coordinated attack on our transportation systems, or the key infrastructure that supports them, would be staggering to our homeland security and, of course, to the personal security of many Americans. Imagine a major city being crippled because an attack had rendered mass transportation unusable, or imagine not even being able to resupply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because we cannot move the goods from warehouse to port. As we look worldwide, we know terrorists often target transportation systems. We are not imagining these threats. As we know from the news, they have not only used airplanes for their inhumane, cruel purposes, to express the extent to which they hate anyone who is not like them, they have used buses, trains, and shipping vessels. With the exception of aviation, the fact is in the United States of America we are still dangerously behind in our efforts to secure our own vital transportation networks. As the 9/11 Commission notes, ``over 90 percent of the Nation's $5.3 billion annual investment in the TSA goes to aviation.'' Important? Of course. Critically important after September 11, but its not enough to meet all of the threats in transportation that face us. This amendment requires the Transportation Safety Administration to at least evaluate the threats, vulnerabilities, and risks faced by all modes of transportation, and then set priorities and deadlines-- including budget and research and development priorities--for addressing those needs; investing in new technologies that can help us gain the security in all modes of transportation that we need. This kind of transportation security strategy has been talked about for many months but it just never seems to happen, and that is why this amendment requires the TSA to complete this critical work under the direction of the Secretary of Homeland Security by April 1, 2005. The Transportation Research Board, the Government Accountability Office, and other independent experts have all called for this exact vital step. It will set the stage for critical new initiatives that must follow to better protect rail, transit, ports, and other key modes of American transportation. There is still more to do in the area of aviation security. That is why this amendment calls on TSA to step up efforts to detect explosives on individuals trying to board planes. Currently, as most of us who travel know but probably do not think about, only checked bags are routinely screened for explosives. This amendment would require the Department of Homeland Security to implement plans to screen all passengers for explosives. The amendment would also direct the TSA to begin comparing passenger lists against the Government's new consolidated terrorist watch list. This is not happening yet; not happening to the extent we want it and need it to happen. It makes such common sense that it is frustrating to the point of being infuriating that we are not yet doing it. That we are not using the capacity of information networks and computers to check passenger lists against terrorist watch lists so none of us is on a plane with someone who intends to use that plane for an attack or to bring the plane itself down. This is the first of several amendments Senator McCain and I will be offering. Again, I believe it is important we act on all of these as well as, of course, the underlying Governmental Affairs Committee intelligence reform proposal. We find ourselves at one of those rare moments in time, certainly in congressional time, when both the moment to act and the momentum for action have come together in a truly bipartisan way in Congress, in the executive branch and, of course, most importantly of all, among the American people to whom we owe the greatest responsibility. With that kind of general agreement nationally, passing a complete package of legislation responding to the strong compelling arguments in the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report is within our grasp, and adopting this amendment will be yet another step toward achieving that goal. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Madam President, I know the Senator from Oregon is in the Chamber. If he has a moment or two, I would like to go forward with a statement I intended to make in response to the amendment Senator McCain laid down, which is the pending amendment. I rise to support that amendment, and I ask unanimous consent that I be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Paul Brand, Andrew Young, Sara Hagigh, Rob Culbertson, Joseph Helble, Wilson Wang, Andrew Weinschenk, and Matt Doyle of my staff and the Governmental Affairs Committee staff have privileges of the floor during the debate on S. 2845.