For Immediate Release
August 4, 2004
Vice President Cheney Discusses National Intelligence Director
Excerpt from August 4, 2004 speech. Click here for the whole speech.
Q My question is this, can you explain to us how the creation of
the new national director of intelligence gathering is going to benefit
the country, and how that will change the complexion of our
intelligence agencies here in America and abroad?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure. Basically, the proposition for a National
Intelligence Director comes from the 9/11 Commission that just
completed its work assessing what happened prior to 9/11, what worked,
what didn't work. One of the problems we had, for example, prior to
9/11 is that there clearly was a lack of effective communication
between the FBI on the one hand, and the CIA on the other.
Part of that was built in institutionally, because we've always
wanted to keep the CIA out of our domestic business. Spies are to go
spy against the enemy overseas, not here in the U.S., has always been
our mind set. And the FBI was primarily a law enforcement operation.
They'd go in after the terrorist attack, find the guilty party, such as
Timothy McVeigh, in Oklahoma City, do a great job of prosecuting the
wrongdoer. We needed to change their orientation and get them more in
the business of counter-terrorism and preventing the attacks, not just
cleaning up afterwards, and do a better job of building those links
between the various segments of the intelligence communities. Part of
the idea of this National Intelligence Director is that you'll have
somebody that sits over the about 15 different intelligence agencies
that we have in the federal government. We've got the CIA. The FBI,
obviously, has significant intelligence capabilities. State Department
has something called INR. We got the National Security Agency, the
National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agencies. There is
a need for a lot of intelligence various places in the government. And
we don't want to inhibit those developments. Efficiency is not
necessarily the right answer for intelligence the way it is some other
places. If you got a little redundancy there, that's probably a good
thing. You'd rather err on that side than the other side.
But the purpose of the NID is to do some things that were built
into the statute from the standpoint of the Director of Central
Intelligence years ago that have never really been fully carried out.
The President has embraced the idea. There's still a lot of work to be
done to flesh out the details, and that work will be done with the
Congress in the weeks ahead.
We also have signed up -- we already have something called the
Terrorism Threat Integration Center. We're going to expand that
significantly into what the 9/11 Commission called the National
Counter-terrorism Center, where you pull together the streams of
intelligence from all over the government, and fuse it together into
one piece of analysis that then is available to the President and other
senior policymakers to help us stay on top of the situation and be able
to make those kinds of decisions. So it's an effort to improve
coordination, a better, wiser allocation of resources to make sure the
President and the top policymakers get the best advice possible with
respect to the terrorist threat that's out there.
I think it's an important initiative. The President is prepared, as
I say, to go forward with it, endorsed it just this week. Now the key
is to write the legislation that actually implements the concept.
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