‘Spook’ panel’s goals outlined Snowe concerned about threats

AUGUSTA – The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence usually meets in a windowless, secure room with armed guards at the door. It rarely meets in open session, but its responsibility to oversee all of the nation’s intelligence agencies makes it one of the most important committees of Congress.

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Republican, serves on the panel and agreed to discuss its priorities in the upcoming session after the incoming chairman of the committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., issued a statement outlining his goals.

“To start with, the committee must look ahead to the next 10 years in the war on terror and insist that the United States Intelligence Community create a comprehensive, global counter-terrorism plan for the next decade,” Rockefeller said. “This strategy must be informed by a better understanding of emerging threat areas in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and other parts of the Middle East.”

Rockefeller said the committee needs to conduct an agency-by-agency review and assess the two-year-old intelligence reform legislation and recommend any necessary changes to accomplish the goals of both short-term and long-term intelligence.

“I don’t disagree with any of those goals and objectives,” Snowe said. “We had to grapple with these issues as we looked at the failed intelligence efforts that led to faulty assessments and resulted in the Iraq conflict.”

She said there was a “vacuum” of intelligence from the end of the first Gulf War to the start of the current war in Iraq that led to the current war.

While much of the findings of the committee from that time period are still classified, Snowe said the three reports related to pre-war intelligence on Iraq paint a clear picture.

“There was a huge gap in intelligence from that time,” she said. “There was no human intelligence from Iraq and too much reliance on technology.”

Snowe shares Rockefeller’s concern with emerging threats from other areas of the world. She said it is not enough to have improved intelligence efforts in the Mideast and not for the rest of the world.

“We have to be prepared with our plans to respond to what our enemies do, wherever they are in the world,” she said. “We have to be forward-looking and ascertain where the next threats will be coming from, whether it’s Asia or Africa or from here in the Americas.”

Rockefeller said the panel plans to conduct an agency-by-agency review to assess the two-year-old legislation that created a director of national intelligence who is charged with coordinating the 16 agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence operation.

Snowe said the review should be an ongoing one because the nation’s enemies are constantly changing their strategies to attack the United States.

“We have to look at emerging threats globally,” she said. “Intelligence is our front line of defense, frankly. We have to be better prepared to deter threats and that means working with others in the international community.”

Rockefeller said he hopes to re-establish the bipartisan approach to intelligence that once characterized the panel’s activities. Snowe said the bipartisanship was one of the reasons she sought appointment to the committee.

“I hope we can now move forward and work in a bipartisan manner,” she said. “One of the reasons I sought the committee assignment was that it was the one refuge from the partisanship and the polarization that had overtaken the rest of Congress.”

Snowe said the partisan disagreements among panel members have kept the committee from concluding the next phase of its review of prewar Iraq intelligence.

The current chairman of the panel, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has said he wants to accomplish that review in the current session of Congress, but Snowe said that may be difficult to achieve.

“Clearly, there has been a schism within the committee on some of the issues,” she said. “There is shared responsibility, and I guess that is all I will say about that.”

Snowe is not the first Mainer to serve on the committee, created in 1976 by a resolution co-sponsored by Sen. Ed Muskie, a Democrat.

Sen. William Hathaway, a Democrat, served on the first panel and Sen. William Cohen, a Republican, served on the panel in the 1980s.