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16 August 2007

http://www.dni.gov/speeches/20070814_speech.pdf

Remarks and Q&A by the Director of National Intelligence
Mr. Mike McConnell

2007 Border Security Conference

Sponsored by Congressman Silvestre Reyes
Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

The University of Texas at El Paso
El Paso, Texas

August 14, 2007

CHAIRMAN REYES: Thank you very much, General. Before I bring up to the podium a very special guest who is going to wrap up our conference – and I consider him a personal friend, although we’ve been working together a very short six months, but I feel like I’ve really got an opportunity to know, Director Mike McConnell – I thought it would be appropriate to honor an individual. And when we honor this individual, we normally don’t get an opportunity to thank the people that worked so hard on behalf of our national security. By the very nature of their job, they have to stay in the shadows; no one ever knows who they are and nobody ever gets an opportunity to thank them.

We have an individual here that Mike Delaney [Staff Director, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] tells me was the impetus to – I hope all of you are familiar with the TV series “24.” This gentleman that I’m about to thank was really the genesis – with a few liberties that Hollywood takes – the exploits of Jose Rodriguez are documented in the series “24.” So he admitted to me that he likes fast cars. I won’t tell you about the women, but I will tell you about the fast cars. (Laughter.) He is a connoisseur of fine wine. I said, well, in my experience, coming out of Camp Fear was I know the difference between Morgan David and Ripple.

He’s been through El Paso once before, and I consider him an American hero. And we thought we would honor Jose Rodriguez. And by honoring him, we honor the thousands of other employees of the Central Intelligence Agency that we never get to know. And I hope that the message gets back to them that we appreciate their work, that we appreciate their commitment; we appreciate their dedication; we appreciate their professionalism, because they have a difficult job and they do that job day in and day out in some of the most God-forsaken places on earth. I know because I’ve had the honor to visit with them in these different places around the world as a member of the intelligence committee.

So I would just like our good friend and American hero to come up and accept a flag flown in his honor over the nation’s Capitol. Please come up, Jose. And this is a certificate that reads, this flag is presented in honor of your commitment and devotion to the United States of America and your service to our country. It is presented on behalf of all of us here and a grateful nation that will never forget your hard work and your sacrifices. Mr. Jose Rodriguez, Director of National Clandestine Service. Please give him a big round of applause.

(Applause.)

JOSE RODRIGUEZ (Director, National Clandestine Service): When I said yesterday that I was a little nervous because I was dropping trou – I didn’t mean it in the “24” series sense; I meant it in dropping cover. But I am truly honored, Congressman. I don’t know what to say. I am truly honored. And what I will do is I will go back to my service and I will tell the people who work there with me, my colleagues, about this honor that you have given us in front of so many people. Thank you. It’s not often that we get recognized. And to be recognized like this is just very unique. And I thank you so much. Thank you so much.

(Applause.)

CHAIRMAN REYES: Okay, now, thank you very much, Jose. Thanks for your 30 years of dedicated service to our nation. Now, I think we’re going to wrap up the conference in a big way, because you’re about to hear from a gentleman that has 40 years experience in this business, and one that I have gotten to know very well. In fact, the last two, three weeks, I think, I saw him more than I saw my wife during that period.

We were participating in some intense negotiations – he on behalf of the administration; I and a couple of others on behalf of the leadership of the House and Senate. And you really get to judge the character of an individual. Regardless of the outcome of those negotiations, I know he is a standup individual. I know that in Mike McConnell, we have the right man for what I think is one of the toughest jobs.

He is today only the second director of National Intelligence. And he’s got a lot on his platter. He’s got a tremendous challenge, but he’s got a lot of great people working in those 16 agencies that he heads as the director of National Intelligence. We are committed to giving him the tools that he needs to make sure that he does the job of keeping this country safe. It’s not an easy job, but this is not an individual that shies away from a challenge.

He’s also, I think, in the same category as Jose in terms of, maybe he’s got a much higher profile type job, but he’s every bit as dedicated; he works every bit as hard. I can tell you from my own personal experience with him. He comes in early and stays late and is ready to come back. I think he’ll tell you that his day starts somewhere around 3:30 in the morning, because he’s got to be ready to brief the president every single morning.

So it’s a real privilege and a real honor for me to have him accept the invitation to keynote this luncheon and to close out our conference, because I know that you’re going to really enjoy his comments. And I hope as you hear him speak up here, I hope you keep in mind the immense responsibility on the shoulders of this gentleman. So with that, please help me welcome and give a warm El Paso welcome to the director of National Intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell.

(Applause.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Thank you, sir. Thank you for those very kind remarks. Usually, when I speak at something like this, I prepare remarks ahead of time. Then there is discussion at the table or you meet someone, so as usual, if you want to know about the prepared remarks, I’ll leave a copy. Everything I’m going to say, I’m just going to make up here based on conversation today.

I also want to acknowledge Jose. I do know about the fast cars, and I won’t mention the women. But I can acknowledge a truly great American who has done tremendous things for this country. It’s a pleasure to be here. I thank you for the opportunity and it’s an honor to be the cleanup batter for this distinguished conference. I understand the fourth year, getting better every year, and great promise of tings to come.

As the congressman mentioned, I have 40 years in this business. First thing that does is make me old. I’ve spent most of that time in the intelligence business, and most of that experience is in the Cold War. So in some senses, I guess I’m a product of the Cold War. But contrary to what is written, in about 1992, history did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have many, many threats today; not the least of which is terrorism, which we focus on; but of course, drugs and human trafficking, and even things like infectious diseases.

The issue is globalization. And part of globalization is speed. Someone can get sick in Hong Kong and 12 hours later, we could have an outbreak of something like SARS in this country. Also, the connectedness. If a major bank were to fail in this country, it could have repercussions around the world. It could have devastating repercussions around the world. So this sense of globalization and the focus of some to take advantage of the technology that we enjoy for greater productivity and a higher standard of living has caused us to have a new series of threats that we have to adjust to.

Now, I got a call in December asking if I would consider the nomination to come back. And quite frankly, I was enjoying supporting this community from, shall we say, an executive position in industry. General Thomas and I had similar positions, he in one company and me in another. So I had to think about it a bit; but why I chose to come back was an opportunity to provide a service to the nation, an opportunity to hopefully impact on this community and the way that it can contribute to the threats that we’re facing today.

So, as I thought about it, I did tell the president that I would agree to come back to government, being considered for the nomination. I went through the process and I sat and thought for those weeks that I was preparing for the nomination hearings – what would I do, and how could I have impact, and what were the most meaningful things to do? So I took a page out of industry to try to determine how would you create a sense of momentum, a series of deliverables and a series of accountability – a set of accountability – in this community to cause us to move faster at a much more aggressive pace.

So the idea we came up with is something we call a 100-day plan, and it’s really nothing very fancy. It’s a contract with the organization – organizations that I represent. We agree on a set of outcomes, we agree on a set of deliverables, we agree on a timetable, and then we launch our efforts. And the areas that we focused on – I’ll just very quickly just give you a list – first and foremost, to create a culture of collaboration. You’ve seen the 9/11 Commission report, Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission report, and all the follow-up to what were the failures of my community as a result of 9/11. And for the most part, it’s a series of efforts of failing to connect dots, or failing to make connections of pieces of information across diverse communities. So it seemed to me, one of the ways that you can take that on is to know people, and you serve with them and you have a relationship with them, and you have a common language and a common understanding and a common set of goals. Even though you can be in different organizations, you tend to connect. So the first thing I want to do is to put more emphasis on collaboration in this community.

Now collaboration can be achieved in a number of ways. I was a product of the Department of Defense, having retired after 29 years in the Navy. That was achieved with a law passed by the Congress, over great opposition from the U.S. military in the mid-’80s. Every service chief, when the law was being debated, stood up under oath and said if you pass this law, it will ruin the United States military. The law is known as Goldwater-Nichols, and what it created was a forced jointness among the services. I remember as a Navy guy, I used to sit in a Navy staff meeting – we’d be talking about what we’re going to do. They’d say hmm, Navy – we have our own ground force, we have our own air force, we have all the ships – why do we need those other guys? (Chuckles.)

So, Navy was not going to embrace jointness, and when the law passed, it changed the world a bit. It said, for example, if any of you Navy officers want to be competitive to make flag rank, you cannot achieve flag rank unless you’ve had joint duty – joint meaning serving with the other services, serving in a joint environment. And that instantly changed the while outlook on jointness. There were some other things that went with that legislation, but that was the force – (inaudible).

So Ambassador Negroponte before me spent about 14 to 16 months working on jointness for this community, and he handed it off to me. And fortunately for me, the new Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, having had experience in this community, understood what this was all about. So we had a partnership, and it didn’t take us too long to get jointness as a part of our culture and our approach and our collaboration. What does that mean? Sixteen agencies in this community. If you hope to be a senior in any of those agencies, the requirement is you must leave that agency to go to another agency, learn about their process and their procedures and their culture and the problems they face. And the proposition is that if you go there and know more about a different organization and you come back, you will establish ties and bonds in understanding, and that will cause us to come together better in a sense of collaboration across this community. It’s a classified world. It’s a world that hides behind the cover, so we have to know each other, and we have to reach across those boundaries.

One part of this collaboration is personal. This community, not through law or policy but by habit, has adopted a position of screening out first generation Americans. Screening out first generation – (inaudible) – Americans. That’s not because it was embedded in any policy documentation or law, it’s just that’s the way it was. The rationale was that if when we were in conflict with the Soviet Union, we couldn’t have someone from the Warsaw Pact, first generation American, that would have relatives. And the rationale would be there would be blackmail. The rationale was well, we couldn’t bring them to our midst. It was too much risk.

That’s not policy; that was just the way our habits evolved. We’re going to change those habits. It is now our policy across this community that we do not screen out first generation Americans. The very people that we need in this community to speak the languages, understand the cultures, are the ones who have come to America from the distant shores. And they’ll allow us to take advantage of their insight, their ability to fit in, because our targets, those that we have to penetrate, understand and gain intelligence information on, they’re all foreign. This community does not have a domestic role other than foreigners who might be here in this country. So, our focus is to get a more diverse culture, particularly first generation – first generation Americans, and particularly from those groups that are currently target in this country, so that we have the language skills and the ability to fit that in when we do the things that Jose Rodriguez and his crew have been doing for the last 30 years.

Now, when I mention diversity, it does remind me of a story I wanted to share with you. One of the greatest opportunities of my life was to work for a general who’s known well to all of you; his name is Colin Powell. Now I showed up as Colin Powell’s new intelligence officer five days before the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, and I remember standing there, looking at all those Iraqi forces on the Kuwait border, and I was wearing my sailor suit. Now a sailor in the summertime wears white – white shoes, white trousers, white shirt, shoulder boards, the whole thing. And I’m standing there in front of a general dressed up like a tree – (laughter). And I said, “General, there are a lot of Iraqis over there on the border.” And he said yes, Mike, I know that. Now I was ready for the next question. He was going to ask me how many – (inaudible) – and I had that figured out. He said, “How many maneuver brigades?” I didn’t even know what a maneuver brigade was.

So I was – at this point, I’m not sure if this is going to work out, but to give you a feel for the man, I felt pretty low about that point, and I said sir, I don’t know but I’ll go find out. So I started out, and I was walking across his office and he said Mike, and I turned around – (inaudible) – said, “We do work together.” And what he said to that little – just that little – (inaudible) – was you’re okay, you don’t know a lot about ground stuff and that’s my world, but if you go out and study and – we can work together. So I already felt great. Now, we did that first Gulf War. It was over and I was assigned as the new director of National Security Agency and what I really wanted to do was to get General Powell come up and visit. Visit the workforce – he was an American hero – just a great opportunity. So I called him and he said you know, I really – my schedule’s pretty busy, and so we talked and we talked. I couldn’t get him. Finally, it dawned on me. I said there’s a way that I can do this. Army guys like to shoot guns and we had a pistol range, so I said General, you know we have a pistol range. He said all right, all right, I’ll come up.

Now, I went down to the Pentagon to get him, and so there we are – this big black limousine – and Otis is in the front seat driving, I’m sitting in the back seat with General Powell. And Otis was not driving fast enough, so the General, about halfway he said Otis, pull over. So, Otis pulled over. General Powell gets in the front seat and is driving, he gets me up in the passenger seat and puts Otis in the back. (Laughter.) So here we are, screaming, 85 miles an hour going to NSA. And you can picture – we go on the base, and there’s specialist Smith, and we’re going 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. So we’ll pull him over.

So he walked up to the car and he sees General Powell and he said, “Excuse me sir,” and he goes back to his vehicle and he calls in and says, “Sergeant, I got a problem here.”

(Laughter.) He said, “Specialist Smith, what’s the problem?” He said, “Well I got a car doing 60 in a 30 mile zone.” He said, “There’s no problem. Give him a ticket. We’ll send somebody out and lock him up.” He said, “No, sir, you don’t understand. I really got a problem here.”

(Laughter.) He said, “Well, what is the problem?” He said, “Sir, I got somebody really important in this car.” He said, “I don’t care how important they are. Give them a ticket.” “But sir, you don’t understand. This person is really important.” “Well who is it?” He said, “I don’t know who it is, but Colin Powell’s the driver.” (Laughter.)

Diversity. We have got to have more diversity. What is your community – your intelligence community, the world we live in? What are we doing today to help the situation here on the borders? As I mentioned, our mission is foreign intelligence, and unfortunately for us – and you know all of the problems that have been discussed in the last few days, and we’re close on time so I won’t recount a lot of that, but drugs, human trafficking, the tunnels across the border, all of the things that we’re focused on.

The new president of Mexico is a wonderful partner. President Calderon has been very, very aggressive in going after the drug cartels. He has been heroic in that he has extradited not only kingpins but many of the other members into this country, and we’re going the right direction probably for the first time in a long time to actually turn this tide on this problem.

Ninety percent of the cocaine that comes into this country comes via Mexico, and huge volumes of not only marijuana and drugs from South America but also Mexico come into this country. We are working very hard. Many of the efforts and things that we do you’ll never know about because they are in the classified realm – working very hard to support the Mexican government, particularly the programs that have been outlined by President Calderon. We are making great progress and we will make even better progress. The president has requested some direct support, and we’re in the process now of determining exactly what that is and what size. And I can’t report to you that it is going in the right direction and I have great hope.

Now, in addition to drugs coming this way, we have another problem. It’s called weapons going the other way. Mexico has a problem with drugs, with weapons originating in this country which are smuggled back into Mexico used by these drug cartels. And you know the stories. The drug cartels jealously guard their territory. They are killing – I think 1500 people were killed last year. So we have to work extra hard on our side of the border to keep these weapons flowing into Mexico.

I do want to mention terrorism. That is one of the things I’ll probably spend about 80-percent of my day on. We don’t yet have a path of terrorists coming through Mexico into this country, but it is a path that is desirable by the terrorists. Why? Last year in America, there were 50 million visitors. Seventy percent of them did not require a visa. So you do the math.

If your intent is to call mass casualties in the United States, the first thing you’d have to do is get here so that the terrorists who are enjoying a relative safe haven in Pakistan, although the Pakistani government is applying pressure every day, they have been able to reestablish – they have their leadership. They have their lieutenants for the training, they have established recruits, they have conducted the training, and so now – and the objective is to come back into this country to achieve mass casualties.

And one of the things we worry about is you can move around in South America and Central America without a visa. And if you are successful in getting a passport, even a counterfeit passport, it would be relatively easing to come north to Mexico in this country, so we are watching very, very closely.

I want to just wrap up in the interest of time to say the community is large. We are well-funded. We have a great relationship and partnership with the Congress. We are doing wonderful things around the country and being successful in areas that you won’t read about for a long, long time. I am somewhat of an amateur historian, and one of the things I take great delight in is going back to read the stories of what was accomplished in World War II and the early part of the Cold War. Those same stories are being created today and you’ll get to hear about them at some time.

But I had the opportunity to go to many of the same places that Congressman Reyes visited, in Baghdad, in Kabul, and Islamabad. And what I can report to you is the great Americans who came into this community post-9/11 are working in those centers all source, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Many of these youngsters are working seven days a week and often 12, 14, 16 hours, and at the consoles doing their business. You can’t tell CIA, NSA, and FBI, and NGA, and DIA. They don’t know anything else but collaboration, and it’s an expectation on their part. The great news for me is when they come back to this community, that will be the way we believe and hopefully we will achieve this higher level of collaboration across the command to be much, much more effective.

So I thank you for your time and attention and I think we can take a couple of questions.

Yes, sir. Could you stand and say your name?

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: NATO. NATO has a significant role. Now remember, my focus and my mission is global. It’s not on our front page as much anymore, but recall Bosnia and former Yugoslavia and Herzegovina and all those issues. Well, that’s not totally resolved, and NATO has a peacekeeping force there now doing a lot of that work. In addition, NATO is with us in Afghanistan and is contributing to keeping the Taliban from resurging, and they think they’re rebuilding the Afghan government.

In addition to all that, the partnership that we have with NATO is significantly growing, and the good news is, most of the nations in Europe and going further to the East want to be members of NATO, so that creates a partnership and a global community for not only security assistance but for markets and development of democracy and that sort of thing but – (inaudible).

Yes, sir.

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: I would say not at all. They really want to embrace – (inaudible) – but you probably wouldn’t believe that if I said it. I think we had frank and objective dialogue in the course of this discussion. I had briefed, I would say, somewhere about 250 to 260 members, either individually or in groups. The big issue is there’s a great deal of confusion associated with FISA.

For those of you who may not have the background of the question, there’s a legislation, and I’ll take a minute to explain this, it’s called FISA. It stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and just let me give you a little bit of context. In the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, my community conducted surveillance against Americans. That was actually, it goes all the way back to the ‘40s. You could say every president from FDR to Nixon, for whatever reason, directed this community to conduct surveillance against Americans. How many times it was justified for a variety of different reasons, but the bottom line was, any time when you conduct any surveillance against an American, you should have a warrant to do that, a warrant issued by a court.

The law which was passed in 1978 required any surveillance against not only an American but a U.S. person – I mean, what does that mean? It means a person in the United States. So even a terrorist who is inside the country, if you’re going to conduct surveillance, you must have a warrant from court. That was true in 1978; it’s true today.

The issue was, in 1978, we had a thing called the Cold War, and the consideration by the Congress of the administration was, how do we let a community whose mission is foreign intelligence do foreign intelligence, and how do we restrict them from ever conducting surveillance against an American unless they have a warrant? So a law was passed that said, very simply, to do surveillance in this country against a U.S. person, you must have a warrant. If you do surveillance against foreigners in foreign countries, no warrant.

Now, the problem with the wording in the law in 1978 was it was written for the technology of 1978. In that timeframe, almost all international communications were wireless, and almost all the communications in the United States were with wire. There were only two kinds of communications, wire and wireless. So the wording in the law said, if you intercept information on a wire in the United States, you must have a warrant. With the technology change today, almost all communications – all – passes through a wire.

Now you would think, well how can that be? We have cell phones and so on. Let’s think of a cell phone as an on-and-off ramp for a 6 lane highway. You could put a hundred gigabits in a single strand of foreign optic wires. So what happens is, global communications follow the path of least resistance, and it’s not uncommon for foreigners who are talking to other foreigners, for that communication to flow through the United States. Therefore, we the community were hand-strung because of wording in the law in 1978. So our effort was to be as convincing as we could to make the law technology-neutral.

So the law was passed, the president signed it, it has a six-month sunset clause where we visit it again. So where are we today? Any time this community would do surveillance where the target under surveillance is a U.S. person, you have to have a warrant; you have to – (inaudible) – the court – (inaudible) – in the past. Any time we do surveillance against terrorists or foreigners in foreign countries of which there is an intelligence interest, we’re not required to have a warrant. That was the whole – (inaudible). And there are some other issues associated with it, but various people took varied points of view. We argued. We debated. We traded drafts. It was intense. I would say the last four days, I probably slept about two hours a night. But we got to closure. It has a sunset clause. We’ll revisit it in six months and see if we got it right. Yes, sir.

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Good question. The president gives us our priorities, and the way we get to a list of recommendations for the president is that we involve all the cabinet members and we have tiers, tier one through three, and we try to pick some large grouping of things that the cabinet members would be interested in, and then, from that, we flow our priorities. So it’s a very disciplined effort. We have a staff that works at – (inaudible) – regular basis. I mean, it’s not something we do once a year. It’s updated.

Part of the effort is, often this kind of engagement will become very complex, almost to the point of being not understandable, so we’re taking a step back to try to get the major pieces and see if we’re in the right place. We’re just going through that process now. So it’s an annual review that everybody makes an input to, and it’s signed out by the president, and then that gives us our guidance for the next year, and we can adjust as we need to during the year. This man in the back area.

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Say that again. If –

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: I can’t comment on the redundancy because I don’t have a feel for it. It’s kind of out of my lane. But let me give you some of the rationale that I’ve heard that those who work this issue have focused on, then comment on the piece that is in my lane. As I mentioned to you, al Qaeda has been able to reestablish with a somewhat of a safe haven, and their leadership and they’re rebuilding their training force and recruits to come back into this country to get to – infiltrate. Most of those operatives have a certain profile, and so part of the rationale of the physical interview is to see if there is some way that we can’t identify early the key people from coming into this country who have those objectives.

Now, let me just give you a feel for some of the level of detail. There are ways to buy, here in El Paso, commercially available chemicals to cause huge explosions, given that they are purchased and assembled in the right way and placed in something that would cause mass casualty, building on loss of life or whatever. So part of that effort, and again, I don’t know all the extent of it, but part of that effort in the interviews is to have a dialogue with a person who is seeking a visa or whatever so that you can do some level of screening. Now, how they’ve done it, I just can’t comment on because I’m not engaged in it so I don’t know. But that was the rationale. Yes, sir.

Q: (Off mike.)

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: There are multiple schools of thought on China. It tends to take on a political flavor. There are some who want to paint China as the next Soviet Union or Russia, and there are some that want to embrace China as a market, not only a provider of goods and services to us but that raise our standard of living by reducing cost to us, but provide a market, huge market, for the United States.

I watch China very closely. My view, if you do a projection, and we’ve done this recently, in the next 20 years, the four largest economies in the globe will be China, the United States, India and Japan, and there’s debate about who will be number two and who will be number three, but there is no debate about who will be number one. That’s going to be China.

And so, then the issue becomes, what is China’s major problem and what are their objectives? At one level, China’s biggest problem is internal stability, creating 25 million new jobs every year. They’d have to do that to stay on the same path. Another way to state the problem, there’s 700 million Chinese – 700 million – who have not enjoyed the fruits of this tremendous prosperity growth levels they’re on. So there were 70,000 demonstrations in China last year.

That surprises most people. One of the characteristics of those 70,000 demonstrations, they tend to be remote, and the demonstrators in one place don’t know about the demonstrators in the other place, so if you’re an information technology provider, what happens when they’re connected?

And what happens when they get some leadership?

So my view is, internal stability is going to be a major problem for China over the next 20 years. Now, are they building a military? They are. I would characterize it, for the most part, while it has offensive capabilities, for the most part right now, it is defensive, and their principle focus is on Taiwan, bringing Taiwan into China, and the ability to have access to natural resources. So they’re starting to build a navy. It is taking on the characteristics of a blue-water navy, and they will try to reach across the oceans to establish this ship line for natural resources energy, among many others.

So it’s something we’ll watch very closely. In my view, China will be probably the most important nation to the United States over the next (inaudible) years in how we balance that relationships. Take one last question. .

Q: (Off mike.)

11

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: I’ll give you optimistic view. My personal estimate on this is that we’re still on an upward trend with another ism, and in our lifetime, we’ve confronted lots of isms. First it was fascism, and that was global conflict of a global nature, and we prevailed.

The second was communism, and you remember Khrushchev banging on the podium at the United Nations, we will bury you, and that took seven years, but that was spent and it eventually collapsed and became no longer a major problem.

I think terrorism is on the same trajectory. I don’t think we’ve tipped yet, but I believe we will. If we stay at it and stay engaged, if there’s a level of outreach and collaboration and most of all, education, I think, in time, we’ll be able to turn the tide. So I don’t worry so much about what might happen internally as I do about our outreach. One of the worst things we could do would become isolationist and not engage in the global enterprise with regard to education and dialogue and so on, so if we do that, I think we’ll be able to prevail in the long term. Thank you all very much. I enjoyed. (Applause.)

CHAIRMAN REYES: Well, I just wanted to make a presentation to Director McConnell, this goody bag of many things from El Paso. This is actually the the director’s first trip to El Paso. We hope this is not going to be the last. And from here, he’s going to be going to the El Paso Intelligence Center, so we very much appreciate you being with us. Thank you for the great job you’re doing. Thank you. (Applause.)