Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, the bill before us has some very important reforms of our intelligence agencies, and I support it. Chief among them, the establishment of the national intelligence directorate as well as the national counterterrorism centers. But while these changes have attracted most of our attention, these changes within our institutions, as tough as they have been for this Congress, are the relatively easy part.
Among the most important recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was to strengthen our efforts at nonproliferation, to try to deal with the problem of nuclear material, in particular, arriving in the wrong hands. As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have made it a top priority to obtain nuclear material, and some of the strongest and most important recommendations of the 9/11 Commission are to deal with that very real danger. In fact, as the President and Senator Kerry both stated during the first Presidential debate, the threat of nuclear terrorism is the number one national security threat facing the country.
In addition to the organizational changes that we have all been debating, there are provisions in this legislation that call for the establishment of a national counterproliferation center that can attack this problem of the proliferation of nuclear material as well as chemical and biological material. It will help oversee operational efforts to interdict this material and also recommended changes in the international legal structure that will better help us deal with the A.Q. Khans of the world, to deal with Iran, to deal with North Korea and attack this very real danger to our country. My own language applying RICO in this area as well as strengthening the dirty bomb statutes has also been incorporated into the bill.
These steps are just a beginning. Many more far-reaching steps also have to be taken if we are to deal with this risk of nuclear terrorism.
The NPT, as we have seen, has served us well for 40 years, but is now showing its age. I think Iran is demonstrating that the purest and simplest path to the bomb now runs through the NPT, not around it. We would do well to pay attention to those recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that are the tougher steps to deal with the proliferation of nuclear material; but this is a good first step, and I support it.