The Republicans — both the RNC and the Bush campaign team — thought they had a strong line of attack against Kerry: his votes to cut military spending in the 1990s.
Unfortunately for them, it not only lacked substance, it lacked coherence. Kerry voted to eliminate some programs, but they were the same programs Republicans wanted to cut at the time. “Kerry agreed with GOP on spending cuts 10 years ago” isn’t exactly bumper-sticker material for BC04.
Now that they’ve pretty much given up on that tack, the GOP has a new one. It’s actually worse. As the New York Times reported the other day:
President Bush accused Senator John Kerry on Monday of having tried to “gut” the nation’s intelligence services in 1995 when Mr. Kerry introduced legislation that would have cut intelligence spending by $1.5 billion over five years.
On a day of rock-’em, sock-’em politics unusual for such an early stage of a presidential campaign, Mr. Bush said the 1995 legislation, proposed two years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, undermined Mr. Kerry’s claim to have given the nation the intelligence tools it needs.
“His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn’t have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate,” Mr. Bush told donors at a fund-raiser in Dallas. “Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He’s for good intelligence; yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war.”
Slate’s Fred Kaplan (once again) does a fine job of explaining why the president is completely wrong and intentionally trying to deceive.
One thing is true: Kerry did introduce a bill on Sept. 29, 1995 — S. 1290 — that, among many other things, would have cut the intelligence budget by $300 million per year over a five-year period, or $1.5 billion in all.
But let’s look at that bill more closely.
First, would such a reduction have “gutted” the intelligence services? Intelligence budgets are classified, but private budget sleuths have estimated that the 1995 budget totaled about $28 billion. Thus, taking out $300 million would have meant a reduction of about 1 percent. This is not a gutting.
Second, and more to the point, Kerry’s proposal would have not have cut a single intelligence program.
On the same day that Kerry’s bill was read on the Senate floor, two of his colleagues –Democrat Bob Kerrey and Republican Arlen Specter — introduced a similar measure. Their bill would have cut the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office, the division of the U.S. intelligence community in charge of spy satellites.
According to that day’s Congressional Record, Specter said he was offering an amendment “to address concerns about financial practices and management” at the NRO. Specifically, “the NRO has accumulated more than $1 billion in unspent funds without informing the Pentagon, CIA, or Congress.” He called this accumulation “one more example of how intelligence agencies sometimes use their secret status to avoid accountability.”
The Kerrey-Specter bill proposed to cut the NRO’s budget “to reflect the availability of funds … that have accumulated in the carry-forward accounts” from previous years. Another co-sponsor of the bill, Sen. Richard Bryan, D–Nev., noted that these “carry-forward accounts” amounted to “more than $1.5 billion.”
This was the same $1.5 billion that John Kerry was proposing to cut — over a five-year period — in his bill. It had nothing to do with intelligence, terrorism, or anything of substance. It was a motion to rescind money that had been handed out but never spent.
In other words, it’s as if Kerry had once filed for a personal tax refund — and Bush accused him of raiding the Treasury.
Kaplan wasn’t the only one to notice how absurd Bush’s charge was. Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel of both the CIA and Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement after Bush’s attack so that the public would know the whole story. Smith’s take also bolsters Kaplan’s explanation.
“I am particularly upset by the Bush Campaign efforts to paint Senator Kerry as being out of the mainstream in the mid-90s with respect to efforts to ensure responsible spending by and for the intelligence community. If he was out of the mainstream, so were most other Senators — including many Republican Senators.
“In 1996, I was General Counsel of the CIA and was asked by then DCI John Deutch to co-chair an inquiry into the practice of the National Reconnaissance Office under which the NRO accumulated vast sums of money that were largely outside of any control by the Congress, the DCI or the Secretary of Defense. Our inquiry revealed that the NRO had for years accumulated very substantial amounts as a ‘rainy day fund.’ For a variety of reasons, very few people, including the Secretary of Defense, the DCI and key members of the Congressional oversight committees, knew about that practice. As a result there was inadequate management by the DCI and the Secretary of Defense and virtually no oversight by the Congress.
“When that practice and other concerns, such as the cost of the new NRO headquarters in Virginia, came to light many Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were outraged. The bill he sponsored in 1995, S. 1290, which is now being criticized by the Bush Campaign, is essentially similar to other measures sponsored by many other Senators in the mid-90s, including Republican Senators, that were attempts to ensure that money appropriated to the Intelligence Community was wisely spent and to re-assert adequate Congressional oversight of the intelligence budget.”
For those keeping score at home, this makes Bush 0-for-2.