To hear the Bush campaign tell it, John Kerry must have been out of his mind for recommending cuts to the intelligence budget in the 1990s.
Indeed, the Bush gang was so outraged by Kerry’s supposed recklessness that they made it the subject of its own campaign commercial, which took Kerry to task because he allegedly “proposed slashing [the] intelligence budget [by] 6 billion dollars.”
What a great point. Anyone who would support cuts to the intelligence budget in the 1990s must clearly not understand the nature of international threats, right? I mean, we certainly don’t anyone with such crazy ideas in a position of authority, right?
Well, it’s a funny story…
President Bush’s nominee to be the director of central intelligence, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), sponsored legislation that would have cut intelligence personnel by 20 percent in the late 1990s.
Goss, who has been chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for the past eight years, was one of six original co-sponsors of legislation in 1995 that called for cuts of at least 4 percent per year between 1996 and 2000 in the total number of people employed throughout the intelligence community.
Oops.
As it turns out, while Kerry once recommended a not-so-dramatic 1% cut to the overall intelligence budget in 1995, Goss, Bush’s choice to head the CIA, actually backed bigger cuts to the intelligence budget.
[T]he cuts Goss supported are larger than those proposed by Kerry and specifically targeted the “human intelligence” that has recently been found lacking. The recent report by the commission probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks called for more spending on human intelligence.
It’s worth noting that the attacks on Kerry’s recommended budget trimming have always been complete nonsense and have deliberately withheld relevant information from the public.
For example, the GOP insists Kerry tried to “gut” the intelligence budget by supporting a $1.5 billion cut. This conveniently overlooks the fact that congressional Republicans voted, at the same time, for a $3.8 billion to cut to the same budget.
Bush is correct that Kerry on Sept. 29, 1995, proposed a five-year, $1.5 billion cut to the intelligence budget. But Bush appears to be wrong when he said the proposed Kerry cut — about 1 percent of the overall intelligence budget for those years — would have “gutted” intelligence. In fact, the Republican-led Congress that year approved legislation that resulted in $3.8 billion being cut over five years from the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office — the same program Kerry said he was targeting.
And even more importantly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide an explanation as to why Kerry’s proposed budget cut was really about redirecting unspent funds, not “gutting” our intelligence agencies.
Five days before Kerry introduced his legislation, The Washington Post reported that the NRO had hoarded $1 billion to $1.7 billion of unspent funds without informing the CIA or the Pentagon. Months earlier, the CIA had launched an inquiry into the NRO’s funding after complaints by lawmakers that the agency had used more than $300 million of unspent classified funds to build a Virginia headquarters for the organization a year earlier.
Kerry campaign officials said yesterday that the $1.5 billion in cuts he proposed were meant to take back the $1 billion to $1.7 billion the NRO had salted away — but the legislation and Kerry’s floor statement, inserted in the Congressional Record that day, did not specify the reason for the proposed cuts. The campaign has no proof that the cuts were for this purpose, but officials point to his joining Specter and others in proposing legislation that resulted in reducing the NRO’s fund reserves over the next five years.
Four days before Kerry’s legislation was introduced, the chairmen of the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) announced they had “agreed upon additional reductions to NRO funding in order to ensure that only such amounts as are necessary.”
I wonder if the Republicans ever get tired of being so wrong so often.