Earlier this week, Slate’s Fred Kaplan thoroughly debunked the Bush charge that John Kerry tried to “gut” the intelligence budget in 1995.
As Kaplan noted, Kerry’s proposal had nothing to do with cutting the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities.
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.
But why should facts get in the Republicans’ way? As Atrios noted, Mark Racicot, Bush’s campaign chairman, told Fox News Sunday:
[Kerry] proceeded thereafter to try and decimate the intelligence function of this country. Although he now condemns the intelligence function, he set about in 1996 to decimate it with a $300 million cut per year over five years.
Well, it turns out that while Kerry was trying to “gut” U.S. intelligence with a $1.5 billion cut, congressional Republicans voted to cut $3.8 billion from the same agency’s budget. If Racicot’s right, and Kerry wanted to “decimate the intelligence function of this country,” what does that say about the GOP’s commitment to the intelligence function?
The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank have the goods in a story that takes Kaplan’s slate piece even further.
In terms of accuracy, the parry by the president is about half right. 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 while Bush has called Kerry’s proposal “deeply irresponsible,” the president clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
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 Bush ever gets tired of being so wrong so often.