Maybe they’re trying to lull the bad guys into a false sense of security. Otherwise, there’s no logical explanation for this.
The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.
The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president’s proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.
Does Bush want the terrorists to be able to “keep more of their own money”? Perhaps they’re going to roll out a new slogan for the campaign, “It’s not the government’s money; it’s the terrorists’ money!”
I shouldn’t joke, of course. This is just another example of the Bush administration’s twisted and misguided priorities. Money for tax cuts for millionaires is good, money for counterterrorism is bad.
Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat whose question to a witness about one line on the last page of a routine report to Congress prompted the disclosure, said he was dumbfounded at the budget decision.
“The zeroing out of resources here made my jaw drop open,” Mr. Pomeroy said. “It just leaps out at you.”
“There are some very tough questions that have to be answered about why the decision was made to eliminate these positions because going after the financial underpinnings of terrorist activity is crucial to rooting terrorism out and defeating it,” Mr. Pomeroy said.
And what does the White House offer by way of a defense?
The White House would not comment directly on the reasons for striking the 80 positions the I.R.S. sought.
This, unfortunately, isn’t the only example of its kind. Let’s also not forget that just two weeks ago we learned that the administration cut the FBI’s counterterrorism funding immediately after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.
The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI’s request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for “collaborative capabilities.”
Maybe the standard GOP retort would be that it isn’t enough to “throw money at a problem.” Fine, but does the White House have to consistently drag money away from the problem? Especially when the problem is terrorism?