Apparently, Kerry hates our intelligence services
much less than Bush's GOoPer colleagues.
President Bush, in his first major assault on Sen. John F. Kerry's legislative record, said this week that his Democratic opponent proposed a $1.5 billion cut in the intelligence budget, a proposal that would "gut the intelligence services," and one that had no co-sponsors because it was "deeply irresponsible."
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.
What's more, the cuts that Kerry requested, and the cuts that Republicans eventually approved, were actually perfectly justified:
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 [...]
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."
This wasn't cutting funds from a needy intelligence agency, it was cutting funds that agency wasn't using.
It was a nice try, though. But a reminder to Bush/Cheney -- this isn't 2000 anymore.