Bush hits Kerry try in 1995 to cut intelligence
'Misleading attack,' senators camp says
WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday blasted John F. Kerry for proposing to cut intelligence funding two years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, calling the budget-reduction legislation the Massachusetts senator filed in 1995 "deeply irresponsible," given the threat of terrorism.
Bush's comments, made during a campaign fund-raiser in Dallas, represented one of the few times the president has criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee by name. The criticism focused on a Kerry proposal to cut $1.5 billion from intelligence funding over five years as part of proposed legislation to eliminate a total of $90 billion from 40 programs that the senator called "pointless, wasteful, antiquated, or just plain silly" in September 1995.
"His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn't have a single cosponsor in the United States Senate," Bush said. "Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He's for good intelligence, yet he was willing to gut the intelligence service. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war."
The Kerry campaign, which obtained Bush's remarks before they were actually made, characterized them as a "misleading attack" on an attempt to curb wasteful spending. The cut in funding for defense intelligence that Kerry proposed amounted to slightly more than 1 percent of the overall budget for intelligence gathering at a time when the federal government was running a deficit.
"You bet John Kerry voted against business as usual in our intelligence community. He voted against a proposed billion-dollar bloat in the intelligence budget, because it was essentially a slush fund for defense contractors," said one of Kerry's spokesmen, Chad Clanton. "Unlike George Bush, John Kerry does not and will not support every special spending project supported by Halliburton and other defense contractors."
Campaigning in Florida, Kerry fired back at Bush, criticizing him for taking time to watch a rodeo in Texas yesterday while limiting his scheduled appearance before leaders of an independent commission investigating what intelligence the United States had before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"If the president of the United States can find the time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence and why we are not stronger today," Kerry told a crowd of 600 gathered outside the West Palm Beach Public Library yesterday. "The president's been stonewalling the effort of our own country to know what happened."
The exact amount of intelligence spending is classified, but estimates compiled by the Center for Defense Information, a private monitoring group, indicate that the United States spent about $26.6 billion in fiscal year 1996 on intelligence. The center estimates that the United States spent between $33 billion on intelligence in fiscal year 2002.
In a statement responding to Bush's remarks, the Kerry campaign sought to explain the senator's proposed cut in 1995. "It was widely known that the intelligence budget was overridden with pet projects and pork and was no longer appropriate to the intelligence tasks at hand," the statement read.
Bush's criticism of Kerry, and the senator's response, illustrate the arguments they plan to use against each other as the campaign unfolds.
The president plans to portray Kerry as a weak-on-defense, flip-flopping liberal, and Kerry plans to paint the Bush administration as out of touch, bull-headed, and wrong.
Even before Kerry all but sealed the Democratic presidential nomination with his near sweep of the March 2 primaries, the Bush campaign had begun to focus on the Massachusetts senator. Before the field winnowed, Bush had mocked the Democratic contenders as being in favor of the war in Iraq and against it, in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement and against it, and in favor of tax cuts and against them. "And that's just one senator from Massachusetts," Bush has said to laughs from partisan audiences.
Bush continued on that theme again yesterday. He prefaced his criticism by saying "one very important part of this war is intelligence-gathering" and contrasted Kerry's 1995 legislation with his statements during the campaign about the need for good intelligence in the war on terror.
"My opponent clearly has strong beliefs," he said. "They just don't last very long."
Patrick Healy of the Globe staff contributed to this report. 