6 Billion Intel cut

[erpowers]

On Weekend Today Liz Cheney claimed that tried to cut 6 Billion from the intelligence budget. I thought that Kerry only tried to cut 1.3 billion for the intelligence budget. Did Kerry try to cut $6 Billion from the intelligence budget?

[Democracy Died 2004]

1. who the fuck is Liz Cheney? n/t

[NMDemDist2]

2. no

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/archives/003606.html#more

[teach1st]

3. WTF

(Edited to eliminate an unintentional italic tag)

The cute little wolf ad does claim $6 billion. Of course, as we all know, any information coming from the Bush camp is suspect. Look what have they told us about Iraq.

From Slate

http://www.slate.com/id/2108598/

In 1995, several legislators, among them Sen. Kerry, did introduce amendments to cut the intelligence budget by $1 billion to $1.5 billion, which, spread out over several years, could have added up to $6 billion.

But these were not cuts in the sense that the term is usually understood. Certainly none of the amendments would have resulted in a cut—much less a "slash"—in "America's intelligence operations," as the ad puts it.

Here's the background: In the early-to-mid '90s, the National Reconnaissance Office—the branch of the U.S. intelligence community that controls spy satellites—had come under investigation for serious financial malfeasance. The probe found vast waste, extravagance, and hoarding. In one instance, the NRO canceled the launching of a highly expensive spy satellite, didn't tell Congress (or any federal agency) about it, and kept the money.

So, Congress voted to cut the budget—not to curtail intelligence operations, but simply to retrieve money that was never spent. As I put it at the time, "It's as if Kerry had once filed for a personal tax refund—and Bush accused him of raiding the Treasury."

Another distortion in the "Wolves" ad: It wasn't just "the liberals in Congress" who voted for this refund. The sponsor of the Senate amendment that passed—and it passed without controversy—was Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania.

Now, it may be that the ad is referring to a slightly different amendment, an omnibus deficit-reduction bill that Sen. Kerry proposed in 1994. It would have imposed cuts across several federal agencies, including a $1 billion cut—for that year and each of the following five years—in the intelligence budget. Kerry didn't link these cuts to specific programs, though the NRO scandal was emerging, and it was widely known that waste and inefficiency pervaded intelligence programs, especially in the high-tech sectors. The amendment didn't pass, mainly because omnibus budget cuts of all sorts rarely pass.

If this is the bill that the "Wolves" ad refers to, Sen. Kerry might be charged with legislative vagueness, but hardly with pushing "deep" cuts that "would have weakened America's defenses." The annual intelligence budget totaled about $30 billion at the time. In other words, Kerry's bill would have cut it by 3 percent.

By the way, Kerry was hardly alone in proposing intelligence cuts. Around the same time, in 1995, Rep. Porter Goss—who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee—co-sponsored another omnibus budget-trimmer, which among other things would have cut intelligence personnel by 4 percent a year in each year from 1996 to 2000. Goss, of course, is the man that President Bush recently appointed as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the wolves are coming after anyone, they have more cause to howl at Porter Goss—and, by implication, George W. Bush—than at John Kerry and the Democrats.

[BlueJazz]

4. Repeat after me 1000X: 9/11 happened during the time that

..Republicans were in control of the Senate, The House of Representatives and the Presidency. (999 to go)