Remember 9/10 and 9/12
9/10 - Ashcroft submits a budget with CUTS for counter-terrorism
9/12 - Bush lets Bin Laden family quietly fly out of the US while airspace closed
Right now, Bush is pointing to some vote Kerry made in 1995 for small cut in intelligence funding. How about looking at Bush's record on terrorism before 9/11 instead?
Who is soft on terrorism?
Who flip-flops?
= = =
http://davidsirota.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_davidsirota_archive.html#107880808913102994As the President desperately reaches back to 1995 in a sad attempt to bill Sen. Kerry as weak on terrorism, the media appears to be forgetting a much more relevant story:
it was the Bush Administration that was trying to cut counter-terrorism funding and shift the Justice Department's focus away from counter-terrorism in the months leading up to 9/11. The NY Times wrote a front page story on this way back in February of 2002 (before Bush politicized the traditional bipartisan national security consensus), but the story has yet to re-emerge. Here are some of the most disturbing excerpts:
= = =
For Mr. Ashcroft, the change in spending priorities before Sept. 11 and after has been especially noteworthy. Although the attorney general made speeches and delivered Congressional testimony before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in which he said fighting terrorism was a top priority of his agency, he identified more than a dozen other objectives for greater emphasis within the Justice Department before the attacks, internal department documents show.
In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism...In his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators. Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness....
In a May 10 letter to department heads, which told them the agenda the new administration was setting, Ashcroft did not mention terrorism...the attorney general's tough talk {on terrorism} was not always reflected in the department's priority lists and budget requests, and some former Justice officials and officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they were frustrated that he had not supported more financing for counter- terror programs before Sept. 11.
One former federal law enforcement official said that top officials in the F.B.I., which does the bulk of the department's counterterrorism work, had been concerned about Mr. Ashcroft's initial lack of focus on fighting terrorism. He said there was worry among some senior agents that counterterrorism would be downgraded in future years if Mr. Ashcroft's early attitude did not change. Another former F.B.I. official said that Mr. Ashcroft's attitude "really undermined a lot of effort to change the culture and change the mind-set" of F.B.I. agents. Any organization, the official said, reacts to its boss's priorities.
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