|
In that vein, the R.N.C. chairman has scolded Mr. Kerry for his alleged zeal to decimate the intelligence and defense budgets. He says that in 1994 and 1995, the Senator tried to slash intelligence funding by more than a billion dollars.
Why would the Massachusetts Senator, then serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee, question the massive, classified intelligence budget? With colleagues from both parties, he was then seeking to recover a substantial amount that had been squirreled away during the previous five years by the National Reconnaissance Office -- the highly secretive satellite-intelligence agency whose strange fiscal practices were a scandal in Washington.
On Sept. 29, 1995, Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who chaired the intelligence committee, rose on the Senate floor to explain why he and other members were seeking an unusual amendment to the intelligence authorization bill. According to Mr. Specter, they were seeking "to address concerns about financial practices and management at the National Reconnaissance Office ?. These amendments address an issue that the committee first identified in 1992 but which has received a good deal of press attention in the past several days and has raised questions about the National Reconnaissance Office?s financial management practices. It has been alleged that the NRO has accumulated more than $1 billion in unspent funds without informing the Pentagon, CIA, or Congress. It has been further alleged that this is one more example of how intelligence agencies sometimes use their secret status to avoid accountability." Vast sums have been spent on intelligence activities during the past two decades, but were they spent wisely or squandered? Such questions are even more pertinent now than when Mr. Kerry first began to ask them. More than 10 years ago, he demanded that higher budgets should include greater accountability.
"If intelligence is the valuable commodity that I contend it is in this very uncertain world, a world of new threats but from which the old nuclear threat has not completely faded, then it ought to be amply funded," he said in 1993. With the end of the Cold War, defense budgets were declining, but Mr. Kerry argued that intelligence should be restructured rather than cut. He had investigated the Panamanian drug dictator Manuel Noriega and exposed the criminal Saudi bankers at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15423
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
