Bush Calls Kerry Weak on National Security

President George W. Bush speaks at a campaign fundraiser Monday in Dallas, Texas. (Tim Sloan - AFP)

President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), squaring off to face each other in the November election, are trading charges over U.S. intelligence, with Bush asserting that his challenger has favored "irresponsible" cuts in spending on espionage and Kerry accusing the president of resisting an inquiry into the country's biggest intelligence failure.

In a speech at a fund-raising event in Dallas today, Bush said that in 1995, two years after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Kerry had introduced a bill to cut the overall intelligence budget by $1.5 billion.

"His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate," Bush told the luncheon gathering. "Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He's for good intelligence, yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war."

In reply, the Massachusetts senator's campaign headquarters issued a statement saying Kerry had sought to cut out a huge unspent "slush fund" in the intelligence budget that was intended to benefit defense contractors. The statement said that the same day Kerry introduced his bill, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) introduced a similar bill that passed by a bipartisan voice vote. The statement said the bill sponsored by Specter and Kerrey "sought to strip the intelligence budget of its pet projects and pork, and shift our intelligence from the Cold War to the threat of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Bush's charge, part of a strategy of portraying Kerry as weak on national security issues, came as part of a wide-ranging attack that also hit Kerry's stands on taxes, trade, education and the war in Iraq. The speech mocked Kerry as flip-flopping on issues that came before the Senate, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

"My opponent clearly has strong beliefs -- they just don't last very long," Bush said to laughter and applause from the partisan crowd.

"My opponent admits that Saddam Hussein was a threat, he just didn't support my decision to remove Saddam from power," Bush said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by the White House. "Maybe he was hoping Saddam would lose the next Iraqi election." He referred to the former leader of Iraq, ousted by U.S. invasion forces last April.

Chad Clanton, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said in a statement, "This misleading attack is a reminder of why George Bush has lost credibility with the American people."

He said Kerry had voted for $200 billion in intelligence funding over the past seven years -- a 50 percent increase since 1996.

But in 1995, Clanton said, Kerry "voted against a proposed billion-dollar bloat in the intelligence budget, because it was essentially a slush fund for defense contractors. Unlike George Bush, John Kerry does not and will not support every special spending project supported by Halliburton" and other defense contractors. Vice President Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.

Campaigning in Mississippi Sunday, Kerry accused Bush of "stonewalling" efforts to explore what he described as a massive intelligence failure leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Kerry asked at a news conference. "The American people deserve an answer now. . . . The immediate instinct of the Republicans and this administration was to shut it down."

The Bush campaign denied that the president was resisting the inquiry and said the administration has granted investigators "unprecedented access."