Republicans slam Democrats for decimating intelligence
By Jonathan E. Kaplan - "The Hill"
Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) yesterday adamantly defended the beleaguered U.S. intelligence apparatus.
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Goss, a former CIA agent who chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed the Clinton administration for cutting back on “human intelligence” to the detriment of national security.
“We have no evidence that intelligence was distorted or morphed to reach a conclusion. That issue ought to be left alone,” Goss told reporters. “In the mid-’90s, the leadership of this country was focused on ‘blue sky’ matters. They did not invest in intelligence and cut back dramatically in people and resources.”
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Goss’s comments came after GOP Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) led an intelligence briefing for the entire GOP caucus. The meeting followed a three-hour-long budget conference. Pryce invited Goss to review the intelligence on whether Saddam Hussein possessed and intended to use weapons of mass destruction.
GOP conference aides said the meeting was planned last week. It took place three days after President Bush defended in an NBC televised interview the use of force in Iraq, even though his principal rationale for going to war, that Saddam Hussein “no doubt … continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised,” has been undercut by David Kay, the former weapons inspector.
Goss said lawmakers wanted to know why the CIA was not “more on the mark” and “what went wrong” in determining whether Saddam intended to use weapons of mass destruction.
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Goss also expressed confidence in George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as did Bush in his interview with NBC’s Tim Russert. Goss said that the agency’s analysts were not “more on the mark” because there were not “enough dots to connect.”
Although the meeting focused on substantive issues, the GOP Conference Committee provided documents to show how spending on intelligence capabilities precipitously fell during the Clinton years.
Goss also said that the Clinton White House “never engaged” former CIA directors James Woolsey and John Deutsch and developed a “political correctness or a risk aversion” to using “distasteful” people to gather intelligence.
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Sources at the meeting said Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), another former CIA operative, spoke at length about the impact of losing human intelligence sources.
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Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) brought along a prop to show how the Clinton administration allegedly neglected intelligence. Weldon produced a Russian device designed to track missiles, and said the device was evidence that Russia had sold military hardware to Iraq for years. The sales, he alleged, were overlooked by the Clinton administration.
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The briefing also did not neglect presidential politics. Documents provided to lawmakers also showed past statements made by Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry (Mass.), perhaps providing a hint of what is to come if the senator secures the Democratic nomination.
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Conference aides culled previous statements from the Congressional Record and earlier votes showing that Kerry had proposed legislation to “gut” the National Foreign Intelligence Program and from Tactical Intelligence in 1994 and 1995. In 1997, the document reports: “Kerry Questioned Size Of Intelligence Community.”
Kerry asked: “Now that [the Cold War] struggle is over, why is it that our vast intelligence apparatus continues to grow …”
After listening to Goss for only 15 minutes, Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) took aim at Kerry. “This was not mentioned in [the room], but John Kerry” was responsible for many of the spending cuts, Blunt said |
