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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (550338)	3/10/2004 1:27:06 PM
From: redfish	Respond to of 769670

Found this on intelligence budget, looks like 1.5b would, in fact, have been a substantial cut: U.S. unveils intelligence budget for first time By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government Wednesday unveiled for the first time its annual spending on the CIA and sister intelligence agencies, a secret for 50 years. "The aggregate amount appropriated for intelligence and intelligence-related activities for fiscal year 1997 is $26.6 billion,'' CIA Director George Tenet disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit that left scant choice but declassification of the figure. The disclosure of the so-called Black Budget capped a heated political debate involving Congress, the White House and directors of central intelligence for the past 20 years. In making public the overall intelligence budget figure for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Tenet said he had acted after consulting President Clinton and appropriate agencies. In April 1996, the White House said Clinton had determined that making the sum public would not harm U.S. intelligence activities, a stance shared by then-CIA director John Deutch. Clinton made clear at the time, however, that he wanted to declassify the total in concert with Congress, apparently to share any backlash from critics who might otherwise accuse him of undermining national security. The Republican-led House and Senate had refused to join Clinton in the maneuver on the ground that Congress did not rightly have the power to declassify and that this was a responsibility for the administration alone. In a statement, Tenet said the circumstances of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit "do not allow for joint action'' with the Congress, as Clinton would have preferred. "We believe this action is appropriate because it does not jeopardize the ability of our intelligence agencies to carry out their missions and serves to inform the American people,'' he said. The lawsuit was brought by the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington group seeking greater intelligence agency accountability, on behalf of Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. "This is a long-overdue reform,'' Aftergood said in a telephone interview. "Significantly, it took a lawsuit to accomplish this. Congressional oversight couldn't get it done.'' Kate Martin, counsel in the case and director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the CIA had been forced to unveil the budget figure Wednesday because it could no longer defend withholding it. "Only because the CIA was required to present its defense to the court today has it released the figure,'' she said. The annual spending total had been kept secret since the CIA was founded 50 years ago. Tenet runs the Central Intelligence Agency and serves as board chairman for the 12 other U.S. spy outfits whose aggregate funding level was at issue, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. In his statement, Tenet stopped short of promising to continue to release annual combined totals for intelligence spending, most of which is buried in secret Pentagon accounts. "Disclosure of future aggregate figures will be considered only after determining whether such disclosures could cause harm to the national security by showing trends over time,'' he said. Executive branch officials would continue to protect from disclosure "any and all subsidiary information concerning the intelligence budget, whether the information concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs,'' Tenet added. "In other words, the administration intends to draw a firm line at the top-line, aggregate figure.'' The overall level of U.S. intelligence spending has long been considered one of Washington's worst-kept secrets, widely estimated at $28 billion to $30 billion. A few years ago, a House panel published the figure inadvertantly. REUTERS@