Bring it On

You know, all the Bush administration seems to have on Kerry is the fact that he proposed cutting some pork out of the Intelligence budget in 1995 - a $1.5 billion cut that our media conveniently keeps "forgetting" was over five years as they take this non-issue and try imbue it with the fake outrage necessary to make it somehow seem important.

You know what, bitches? Bring it on. You really want to start digging into what people were doing about terrorism before September 11? You really want to ask how high a priority it was for the Bush "oops we shelved the Hart-Rudman report" administration? You want to remember just how important Bush's attorney general thought it was?

But 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.

Last August, before he proposed cutting the program to $44 million from $109 million, Mr. Ashcroft went to Dayton, Ohio, and watched a preparedness exercise and announced grants totaling $1.8 million to Ohio. He said: "All of these domestic preparedness efforts have one overarching goal: to ensure that those of you at the state and local levels build the critical capacity to adequately respond to domestic terrorism. At the Department of Justice, we recognize that the threat of terrorism here at home is a serious and growing challenge for our nation."

Mr. Ashcroft justified the cut to Mr. Daniels by saying that states had been slow to develop the statewide plans needed to qualify for federal money. Congressional critics of the attorney general said the Justice Department was not really interested in the program and did not help states develop the required plans.

In various listings of priorities for his department issued between May 10 and Aug. 9, made available to The New York Times by Congressional officials critical of Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general did not single out counter-terrorism.

For example, in a May 10 letter to department heads, which told them the agenda the new administration was setting, he did not mention terrorism. Instead, Mr. Ashcroft cited seven goals: reducing gun violence and drug trafficking; helping states with anticrime programs; reducing racial discrimination; securing the nation's borders and cutting the immigration backlog; reducing overcrowding and drug use in prisons; securing the rights of victims of crime and strengthening internal financial and computer systems.

...

Under Mr. Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, the department's counterterrorism budget increased 13.6 percent in the fiscal year 1999, 7.1 percent in 2000 and 22.7 percent in 2001.