The CIA’s release this week of an internal report critical of the agency’s pre-Sept. 11 intelligence work has sparked a new debate on who is to blame — Democrats or Republicans.
Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement Wednesday charging that “drastic cuts in funding to intelligence agencies during the 1990s made it difficult for the CIA to do its job.”
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He said renewed attempts to blame Bush are “an unwarranted cheap shot.”
Experts estimate that the intelligence budget was about $40 billion in 1990. By 1998, the sixth year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it had dropped to $26.7 billion. In the next two years it rose above $30 billion, then took a quantum leap after Sept. 11 to about $45 billion today.
P.J. Crowley, a Clinton aide on the National Security Council staff and now an analyst at the Center for American Progress, said the elder Bush started the decline.
“Senator Bond needs to expand his target list to include the president’s father, himself a former CIA director; Robert Gates, also a former CIA director; and Dick Cheney, who controlled 80 percent of the intelligence budget as secretary of defense,” Crowley told The Examiner. “They were the initial authors of the peace dividend. … Senator Bond voted for each of these budgets that he is now criticizing.”
The 2005 report by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, released Tuesday, listed a series of failures by the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center to follow leads about al Qaeda operatives in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
George Tenet, who also was criticized by Helgerson, said in his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” that his agency was in “Chapter 11” at the end of the decade.
Defense Secretary Gates, who led the CIA under the first Bush presidency, said earlier this year, “Within three years of my retirement in 1993, CIA’s clandestine service had been cut by 30 percent.”
Republicans took over Congress in 1995 and acceded to cuts until Tenet came to them with an urgent request for more money. Tenet wrote in his book that he asked the White House for an immediate infusion of up to $2 billion a year, but was rebuffed.
“The problems in the CIA were deep-rooted and predated this administration,” Bond said. “The previous administration as well as the Congress should share in the blame for slashing intelligence funding and depriving the intelligence community of much-needed human intelligence resources.”
