Bush chides Kerry on intelligence cuts

DALLAS — President Bush yesterday accused John Kerry of wanting to weaken the nation’s security by repeatedly advocating “deeply irresponsible” cuts to the CIA during his 20 years in the Senate.

“One very important part of this war is intelligence-gathering, as Senator Kerry noted,” Mr. Bush told a room full of campaign contributors.

“Yet in 1995, two years after the [1993] attack on the World Trade Center, my opponent introduced a bill to cut the overall intelligence budget by $1 billion. His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn’t have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate,” he said.

Mr. Bush used the national security issue, and many others, to paint Mr. Kerry as a man with ever-changing positions who can’t be trusted with the presidency in dangerous times.

“Once again, Mr. Kerry is trying to have it both ways,” he said. “He’s for good intelligence, yet was willing to gut the intelligence services, and that is no way to lead the nation in a time of war.”

The Kerry campaign says that the bill offered by the junior senator from Massachusetts was about opposing “business as usual in our intelligence community” and that Mr. Kerry has supported $200 billion in intelligence funding over the past seven years — a 50 percent increase since 1996.

“He voted against a proposed billion-dollar bloat in the intelligence budget because it was essentially a slush fund for defense contractors,” Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said. “Unlike George Bush, John Kerry does not and will not support every special spending project supported by Halliburton and other defense contractors.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks reflect a more aggressive campaign to rebut the daily attacks by Mr. Kerry on the president’s record in foreign policy.

Over the weekend, Mr. Kerry said that unlike Mr. Bush, he would have acted sooner to protect Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resigned last week as rebel forces unhappy with his corrupt and violent rule approached his palace.

Mr. Kerry has also long criticized Mr. Bush for his execution of the war in Iraq, and says that the president has ignored North Korea as it has continued to develop nuclear weapons.

The senator told supporters yesterday at a fund-raiser in Florida that some foreign leaders have told him that they hoped he would defeat Mr. Bush.

“I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,’ things like that,” he said.

While Mr. Kerry did not name names, he has been winning apparent support from abroad — from North Korea.

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