From the Washington Times:
"Senior House Republicans are complaining about Democrats' plans to divert 'scarce' intelligence funds to study global warming.
The House next week will consider the Democrat-crafted Intelligence Authorization bill, which includes a provision directing an assessment of the effects that climate change has on national security.
'Our job is to steal secrets,' said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
'There are all kinds of people analyzing global warming, the Democrats even have a special committee on this,' he told The Washington Times. 'There's no value added by the intelligence community here; they have no special expertise, and this takes money and resources away from other threats.'
Democrats, who outnumber Republicans on the committee, blocked the minority from stripping the warming language from the bill." Read on.
Surprising? NOT!Remember, this is the party of Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton, the president with great disdain for the military and the intelligence community. Under his 'leadership,' small, subtle, incremental changes were implemented to cripple our intelligence agencies.
For the majority of the 1990s intelligence was seen as largely coarse and possibly irrelevant. The CIA saw its budget cut every year and suffered under unreasonable restrictions on its ability to protect the American people. According to the 9/11 Commission, the CIA suffered several years of budget cuts under the first Pres. Bush and Clinton before its funding finally stabilized in the late 90's.
1During this same period new rules were put into effect which did not allow the CIA to use foreign operatives with questionable human rights backgrounds. Spies were almost impossible to recruit because standards were raised to the point where only "Boy Scouts" would qualify.
How was the CIA supposed to infiltrate a group like Al Queda when they were forbidden to deal with unsavory characters? Taking this into account it is hardly surprising that recruitment of CIA agents is reported to have hit record lows in 1995 and 1996, when only 25 people joined the agency.
1We have more FBI agents in New York than we have covert CIA operatives spread out around the globe.
Some CIA case officers overseas recall the period between Clinton's November 1992 election and the January 1993 inauguration as the "winter of despair". It was known in the agency that Clinton was not interested in intelligence and would demand budget cuts and set new priorities. After all, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union were gone, Russia was in political turmoil and economically finished; even China, North Korea, Iran and a few other isolated places were no match, it was believed, for the one remaining superpower. It was the economy, stupid! And what had been expected soon came to pass. Budgets for intelligence collection were pared down to the quick. Programs were slashed even in advance of an in-depth Clinton team assessment under the theory that executive pencil-pushers in the agency could identify and cut fat, more effectively and with less long-term pain, well before the definition of and fights about new objectives.
2Clinton named James Woolsey to head the CIA. Not a bad choice, perhaps; but within a short period of time Woolsey was facing a nightmarish crisis. Career operations officer Aldrich Ames was arrested and discovered to have been spying for the Soviet Union and, after the USSR's demise, Russia. The Ames affair was compounded by the investigation and later arrest of Jim Nicholson on similar charges. The counterintelligence repercussions over the next several years were pervasive and for several years would limit both the effectiveness of the agency and its credibility among policymakers. Morale was plummeting and ever-tighter budgets made the traditional recruitment of highly placed informants with access to significant information ever more challenging and difficult. Intelligence-collection priorities would be sent to the field only to be amended or questioned later. Agents would be signed up and terminated when the wind changed. Old-fashioned country-specific collection and analysis were out the window. Major blind spots began to appear despite the remaining large program initiatives in non-proliferation and counter-terrorism.
2Peter Goss, who replaced George Tenet as CIA Director chiefly blames President Bill Clinton for the recent CIA failures. He confided in a reporter: "The one thing I lose sleep about is thinking what could I have done better, how could I have gotten more attention on this problem sooner." When asked whether he ever brought up his concerns with the administration, Goss claimed he had met three times with President Clinton to discuss "certain problems." The upshot? "He was patient and we had an interesting conversation but it was quite clear he didn’t value the intelligence community to the degree President Bush does."3
As Newsweek and CNN reported, in June 2004, while Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in the face of withering attacks by the Democrats against the Bush Administration in a very tightly contested presidential and congressional election year, Goss defended the intelligence community and the Administration in decidedly partisan terms. During floor debate, fending off efforts by the Democrats in the House to cut the intelligence budget, Goss exposed the fact that Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, that Senator Kerry did not appreciate the critical need for robust and sustained support for the CIA and the Intelligence Community. Goss noted a 1977 quote of Kerry's arguing for intelligence budget cuts and calling Kerry's proposals on nuclear security "dangerously naive."3
And as if this wasn't bad enough ..... we had to be neutered a little more. During his eight years of 'leadership' and 'guidance' ..... he decimated America's military....... nearly cutting our forces in half.
In addition, "research and development on all new weapons systems were brought almost to a halt as other nations continued to build. Clinton destroyed nearly our entire arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Monsters like Saddam flourished as Clinton bombed aspirin factories, tent cities in Afghanistan and worthless radar stations in the Iraqi desert."4
So what we have here is a party that says "the war in Iraq cannot be won." In fact, they say, "the war has already been lost". Many Democrats, most notably president wannabe John Edwards, do not believe we are in a war. So not only do they not want to be engaged militarily in this "war" (or "endeavor" if this word is more palatable to them) but they also want to cut back on funds for intelligence purposes. What a great plan. Simple, but yet idiotic. Devious, and yet destructive.
With their desires for open or should we say no borders, and a military that amounts to no more than a giant international meals-on-wheels organization, and a defunded intelligence community, why don't we just give our enemies the mayoral keys to all of our cities? (HH)
