What the Kerry campaign NEEDS to do. [View All]

[fishface]

Bush is hammering the Mass.,New Hampshire.Vermont area with one of his "Kerry and his liberal allies in Congress" TV ads about how weak they are on terror and I'm sure it'll make some of the sheep in those areas decide to vote for the village idiot.

Kerry needs to have a counter ad that tells how Bush cut the FBI's counterterror funding by 2/3rds AFTER 9/11

FBI Budget Squeezed After 9/11
Request for New Counterterror Funds Cut by Two-Thirds

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A06

In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.

The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A13541-2004Mar21¬Found=true

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and also highlighting how many career anti-terror experts have quit smirks administration in frustration at the terrible way he's going after terrorists.

U.S. Terrorism Policy Spawns Steady Staff Exodus
Wed Apr 7, 7:45 PM ET Add Politics - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has faced a steady exodus of counterterrorism officials, many disappointed by a preoccupation with Iraq (news - web sites) they said undermined the U.S. fight against terrorism.



Former counterterrorism officials said at least half a dozen have left the White House Office for Combating Terrorism or related agencies in frustration in the 2 1/2 years since the attacks.


Some also left because they felt President Bush (news - web sites) had sidelined his counterterrorism experts and paid almost exclusive heed to the vice president, the defense secretary and other Cabinet members in planning the "war on terror," former counterterrorism officials said.


"I'm kind of hoping for regime change," one official who quit told Reuters.

<snip>

Similar charges were made by Bush's former counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, who told the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the administration ignored the al Qaeda threat beforehand and was fixated on Iraq afterward. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) testifies before the 9/11 panel on Thursday.

<snip>

"HIGH TURNOVER


Roger Cressey, who served under Clarke in the White House counterterrorism office, said: "Dick accurately reflects the frustration of many in the counterterrorism community in getting the new administration to take the al Qaeda issue seriously."


Cressey left the office in November 2001, when he became chief of staff of the White House's cybersecurity office until September 2002.


The attrition among all levels of the Office for Combating Terrorism began shortly after the attacks and continued into this year. At least eight officials in the office -- which numbers a dozen people -- have left and been replaced since 9/11. Several of the officials were contacted by Reuters.


The office has been run by four different people since the attacks, and at least three have held the No. 2 slot.

<snip>
Rand Beers, a former No. 2 in the office who quit last year over the administration's handling of the war on terrorism, told Reuters the turnover had been "unusually high" since the hijacked airliner attacks in New York and Washington.


"And one of the reasons is frustration with the way counterterrorism policy has been conducted, including the focus on Iraq," said Beers, who now serves as a foreign policy adviser for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites), who hopes to unseat Bush in November.


<snip>

"There's a problem of too few counterterrorism staffers to begin with ... and with the focus on any big issue like Iraq, it is a distraction from the overall counterterrorism effort," the official said.

(the link to this story is no longer active )

There's a wealth of examples of Bush's incompetence like this that needs to be put out there for the idiots that 'think' Bush is doing a wonderful job of keeping us safe.