Norman D. Dicks: “I want to take very strong exception to what the chairman of this committee, who I consider to be a personal friend…”

“I want to take very strong exception to what the chairman of this committee, who I consider to be a personal friend, said to attack the Democrats in this House. And I was the ranking member of this committee for 4 years from 1994 to 1998. And we had bipartisan support for intelligence. And I think this is wrong to try to go back now and say after the Cold War was over, and there were some efforts, and it was first by the Bush administration, to reduce the money for defense. I mean, Dick Cheney was one of the biggest budget hawks and cutters on defense. He cut the B-2, he tried to get rid of the V-22, the F-15, F-16. One can go right down the list. Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They had what they called the base force which was one-third less than the size of the existing force. And as part of this downsizing, the intelligence community was cut by 10 percent. That was the policy of the first Bush administration that was inherited by the Clinton administration. And I must say during the years that I was on the committee under Dan Glickman as chairman and Larry Combest and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) as chairman, we were able to work on a bipartisan basis. And we supported intelligence. Now, we did not throw money at it. We tried to make sure that we invested wisely. We had to modernize all of our national technical means. But this was done on a bipartisan basis.”