election 2006 U.S. Senate

DeWine, Brown trade barbs on security issues

DeWine believes U.S. didn't spend enough money on intelligence; Brown says he sought to make CIA more responsive.

By Jessica Wehrman

Staff Writer

WASHINGTON | U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine says the issue of security – including intelligence matters – is one where he differs wildly from his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown.

DeWine, R-Ohio, and Brown, D-Avon, have differed on the war in Iraq – DeWine supported it, Brown did not – the Patriot Act and numerous other defense-related votes.

But it's the issue of intelligence funding and oversight that could become the cornerstone of their security-related attacks on each other.

In his first attack ad of the campaign, which ran through late July, DeWine bashed a series of votes Brown took in the 1990s on amendments to cut intelligence funding.

Each amendment was defeated and Brown still voted for the final bill for CIA funding each time except in 1995 and 1998, when he voted for an intelligence-related amendment attached to the defense appropriations bill.

He was joined in many of those votes by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a hawk and fiscal conservative, and Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn.

Brown said he supported those amendments because of the era: The Cold War was over and the intelligence community had been criticized for a series of blunders. "Our interest was not cuts in funding; primarily our interest was to make the intelligence community more responsive and more effective," Brown said.

DeWine says that's no excuse.

"It's one thing to say, 'we need to change things,' " he said. "It's another to say, 'we need to slash spending.' "

He said post-9/11, one of the key criticisms of the intelligence community was that it was underfunded, and that CIA stations were closing overseas. "We didn't spend enough money," DeWine said. "He's on the wrong side of history."

Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer now with the Center for Defense Information, remembers that era as one where Congress was trying to get more information about the intelligence budget.

"There was a mood to sort of sniff around it and check it out," he said.

Brown, meanwhile, said DeWine, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, should have been more skeptical about claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and more critical of pre-9/11 intelligence failures.

During the era when Brown voted to cut intelligence funding, right up to Sept. 11, "the majority party enacted no appreciable reforms to improve our intelligence."

The result, he said, was an intelligence system that failed to sniff out 9/11 and the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, argues that there's some validity to Brown's criticism, though he agrees that "it wasn't just us" who believed Iraq had WMDs. Saddam Hussein bolstered that belief, he said, with false claims.

Wheeler said election-year politics interfered with real scrutiny: "Democrats were scared silly of being labeled unpatriotic and Republicans were salivating at the bit to run ads morphing Democratic opponents into Osama bin Laden."

More: The latest on the 2006 election