Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.

President Bush on Thursday apologized for the "humiliation" some Iraqi prisoners suffered at the hands of U.S. troops...
At a Rose Garden press conference following a White House meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah, Bush offered his first direct apology over the prison issue.
"I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families," Bush said.

The Senate on Monday unanimously passed a resolution that condemns the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in a Baghdad-area jail, calling for a complete investigation into the scandal and taking steps to ensure such mistreatment never happens again.

The resolution, approved 92-0, "condemns in the strongest possible terms the despicable acts at Abu Ghraib prison and joins with the President in expressing apology for the humiliation suffered by the prisoners in Iraq and their families.”

It also "urges the Government of the United States to take appropriate measures to ensure that such acts do not occur in the future.” It recommends a full investigation into the abuse and punishment for all those responsible.

The resolution is in response to the inmate abuse uncovered at Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad that involved the humiliation, torture and physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American military guards in November and December 2003.

"Democracy is not perfect and indeed we made mistakes," said Senate Majority Leader William Frist, R-Tenn. "But openness is a hallmark of that democracy, and as a democracy we will investigate and we will correct those mistakes."

And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life.

Let’s retell that story as briefly as we can. Bush started an oil company called Arbusto in the late 1970s. He was driving it into the ground when, in 1982, he was rescued by Philip Uzielli, a Princeton crony of his dad’s troubleshooter James Baker. Uzielli invested a million dollars in Arbusto, which was then worth less than $500,000. In return, he got 10 percent interest in the company. No, that’s not a misprint. Mismatches between equity and ownership–always in Dubya’s favor–are a hallmark of our President’s financial rise.

Even after Uzielli’s turbocharging, Arbusto was going under. Before it did, it "merged" with a company called Spectrum 7, which took on Bush as head executive. As that company, too, nose-dived, Harken Energy proved unaccountably eager to "merge" with it. It offered a half-million dollars in stock and $120,000 a year to get the Vice President’s son on the board. It also "loaned" Bush hundreds of thousands of dollars below prime rate.

Weeks after his father was elected president, Bush got involved in the purchase of the Texas Rangers. He would eventually sell his Harken shares to cover the loan that allowed him to help buy the team. He put up under 2 percent of the purchase price ($606,000 out of $46 million), but the deal called for him to be given almost 12 percent of the stock, once the other partners cleared their initial investments. Generous of them! In 1998 Bush sold his stake in the team–pumped up by a $135-million publicly-financed-but-privately-owned stadium, bestowed as a gift from the taxpayers of Arlington, TX–for $15 million.

For decades now, the "small government" Republican Party has been slamming the corrupt conduct of, say, trial lawyers who just suck money out of the economy and put it in their pockets in the name of the ideal of "representing the little guy." When they talk this way, I’m all ears. But, Jesus, this is what they have to offer in its place?

IN 1984, when he was still lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, John Kerry became interested in the emerging problem of acid rain. Some people mocked the idea of poisonous rain from the skies, but Kerry embarked on a fact-finding mission across Europe, where he saw the devastation of industrial pollution on the Black Forest in Germany and many historic buildings.

He took the issue to a meeting of the six New England governors and the eastern Canadian premiers, resulting in the first international agreement on acid rain controls. The pact became a blueprint for the reauthorized Clean Air Act in 1990.

By Robert Parry

Oct. 25, 2004  |  In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry.

Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family.

In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America.

Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers.

In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies.

Kerry took on the investigation though he didn't have much support within his own party. By 1986, congressional Democrats had little stomach left for challenging the Reagan-Bush Contra war. Not only had Reagan won a historic landslide in 1984, amassing a record 54 million votes, but his conservative allies were targeting individual Democrats viewed as critical of the Contras fighting to oust Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Most Washington journalists were backing off, too, for fear of getting labeled "Sandinista apologists" or worse.

Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress to restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the Contra supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff.

Through most of 1986, Kerry's staff inquiry advanced against withering political fire. His investigators interviewed witnesses in Washington, contacted Contra sources in Miami and Costa Rica, and tried to make sense of sometimes convoluted stories of intrigue from the shadowy worlds of covert warfare and the drug trade.

Kerry's chief Senate staff investigators were Ron Rosenblith, Jonathan Winer and Dick McCall. Rosenblith, a Massachusetts political strategist from Kerry's victorious 1984 campaign, braved both political and personal risks as he traveled to Central America for face-to-face meetings with witnesses. Winer, a lawyer also from Massachusetts, charted the inquiry's legal framework and mastered its complex details. McCall, an experienced congressional staffer, brought Capitol Hill savvy to the investigation.

Behind it all was Kerry, who combined a prosecutor's sense for sniffing out criminality and a politician's instinct for pushing the limits. The Kerry whom I met during this period was a complex man who balanced a rebellious idealism with a determination not to burn his bridges to the political establishment.

The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

[click here to read the whole article]

While the numerical comparison of bills passed makes for an easy tit-for-tat, Congress experts agree that it's a simplistic way of measuring relative senatorial success. "I don't think, taken by itself, that it's a fair way to compare," says Yale political science professor David Mayhew. "It's easy to get your name on something if you're the chairman of a committee." Besides, he says, "legislating is not the only thing that they do that makes them important." Mayhew says there are three ways for a member of Congress to distinguish himself: as a legislator, as a leader of the public discourse -- think Sunday talk regulars like Jesse Helms or Joseph Biden -- or as an investigator.

Kerry has made his mark as the latter. As freshman senators in 1985, Kerry and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin sent themselves on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua to assess the dangers posed by the Sandinista government. Upon their return, Kerry began to receive tips suggesting that the Reagan administration was illegally funneling aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebels struggling to overthrow the Sandinista government, and that the Contras were using supply chains established with U.S. assistance to carry on a bustling drug trade. Kerry took it upon himself to launch a probe. In the months ahead, he developed enough information to persuade more senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to conduct a full-scale investigation [that led to the unraveling of the Iran-Contra scandal].

In a follow-up investigation, Kerry developed information that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was trafficking in drugs and sending money out of the country to the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, or BCCI. Kerry launched another investigation and developed information leading to criminal indictments and the collapse of BCCI in 1991.

A year later, Kerry and Sen. John McCain led a Senate select committee assigned to investigate whether American prisoners of war were still being held in Vietnam. After an exhaustive investigation, they reported finding no evidence that any American was still being held. Based on that finding, the two Vietnam veterans, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, worked together in an effort that would ultimately lead President Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam in 1995.

It's an impressive record of investigative work, but the Kerry campaign has said little about it. Indeed, as the New York Times noted over the weekend, the Kerry campaign seldom even uses the word "senator" to describe him. Part of that may stem from an understandable desire to avoid reminding voters that Kerry is a longtime Washington insider; in the last century, only two sitting senators -- Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy -- have gone straight from the Capitol to the White House. But in failing to define his Senate career himself, Kerry allows the Republicans to do it for him in a less than desirable way. The GOP isn't going to focus on Kerry's investigative work -- why play to his strengths, and why remind voters of the congressional investigations into 9/11 and the war on Iraq?

BCCI was an international bank of Middle East origins whose employees asked few questions of their wealthy and powerful customers, making it a favorite of arms merchants, drug dealers, despots such as Noriega, and intelligence agencies. At the CIA, which sometimes used the bank to launder its own activities, it was known as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals."

Kerry's investigation, launched in 1988, helped to close the bank three years later, but not without upsetting some in Washington's Democratic establishment. Prominent BCCI friends included former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former President Jimmy Carter, and his budget director, Bert Lance. When news broke that Clifford's Washington bank was a shell for BCCI -- and how the silver-haired Democrat had handsomely profited in the scheme -- some of Kerry's Senate colleagues grew icy.

"What are you doing to my friend Clark Clifford?" more than one Democratic senator asked Kerry. Kerry's aides recall how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pamela Harriman, a prominent party fund-raiser, called on the senator, urging him to not to pursue Clifford.

Kerry and his staff were under intense pressure, and Foreign Relations chairman Claiborne Pell, the Democrat from Rhode Island, began to request that Kerry's investigation end. Blum brought the evidence against BCCI to the Justice Department, but was rebuffed. With Kerry's blessing, he left the staff and took the case to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who filed the indictments leading to the bank's collapse in the summer of 1991.

Over the years, BCCI was involved with:

• Drug cartels. As early as 1985, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the IRS found that BCCI was involved in laundering heroin money, with numerous branches in Colombia to handle accounts for the drug cartels. It ran accounts for the traffickers’ protector, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, as well as for the drug kingpins of Asia’s Golden Crescent, including Burmese heroin warlord Khun Sa, and for drug trafficking Afghanis and Pakistanis. 

• Illegal arms traders. For the Afghanis, the rule was “drugs out, American and British arms in.” Clients also included Middle East terrorist Abu Nidal, who used bank financing to get weapons; the sellers of nuclear technology to Pakistan; and Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar. The bank served international organized crime involved in extortion, bribery, kidnapping and murder, and ran accounts for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier, Liberian strongman Samuel Doe and other thieving heads of state who needed to hide their stolen cash.

• The Iran/Contra scandal. BCCI had a role in the infamous scandal of the Reagan years. The CIA told Noriega to use the bank for the payoffs he got for helping National Security Council (NSC) staffer Oliver North set up shell companies and secret bank accounts in Panama to illegally move funds to the Contras in Nicaragua and arms to Iran in 1985-86. North had arranged to illegally sell 1,250 U.S. Tow missiles to Iran in exchange for a promise that Teheran would press militants in Lebanon to release American hostages. Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman and fixer, used a BCCI account to move $20 million for the illegal arms and money plot. BCCI prepared phony documents for the arms sale, and checks signed by North were drawn on the Paris branch of BCCI, which “had no records” of the account when U.S. law enforcement later sought them. The profits were sent to Nicaragua’s right wing Contra rebels, violating a congressional ban on such aid.

• Saddam Hussein. During the Reagan-Bush support of Iraq as an adversary to Iran, BCCI funneled millions of dollars to Baghdad's banker in the U.S., the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, (an Italian bank), so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq — money for arms. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank’s international advisory board along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become Bush Sr.’s National Security Advisor.

BCCI’s global connections also helped bring private profit to the Bushes. Former Senate investigator Jack Blum told me, “This whole collection of people were wrapped up in the Bush crowd in Texas.” Prominent Saudis played a key role: Khalid Bin Mahfouz, head of National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, and a major investor and BCCI board member; Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence and a major shareholder and frontman for BCCI, and; Ghaith Rashad Pharaon, a BCCI shareholder and front man for the bank’s illegal purchase of three U.S. banks.

Then there was James Bath, a Texas businessman, who owned Houston’s Main Bank with Bin Mahfouz and Pharaon. When George W. Bush set up Arbusto Energy Inc. in 1979 and 1980, Bath provided some of the financing. As it turned out, Bush was not much of a businessman, and when Arbusto needed a bailout, political connections eventually got him a buyout by Harken Energy Corp., which paid him $600,000 in stock and a $120,000-a-year consultancy.

BCCI-connected friends were there again with money to help when Harken got into trouble. Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens in 1987 worked out Harken’s debts by getting $25 million financing from Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), a partner with BCCI in the Swiss Banque de Commerce et de Placements. As part of that deal, a board seat was given to Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

Were the Bushes putting their financial interests ahead of American security? Given the Bush links to BCCI, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration tried to smother the investigation and prosecution of the bank.

It might have succeeded, were it not for New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — and the junior Senator from Massachussetts, John Kerry.
...
The Kerry Committee report issued in 1992 was damning. It said that the White House knew about BCCI’s criminal activities, that the U.S. intelligence agencies used it for secret banking and that BCCI routinely paid off American public officials.
...
There’s a lot about BCCI that outsiders will never know. Once the investigations started, there were seven fires in the fireproof London warehouses where BCCI stored records. In one of them, four firemen were killed.

My job tonight is an easy one: to present to you one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders – and a good friend.

He was once a lieutenant governor – but he didn't stay in that office 16 years, like someone else I know. It just took two years before the people of Massachusetts moved him into the United States Senate in 1984.

In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington.

Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so.

John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment. Business Week magazine named him one of the top pro-technology legislators and made him a member of its "Digital Dozen."

John was re-elected in 1990 and again in 1996 – when he defeated popular Republican Governor William Weld in the most closely watched Senate race in the country.

John is a graduate of Yale University and was a gunboat officer in the Navy. He received a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three awards of the Purple Heart for combat duty in Vietnam. He later co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Assertions that the Democrats' presumptive nominees are extreme liberals fall flat," Brookings Institution fellows Sarah Binder and Thomas Mann wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece based on a study of senators' lifetime voting records. "True, Mr. Kerry's voting record places him to the left of today's median Senate Democrat (Tom Daschle of South Dakota). But he is closer to the center of the Democratic Party than he is to the most liberal senators, including Mr. Kennedy."

To support the "most liberal senator" claim, the Bush-Cheney campaign points to the congressional vote ratings prepared by the National Journal. At a campaign stop in Minnesota Friday, Cheney said Kerry is "by National Journal ratings, the most liberal member of the United States Senate. Ted Kennedy is the more conservative of the two senators from Massachusetts. It's true. All you got to do is go look at the ratings systems. And that captures a lot, I think, in terms of somebody's philosophy. And it's not based on one vote, or one year, it's based on 20 years of service in the United States Senate."

The thing is, Cheney's claim is not "true." It's that other thing: "false." Earlier this year, National Journal identified Kerry as the senator with the most liberal voting record in 2003. When the National Journal looked at Kerry's entire Senate voting record -- "on 20 years of service in the United States Senate," as Cheney put it -- the magazine determined that Kerry was not the "most liberal" senator. In fact, the National Journal reported in March that "10 other current senators have a lifetime composite liberal score that is higher than Kerry's. And, yes, the top-10 list includes Massachusetts' other senator, Edward Kennedy, D-Mass." For the record, the National Journal's list of the top 10 "most liberal" sitting senators is: Mark Dayton, Paul Sarbanes, Jack Reid, Jon Corzine, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, Richard Durbin, Frank Lautenberg and Patrick Leahy.

The "11th most liberal senator" doesn't carry quite the sting that "most liberal senator" does, so the Bush-Cheney campaign and some in the media keep pushing the flashier -- but false -- charge. Last week on "Crossfire," for example, Tucker Carlson called Kerry "the most liberal member of the Senate by any measure of his votes."

But even the single "measure" the Republicans can cite credibly -- the National Journal's rating on Kerry's 2003 voting record -- can fairly be called into question. The National Journal ranks senators based on their votes in three categories: economic policy, social policy and foreign policy. However, because Kerry missed so many votes while campaigning in 2003, the National Journal lacked sufficient data to grade him on social policy or foreign policy. Thus, Kerry's 2003 ranking is based solely on his 2003 votes on economic policy -- an area in which the National Journal has traditionally seen Kerry as significantly more liberal than he is on, say, foreign policy.

And even when it comes to the 2003 economic policy votes the National Journal counted, it's not entirely clear that Kerry's views should be deemed "liberal." The National Journal included 32 Senate roll calls in its economic policy rankings. Kerry voted in 19 of those. In each of those 19, Kerry's vote was exactly the same as that cast by a majority of the Senate's Democrats. As the Democratic Leadership Council's Al From and Bruce Reed argued in a recent Op-Ed piece, the National Journal rankings are "based more on partisan than ideological differences, ensuring that most Democrats will have very liberal rankings."

On average, 46 senators -- including 3.6 Republicans -- sided with Kerry on the 19 votes used in his National Journal ranking. On 12 of the 19 votes, at least one Republican joined Kerry. On three of them -- votes against loans for the construction of nuclear power plants, against the study of offshore oil and gas drilling and against the privatization of air traffic controllers -- 10 or more Republicans joined Kerry. And it wasn't just crossover moderates like McCain or Maine's Olympia Snowe. North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole voted with Kerry on the offshore drilling measure; Missouri Sen. Jim Talent and Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe voted with Kerry on the air traffic controllers; and Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel voted with Kerry on a Medicare issue.

While Kerry led the National Journal's liberal rankings during the first few years of his Senate tenure, he moved to the middle after he was reelected in 1990. "Kerry was especially moderate in his second term when it came to foreign policy issues," the National Journal's Richard E. Cohen wrote in February as the magazine unveiled its 2003 rankings. "He opposed the liberal position in key Senate showdowns on missile defense and intelligence spending in 1993 and on procurement of additional F-18 Navy fighters in 1996 ... Kerry also voted with President Clinton and congressional Republicans, but against many liberals, in favor of welfare reform in 1996, and he occasionally split from organized labor on workplace issues."

The DLC's From and Reed, claiming Kerry as one of their own, point to a series of votes from the mid-1990s in which Kerry separated himself from more liberal members of his party. In addition to Kerry's 1996 vote on welfare reform, they cite his 1994 role in passing legislation that put 100,000 cops on the street, his vote for NAFTA and other trade measures, and his support for the balanced-budget agreement Bill Clinton struck with congressional Republicans in 1997.

That's not to say that Kerry is a conservative. While Kerry was attacked from the left during the primaries -- particularly for voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq and for refusing to consider a broader repeal of Bush's tax cuts -- his overall Senate record is aligned closely with all of the usual Democratic Party causes.

Kerry has voted for abortion rights and, by and large, against the death penalty. He has a solid if not spectacular record on labor, and a near-perfect record with the NAACP. In 1996, he was one of only 14 senators who opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, the constitutionally questionable measure that says no state can be required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in another state.

On Supreme Court nominees, Kerry has been reliably liberal. Although he voted to confirm Antonin Scalia, who sailed through the Senate on a unanimous vote in 1986, Kerry voted against the confirmations of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and David Souter, and he voted against William Rehnquist's elevation to chief justice. Like most Democrats, Kerry voted against John Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general.

Kerry's environmental record is also strongly liberal. He has been a leader in the fight against pollution and global warming, and he has helped prevent oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Until 2003 -- when missed votes cost him points -- Kerry won high scores from the League of Conservation Voters. Americans for Democratic Action gives Kerry a lifetime ranking of 92. ADA spokesman Don Kusler says that score puts Kerry just outside the liberal top 10 for current senators.

Kerry's high rankings on the left are matched by low rankings from the right. The American Conservative Union gave Kerry a 13/100 for 2003 but only a 5/100 overall. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which tracks business-friendly votes, gave Kerry a zero ranking in 2003. But as with the National Journal, the chamber relied on a small data set for 2003. "Kerry missed 14 of the 23 votes we scored, and he was against us on all of the other votes, and that's why he got a zero," explains Ron Eidshaug, a lobbyist for the chamber. For his Senate career, the chamber gives Kerry a 37/100, a ranking that puts him to the to the right of liberals like Kennedy, Paul Sarbanes and Russ Feingold.

Stanford professor David Brady says Kerry's Senate track record is exactly the right one for a Democratic senator who wants to be president. A Democrat who works more to the middle in order to "get stuff done" risks coming off as too conservative to get through the Democratic primaries, Brady says. A Democrat who clings too hard to the left -- a Barbara Boxer or a Ted Kennedy -- won't survive the general election.

"Kerry is sort of in between the can-do guys and the ideologues," says Brady, an expert on Congress at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "If you want to be president, you don't want to be Bob Dole and you don't want to be Tom Daschle because, over the years, the success of getting stuff done makes you a moderate in your party. But if you're too far left, they're going to beat the s--- out of you [in the general election] for being a lefty."

...

The Bush-Cheney claims about Kerry's defense record are of a piece. In a charge circulated so widely on the Internet that the folks at Snopes.com have felt the need to debunk it as an "urban legend," Republicans say that Kerry has voted against the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the F-14, F-15 and F-16 fighters, the Apache helicopter, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Abrams tank and a host of other critical weapons. In fact, Kerry did not vote against these weapons specifically. Rather, as the Annenberg fact check explains, Kerry simply voted against the overall defense appropriations bills in 1990 and 1995. Having voted in support of such bills at least 16 other years, Kerry is, on balance, a supporter of the weapons systems the Republicans accuse him of opposing. Moreover, Annenberg says, the first President Bush and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, also advocated eliminating some of the same weapons Kerry opposed.

The Kerry campaign has begun to push back against some of these distortions. As soon as the Bush campaign released its new radio ad last week, Kerry's staffers responded with an e-mail to reporters in which they tried to set the record straight. And late last week, the Kerry campaign finally started to fight fire with fire over Kerry's vote on the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the war in Iraq. For months, the Republicans have attacked Kerry for voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq and then voting against an additional $87 billion for funding the war. They've mocked him for saying that he "voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it." In reality, there's little to mock there. Although Kerry explained himself badly, he voted for the Iraq funding when it was going to be paid for by rolling back the Bush tax cut for the very richest Americans. He voted against it when that funding proposal died and the entire amount was to be added onto the already exploding federal budget deficit.

Kerry and his people have been trying to make that point for months; last week, they finally made a more aggressive one: Twice during the negotiations over the $87 billion, they said, Bush's staff threatened he would veto the legislation if it wasn't drafted his way. [Note: It's not just what "they said" - Bush did threaten to veto it forcing that Bill to get killed!]

If Kerry's votes were a flip-flop, weren't Bush's threats, too? The "steady leader" would surely say no. But in posing the question, the Kerry camp sent a warning shot across the White House bow: Playing politics with voting records is a dangerous game, and it's one that both sides can play.

Have you seen George W. Bush's latest campaign ad—the one with the wolves? A shaky hand-held camera moves through a forest at twilight. Suddenly a wolf darts across the screen, then another, until finally we see a whole pack of wolves, rising from their slumber to come get us. Over a soundtrack of rustling leaves and spooky music, the narrator—a breathy woman—says:

In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By $6 billion. Cuts so deep, they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.

The key phrase here is "after the first terrorist attack on America." At first viewing, I took this as a reference to the aftermath of 9/11. (Millions of other viewers probably did, too; no doubt the scriptwriters meant us to make the connection.) This puzzled me, because nobody proposed cutting intelligence after 9/11. On second viewing, though, I realized that the phrase was a veiled reference to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993

Once this is clarified, the rest becomes plain. The Bush campaign appears to be repeating a falsehood that the Republican National Committee first propagated last March. We've been through this before, but now, with the "Wolves" ad, it's worth reciting again.

In 1995, several legislators, among them Sen. Kerry, did introduce amendments to cut the intelligence budget by $1 billion to $1.5 billion, which, spread out over several years, could have added up to $6 billion.

But these were not cuts in the sense that the term is usually understood. Certainly none of the amendments would have resulted in a cut—much less a "slash"—in "America's intelligence operations," as the ad puts it.

Here's the background: In the early-to-mid '90s, the National Reconnaissance Office—the branch of the U.S. intelligence community that controls spy satellites—had come under investigation for serious financial malfeasance. The probe found vast waste, extravagance, and hoarding. In one instance, the NRO canceled the launching of a highly expensive spy satellite, didn't tell Congress (or any federal agency) about it, and kept the money.

So, Congress voted to cut the budget—not to curtail intelligence operations, but simply to retrieve money that was never spent. As I put it at the time, "[I]t's as if Kerry had once filed for a personal tax refund—and Bush accused him of raiding the Treasury."

Another distortion in the "Wolves" ad: It wasn't just "the liberals in Congress" who voted for this refund. The sponsor of the Senate amendment that passed—and it passed without controversy—was Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania.

Now, it may be that the ad is referring to a slightly different amendment, an omnibus deficit-reduction bill that Sen. Kerry proposed in 1994. It would have imposed cuts across several federal agencies, including a $1 billion cut—for that year and each of the following five years—in the intelligence budget. Kerry didn't link these cuts to specific programs, though the NRO scandal was emerging, and it was widely known that waste and inefficiency pervaded intelligence programs, especially in the high-tech sectors. The amendment didn't pass, mainly because omnibus budget cuts of all sorts rarely pass.

If this is the bill that the "Wolves" ad refers to, Sen. Kerry might be charged with legislative vagueness, but hardly with pushing "deep" cuts that "would have weakened America's defenses." The annual intelligence budget totaled about $30 billion at the time. In other words, Kerry's bill would have cut it by 3 percent.

By the way, Kerry was hardly alone in proposing intelligence cuts. Around the same time, in 1995, Rep. Porter Goss—who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee—co-sponsored another omnibus budget-trimmer, which among other things would have cut intelligence personnel by 4 percent a year in each year from 1996 to 2000. Goss, of course, is the man that President Bush recently appointed as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the wolves are coming after anyone, they have more cause to howl at Porter Goss—and, by implication, George W. Bush—than at John Kerry and the Democrats.

• First, obsessing over Kerry's entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
  It shouldn't, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he's reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors' long records before taking office — and I'd argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry's past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.

[Kerry] took a principled and honest stand by releasing a list detailing more than 300 meetings he has held with lobbyists and advocacy groups since 1989, including those that are also his campaign contributors and fundraisers.

Kerry has largely eschewed money from political action committees (PACs), a major source of funds for most of his colleagues. When you combine money from paid lobbyists and PACs--which makes sense, since they're both conduits for "special interests"--Kerry actually ranks ninety-second out of 100 U.S. senators. That doesn't make him pure, but it makes him purer than most serious candidates for the White House. And it puts him on a different planet from President Bush, who accepted more money from lobbyists last year alone than Kerry has in the last 15.

In 1997, four years before Sept. 11, Kerry published "The New War," which was derived from his years leading the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations. In the book, Kerry described a changed global landscape after the end of the Cold War, with security threats coming less from nation-states than from shadowy criminal groups. Although it dwelled mostly on drug cartels and the Russian mafia, "The New War" also addressed the threat of Islamic terrorism and called for international cooperation to fight it.

"We should be the natural leaders of a world coalition against crime," Kerry wrote, "but we have yet to recognize the `new crime's' scale and sophistication."

• First, obsessing over Kerry's entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
  It shouldn't, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he's reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors' long records before taking office — and I'd argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry's past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.

• Second, Kerry has a reputation for taking his cues from his advisors, so it's worth looking at