The current administration has “made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world,” Kerry said. “We have endured in these last few years under this administration too many intelligence failures.”
“This is my message to the terrorists,” Kerry said. “As commander in chief, I will bring the full force of our nation’s power to bear on finding and crushing your network. We’ll use every resource of our power to destroy you.” But, he added, “I will do what this president has failed to do: reform our intelligence system by making the next director of the CIA a true director of national intelligence with true control over intelligence personnel and budgets across our government.”
The Wall Street Journal captured the essence of the message in the headline of a May 28 article on the speech: “Kerry Focuses on Homeland Protection.” Kerry’s speech “sounded in many ways like one from the man he is vying to unseat in November,” the Journal said. But Kerry “says he will work harder than Mr. Bush at undercutting terrorists,” the Journal says, by “revamping intelligence-gathering and relying more on economic sanctions to block development of nuclear weapons.”
The Kerry campaign has posted on its web site a document called the “Plan to Make America Stronger and Safer.” In it, the Democratic Party campaign outlines the ways in which it plans to beef up the domestic police apparatus and draw other forces into aspects of domestic spying. Among the proposals are:
Kerry returned to this last theme in his May 27 speech, promising “to reform training and update the way we structure our armed forces…with National Guard and Reserve units retooled to meet the requirements of homeland security which have been neglected by this administration.” This is a continuation of the course first carved out by the Clinton administration and deepened under Bush to strengthen the domestic military command structure. Under Clinton the first military command within the U.S. borders was created in January 2000. It was later formalized under Bush with the establishment of the U.S. Northern Command in October 2002.
In the speech, the Democratic presidential hopeful said he would continue and strengthen the initiatives by the Bush administration to conduct piracy on the high seas in the name of combating “weapons of mass destruction.” As commander-in-chief of the world’s number one nuclear-armed power, Kerry said he would use “changes in international treaties, sharing of intelligence, and setting conditions for economic sanctions and the interdiction of illegal shipments” to ensure that Washington and a small number of other imperialist states remain the only nations with the capacity to use nuclear weapons. The senator from Massachusetts assured his listeners that he would be just as much a war president as his opponent, stating, “Osama bin Laden is still at large because the Bush administration didn’t finish him off at the Battle of Tora Bora [Afghanistan] when they had the chance.” He said that Washington is not dealing strongly enough with “Saudi sponsorship of clerics who promote the ideology of Islamic terror,” saying, “we will not do business as usual with any country that does not demonstrate its full will to partner in this struggle.”
Kerry insisted on a theme pushed by many liberal critics of the Bush administration: Washington is putting its armed forces at unnecessary risk by deploying relatively small numbers in Iraq. “As president, on my first day in office,” Kerry proclaimed, “I will send the message to every man and woman in our armed forces: this commander-in-chief will ensure that you are the best led, best equipped fighting force in the world…. But you will never be sent into harm’s way without enough troops for the task.”
“The idea of America,” waxed the millionaire senator in an interview the next day with the Washington Post, “is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we’ve developed in this world.”
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home