Senate approves spending $368.6 billion on defense

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jul 18, 2003 by Ken Guggenheim Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The Senate approved a $368.6 billion defense spending bill Thursday after Republicans beat back a new Democratic push for an examination of how the White House handled intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs.

The bill is $3.1 billion below Bush's budget request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, and represents a Defense Department budget increase of slightly more than 1 percent. That does not count a $62.4 billion emergency spending bill passed earlier this year to cover the cost of war in Iraq.

Congress is expected to make up the $3.1 billion in separate legislation.

The bill largely meets President Bush's budget request and the 95- 0 vote showed Democratic reluctance to challenge his defense priorities.

But Democrats used three days of debate to press unsuccessfully for investigations of the administration's handling of prewar intelligence that go beyond the reviews under way by the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The Senate defeated 62-34 an amendment by Sen. Dick Durbin, D- Ill., to withhold $50 million in intelligence funding until President Bush submits a report about how the White House handled the intelligence.

Durbin, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said closed- door testimony by CIA Director George Tenet on Wednesday made clear that that the White House pressured the CIA to allow discredited intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program to be included in the State of the Union speech.

"The president has within his ranks on his staff some person who was willing to spin and hype and exaggerate and cut corners on the most important speech that the president delivers in any given year," Durbin said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Durbin's "characterization is nonsense" and a U.S. government official attending Wednesday's meeting said it was another official, not Tenet, who discussed the exchanges with the White House. The White House had not insisted on including the language, the U.S. official said.

Appropriations Committee chairman, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, accused Democrats of "nitpicking" on a single error in the speech.