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Kerry Continues to Press Bush on Security

Posted on: Monday, 8 March 2004, 06:00 CST

John Kerry is pressing President Bush on national security issues, raising questions about the handling of probes into terrorist attacks as well as intelligence suggesting weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq.

"The American people deserve an answer now as to why we had intelligence failures and what the security needs of our nation are," Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said Sunday. He accused Bush of stonewalling separate probes into those issues.

The Massachusetts senator is putting the finishing touches on a four-day swing through the South, a trip he argued was aimed at showing that his populist economic message and focus on jobs can sell well in what is arguably his toughest region to win.

Florida, the key to Bush's 2000 victory, was Kerry's focus Monday, with appearances set in Hollywood, West Palm Beach and Tampa.

Throughout his Southern tour he has focused on job losses, blaming Bush's trade policies. And, he said, "I'm going to run the same campaign in every part of the country. I believe people in the South care deeply about jobs, about health care."

Kerry, however, also has diverted to criticizing Bush on national security issues. He said the president's use of images from the destroyed World Trade Center in a campaign commercial was inappropriate, then met with reporters to issue his strongest criticism to date of Bush's handling of security issues.

He accused Bush of impeding the separate inquiries by denying answers to crucial questions until after the November election.

Kerry pointed to complaints by members of a federal commission investigating the attacks that Bush was resisting their efforts to get documents and question witnesses.

"Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Kerry said at a hastily arranged news conference.

"The American people deserve an answer now," he said. "The immediate instinct of the Republicans and this administration was to shut it down."

The Bush campaign rejected the charges out of hand.

"This is another inaccurate attack by John Kerry," spokesman Scott Stanzel said. "Not a single person has refused to be interviewed," and the administration has allowed "unprecedented access" for investigators.

Kerry said the public deserves an answer as soon as possible about what went wrong leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Nothing could be more important to the American people at this moment," he said. "They need to know why we had such a failure of intelligence."

He also argued that Bush has delayed a report on potential intelligence failures until 2005, "which just happens coincidentally to not be an election year."

Last month, the president named a commission to "figure out why" inspectors haven't found the weapons that intelligence experts said Saddam Hussein was hiding in Iraq. He told the panel to report back by the end of March 2005.

At the news conference, Kerry also said he had spoken and planned to meet with vanquished rivals John Edwards and Howard Dean. Aides said they anticipated arranging a session with Dean this week, likely in Washington.

"I look forward to meeting with him," Kerry said. "We're going to discuss winning the presidency of the United States."

The meeting is potentially important because Dean, a former Vermont governor, built a large fund-raising network on the Internet and his list of potential donors could be very valuable as Kerry seeks to match Bush's fund-raising prowess.

In addition, Kerry said he will ask advisers and allies to travel to Iraq to prepare an independent assessment of the situation there. He said he hadn't ruled out going himself, but "that's not on the front burner."

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