Secretary Rice must not duck Congress' Iraq war hearings

In light of the troubling claim by former CIA Director George Tenet that the Bush administration rushed to war in Iraq without serious debate, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice owes it to nation to go before Congress and answer questions about the pre-war intelligence.
Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the death toll of Americans has topped 3,000, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and sectarian violence between the Shiites and Sunnis has evolved into a civil war that is spreading like wildfire.
Tenet, who served as CIA chief from 1997 to 2004, has written a book, "At the Center of the Storm," in which he lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior White House officials for pushing the invasion of Iraq without "serious debate" about whether then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat.
The book was previewed last week by The New York Times, and Tenet appeared Sunday night on CBS' "60 Minutes."
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes in his book, adding that there was never "a significant discussion" about containing Iraq without an invasion.
Bush senior White House counselor Dan Bartlett and others brushed off Tenet's broadside, insisting that the president did wrestle with the serious questions that surrounded the planned invasion of Iraq.
"This president weighed all the various proposals, weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision," Bartlett said on NBC's "Today" show Friday.
Uranium claim
For her part, Secretary of State Rice insisted over the weekend that she has already addressed claims that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger, claims which became one of the centerpieces of the Bush administration's justification for going to war. The president and other top officials told the American people that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which made Hussein a major threat to the security of the United States.
Tenet, as head of the CIA, is not without blame. A National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the agency said in no uncertain terms that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. The estimate was used by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to win United Nations support for a war resolution.
Against this backdrop, Rice, who keeps insisting that the issue of the prewar intelligence has been "looked at and looked at and looked at," has a responsibility to the American people to appear in the People's House and answer questions from the people's representatives.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has issued a subpoena to compel Rice's testimony.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America's homeland has been blamed on a failure of the U.S. intelligence community. Tenet has admitted the agency dropped the ball, but he also insists that in July 2001, he warned Bush insiders that a major terrorist attack in the United States was possible and that there was a need to step up the search for Osama bin Laden and the campaign against his al-Qaida terrorist organization. Bin Laden turned out to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
It's time for everyone involved in the discussions leading up to the invasion of Iraq to make themselves available to the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.