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Democrats to push for open debate

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON JUNE 14. Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing for open hearings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction even as they are mapping out a strategy that would serve this purpose and yet come away looking as if they were not pursuing a partisan agenda. Both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, Democrats are looking for a way to push the issue a little harder knowing that Republicans who are in charge of Committees are clearly for closed door hearings.

"We can only authorise an investigation by a vote. If the majority holds together, the majority will prevail," a Congressional aide has been quoted. In fact, senior Democrats on the Hill have been saying that they are going to rely on the friendships with the Republican law makers to see if the hearings could be made open and are making the point that politics should not be seen as the reason behind the push.

"I am not political," remarked West Virginia Democrat, John Rockefeller IV, a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee whose Chair recently decided to have closed door hearings on Iraq and its banned weapons.

But there is a difference within the Democrats itself on Capitol Hill — the rhetoric on the subject is sharper among those who are in the fray for the Presidential elections of 2004.Candidates in the run for the big event of next November have not hesitated to lash out at the Bush administration, some even questioning the basic sincerity of the President, George W. Bush. In fact, the former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, has gone to the extent of likening this Iraq's weapons of mass destruction controversy to the Watergate Scandal that eventually led to the downfall and resignation in disgrace of the former Republican President, Richard Nixon. "I never thought I'd hear this question raised in my lifetime again...But the question really is now going to become, What did the President know and when did he know it," Mr. Dean remarked recently.

Other Democrats running for the Presidency in 2004 have been far more critical of the administration foreign policy with the Congressman from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, calling it `fraudulent,' and Senator, Bob Graham, maintaining that the President `lied' in that he did not tell the "whole truth."

At the heart of this ongoing debate on Iraq is the perceived intelligence failure on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The administration is not admitting it, but is acutely embarrassed in coming up with virtually nothing on proscribed weapons more than two months after the `liberation' of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. The existence of weapons of mass destruction was the chief rationale for going to war against Iraq. Even more embarrassing to this Republican administration is that it is now asking for "more time" to unearth the banned weapons — the same thing that United Nations weapons inspectors wanted in March but were derisively laughed out of court.

The debate on Iraq is bound to pit the intelligence community against the administration; and even at the outset, much of the focus is on George Tenet and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the beginning stages of the debate, very few knowledgeable people are talking about any `bungling' by the CIA.

Rather, many want to know what was the assessment of the CIA and how much of this was stretched by this administration to justify its objectives. On a different level, some law makers wanted to know what it was that the CIA told the U.N. weapons inspectors.

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