US House panel invites former CIA chief to testify

WASHINGTON, Apr 28 (Reuters) The chairman of a US House of Representatives investigative committee today invited former CIA Director George Tenet to testify about prewar claims that Iraq sought weapons of mass destruction.

Rep Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, invited George Tenet, whose new book criticizes the Bush administration, to testify at a hearing before the panel on May 10.

''The purpose of the hearing is to learn your views about one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq - the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger - and related issues,'' Waxman said in a letter addressed to the care of Tenet's lawyer, Robert Barnett.

The committee this week subpoenaed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about the now refuted Iraq-Niger uranium claim. The administration said it might fight the subpoena.

The claim about Niger was one of the administration's main justifications for the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Critics later said the White House twisted intelligence to build support for the war, which the administration denies.

Shorty after the invasion, the CIA concluded that the Iraq-Niger uranium report was based on forged documents and was therefore no longer credible.

Tenet, who resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in July 2004, has done a series of interview this week to promote his book ''At the Center of the Storm,'' which is due to be released next week.

In the book, Tenet is reported to have written that President George W Bush took the country to war without ''a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.'' He also accused administration officials of ruining his reputation by leaking a distorted version of his now famous ''slam dunk'' statement about how easy it would be to find weapons of of mass destruction in Iraq. He told CBS Television's ''60 Minutes'' his comment was taken out of context and did not refer to whether Iraq had such weapons. No large of caches of such weapons have been found in Iraq.

REUTERS TB BST0702