'NO EXEMPTION'

A kickass editorial from the Newark Star-Ledger:

It is good to be the national security adviser.

Others have to be sworn in and undergo days of detailed testimony on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. As the national security adviser, you merely have to make the claim that you'd really love to testify, but there is a constitutional principle to be honored.

If others make detailed allegations of incompetence against the administration you work for, all you need do is walk to the nearest television camera, call them nasty names and impugn their integrity. You get to declassify anything you think might help your case and keep secret everything that does not. Regular people cannot decide for themselves what is secret.

Never mind that your claim that national security would be endangered if you should answer important questions looks more ridiculous with every television appearance you make and op-ed article you write.

Condoleezza Rice has it easy. She should not.

Richard Clarke held high positions in the Bush administration (as well as the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations). He has made serious charges about our country's lack of preparation for terrorist attack and its choice to pursue other goals, other targets than terror. He is a man of calm substance who merits answers. The exchange of slogans with some fawning Fox News anchor is not an answer.

National security advisers have testified in public when the issue was important enough. Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997 both gave testimony. The republic did not fall on either occasion.

Rice should not be permitted to function as a mere heckler of those who do not agree with those who employ her. She doubtless knows what went on in the nine months before Sept. 11 and in all the time since. She knows the rationales and the priorities that have brought us to where we are today. If there are answers to Clarke's charges, she has them.

She should give them under the same circumstances he faced.

In public.

Under questioning by friendly and hostile questioners.

Under oath.

Without those three things, she is irrelevant.

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