To the editor:

A recent front-page newspaper story reports that the public version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was stripped of warnings and doubts about reliability of information that figured in the recently declassified secret version.

The reporter states: “While the top-secret version delivered to Bush, his top lieutenants and Congress was heavily qualified with caveats about some of its most important conclusions about Iraq’s illicit weapons programs, those caveats were omitted from the public version.”

Note that Congress is included among those who received the secret version.

Last year Congressman Dennis Moore told a group of Lawrence residents that he voted to authorize military force against Iraq because the classified intelligence briefings Congress received made a stronger case that Iraq posed an imminent threat than publicly available information did. Now it appears the opposite is true.

As citizens, we need to keep asking our elected representatives, Republican and Democrat alike, why they voted to authorize this war when they had even better reasons than we did to question its necessity.

Allan Hanson,

Lawrence