To the editor:

Have we become so accustomed to the widespread conflicts of interest in our current GOP-run government that no one is questioning the impartiality of Sen. Pat Roberts? He’s a co-chairman, along with Sen. Sam Brownback, of the GOP’s efforts here in Kansas to re-elect President Bush. Who is naÃive enough to think that he’s not now protecting the president by blaming the intelligence community for G.W.’s rush to war?

Long before the war began, the information that Iraq likely did not have weapons of mass destruction was widely available. Why do you think the United Nations and all but one of the world’s other powerful nations refused to take part? The existence of the evidence and the administration’s efforts to denigrate and/or ignore all intelligence that it didn’t like have since been widely reported (outside of the toady press.) You can read for yourself at the New York Review of Books (“Now They Tell Us,” Feb. 26) the American Prospect (“Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings,” Jan. 28) and even the venerable Washington Post (“Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq,” Feb. 7).

The intelligence community told this administration everything it needed to know to reserve judgment on the existence of those weapons. But this administration, as we know now, intended to attack Iraq regardless. The WMD, as we know now, were simply the most horrifying excuse they could come up with, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted last year. Roberts is destroying his own credibility by participating in the cover-up.

Mike Cuenca,

Lawrence