WASHINGTON, April 10 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush admitted on Monday that he declassified intelligence documents in 2003 to help explain his administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq.

    Bush said that people had doubts about his rationale for going to war with Iraq after the invasion in March 2003.

    "And so I decided to declassify the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) for a reason. I wanted to see people to see what some of those statements (he had made on Iraq) were based on," he responded to a question from the audience after a speech on Iraq and the anti-terror war at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

    Bush said he "wanted people to see the truth" and that was why he had declassified the document.

    "You can't talk about -- you're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document...And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing, you know, ongoing intelligence matters, and so I did," he said.

    Court papers made public last week showed that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, testified in a CIA leak case that Bush had authorized the leak of prewar intelligence information on Iraq in the summer of 2003.

    The court papers said Libby had told prosecutors that Cheney had told him that Bush authorized him to disclose certain "classified material" about Iraq to a reporter.

    Libby made the testimony when he was under investigation concerning the disclosure of the identity of CIA's covert agent Valerie Plame in July 2003, the wife of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of Bush's war policies. Enditem