The chairman dissents: and the chairman--Pat Roberts of the Senate Intelligence Committee--is right.

A SENATE committee undertakes an in-depth study of a critical national issue. After years of investigation and debate, it releases a report, offering a number of conclusions. At the end of the report, the committee's chairman makes a statement of his own: "These conclusions," he writes, "are a myth."

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Huh?

A chairman trashing his own committee's report is unheard of in Washington. And yet that is exactly what happened in early September, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a pair of reports from its so-called Phase Two investigation into pre-war intelligence. One report, titled "Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare With Prewar Assessments," got lots of press for its conclusion that there was no working relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda. The other report, titled "The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress," received almost no attention for its conclusion that American intelligence relied on knowingly false reports from Iraqi defectors in making the case for war. Yet that second report was possibly the bigger story, because it brought into stark relief the war going on inside the Intelligence Committee. In the report's pages, chairman Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, bitterly denounced its conclusions; in addition to "myth," he called them "distorted," "cherry-picked," and filled with "inaccuracies, omissions and mischaracterizations."

It was a stunning turn of events, even for a committee many now regard as the most dysfunctional on Capitol Hill. What happened?

It started out as a relatively simple, if controversial, matter. The Iraqi National Congress investigation focused on the actions of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who is a bete noire for opponents of the war. By the end of the committee's probe, even though there were some disagreements about details, both Republicans and Democrats agreed on one basic fact: Much of what INC-related defectors told American intelligence officials was wrong. The question then was, Were Chalabi and his allies lying? If so, why? And did the bad information they gave the U.S. play a key role in the American decision to go to war?

Roberts and the Republican members of the committee were no great defenders of Chalabi. But during the investigation, they came to doubt that he was the grand, evil puppet-master that some Democrats have described. Instead, the investigators came to believe that he simply turned over Iraqi defectors who came to him, didn't vouch for their reliability, and never made a secret of his agenda to overthrow Saddam Hussein. More important, Roberts concluded that the information provided by Chalabi and the INC played a tiny role in the American case for war. Just two of the 45 human-intelligence sources cited in the administration's now-famous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were affiliated with the INC. Just one of the key judgments in the NIE was based on corroborating evidence from Chalabi's group (and even in that case, intelligence officials said the judgment wouldn't have changed if there had been no INC source). And none of the judgments about Iraq's links to terrorism came from the INC.