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."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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.

In all, Roberts found, "the Intelligence Community agencies told the committee that INC-affiliated reporting had a minimal impact on prewar judgments about Iraq." That conclusion was in line with earlier, independent investigations into the matter, among them the report on prewar intelligence conducted by former senator Charles Robb and Judge Laurence Silberman, who found that the "CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments."

At the end of the probe, the Intelligence Committee's professional staff came up with a proposed conclusion: "Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not widely used in Intelligence Community products and played little role in the Intelligence Community's judgments about Iraq's WMD programs." Roberts felt that this statement was consistent with what the committee had found. But Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top-ranked Democrat on the committee, saw things differently. Based on the same evidence, he came up with an alternative conclusion: "False information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC)-affiliated sources was used to support key Intelligence Community assessments on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war."

A conflict was guaranteed, and it came at the committee's meeting on August 2. Everyone had had the professional staff's Conclusions--there were six of them--for quite a while. But at the meeting, Rockefeller proposed throwing out all of them and substituting eight Democratic conclusions, beginning with the one quoted above.

It was the scene Republicans on the committee had dreaded for months. There are eight Republicans and seven Democrats on the committee; if there had been a split along party lines, Roberts would have prevailed. But Republicans knew that two of their number, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, had aligned themselves with committee Democrats and would likely side with them if push came to shove. And indeed, when the vote was taken, Rockefeller's conclusions had the support of every Democrat, plus Hagel and Snowe. Rockefeller won by a vote of 9 to 6. And his conclusions became the committee's official word.

Roberts and the five other Republicans on the committee were left sputtering in frustration. "We are concerned that members of the committee have perpetrated the very offense for which they so often charge the Intelligence Community and the administration," they wrote. "Whether these actions were based on politics, a lack of objectivity, or the desire to meet theoretical public expectations, a majority of the committee chose to support amended conclusions that rely upon 'cherry-picked' facts to validate preconceived notions."

Roberts listed several "myths" in Rockefeller's conclusions--chief among them the Democratic conclusion that the INC "attempted to influence" American policy in Iraq by "providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists." The reality, Roberts wrote, was much different. Several CIA officers had told the committee that the INC defectors, in one officer's words, "really did believe what they were saying about WMD." In addition, committee staff got to know Chalabi pretty well. "We sat with him for hours," says one committee source. "He told us a lot of things we found to be really surprising and hard to believe, but when we continued to investigate, it checked out in the documents." Roberts quoted another CIA officer who told committee investigators, "If you're trying to say that the INC is the one that pushed us to go to war because of the WMD reporting, that's wrong."

But Hagel and Snowe remained unconvinced. They did not explain their votes; at the end of the INC report, they were the only senators on the committee who did not offer additional comments. Meanwhile, Republicans talked among themselves about Hagel's and Snowe's motivations. Some said Snowe was terrified of appearing too conservative to her constituents in Maine. Some said Hagel simply had an intense dislike for the "neo-conservatives" who championed Chalabi. Still others pointed to the influence of one of Hagel's key aides in the pre-war intelligence investigation, a man named Eric Rosenbach. Rosenbach came to the Senate after completing studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government under Rand Beers, a top foreign-policy adviser for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. While at Harvard, Rosenbach wrote a policy paper for the Kerry campaign, and in the fall of 2004 he took three weeks to volunteer for the campaign. Looking at it all, Republicans wondered: And these guys are on our side?

Whatever the case, the report marked the end of the INC portion of the Intelligence Committee's investigation. But Phase Two goes on. Still ahead is the committee's most contentious assignment: the assessment of public statements made by administration officials during the run-up to the war--also known as the "Bush lied and people died" part of the investigation. The committee has been bickering about the subject for years now, reaching no conclusions about anything. At the rate it's going, the bickering promises to stretch well into the 2008 presidential campaign. Which is, for some members in both parties, precisely the point.