The Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence last week presented details on what has been broadly assumed for years: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction leading up to the 2003 war, no biological or chemical weapon stockpiles or programs and no link to 9-11.

Had this information been widely understood pre-war, support for the invasion of Iraq would have collapsed, and as the administration looks elsewhere in the Middle East for threats to the United States, that makes this record important. But it is not what matters most about this years-long investigation.

Phase II of the committee’s work -Phase I, released in 2004, described broad intelligence failures – is supposed to look at the known pre-war evidence and judge whether the administration’s public statements, reports and testimony accurately portrayed that evidence. (Less controversially, it will also look at pre-war assessments of what Iraq would look like post-war, and whether intelligence gathering related to Iraq by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.) That portion of the report is missing from last week’s release.

Even so, the committee might not have released any part of it had not Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe sided with Democrats and pushed the report’s conclusions into the public. Sen. Snowe has resisted the demands of her party in the past, even when it infuriates leadership, when it has taken the wrong track before and she deserves credit in Maine for persisting this time with Phase II.

The newly declassified report makes clear that U.S. intelligence experts were disputing any link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida while Bush administration officials were implying that possibility. And it shows how often the source Curve Ball and members of the Iraqi National Congress misled the administration on Iraq’s WMD capability, and that even after the United States learned the INC had been infiltrated by counterintelligence agents from other countries, the administration continued funding it.

These conclusions lead naturally to the unreleased part of the investigation – what did the White House do with the information it had and to what extent did it cling to discredited information that justified its assertions? Another election is going to pass before answers to those questions are made public, and yet a minority of members of the committee, led by chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, complain in a minority report that the majority overemphasizes the INC’s role in informing U.S. intelligence. A thorough inquiry into what intelligence the administration accepted or rejected for public use, and how that aligned with INC information, would help clarify that very point.

The committee’s report doesn’t change the difficult position the United States faces in Iraq now, but in a time of increasing secrecy in Washington, having an extensive public review of a decision that was so badly informed is a step toward accountability. The committee should commit itself to completing the important job it has begun.