There is an old saying that one should never ask a question one does not want the answer to.

Congress keeps ducking Niger investigation


As Patrick Fitzgerald’s criminal probe grinds on, we shouldn’t forget that a congressional inquiry into the Valerie Plame outing and the Niger uranium forgeries has never really started grinding at all. So with that in mind, let’s run down a short to-do list of things that need doing if and when Washington ever decides to get serious about getting to the bottom of this caper.

First, how about the investigation Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate intel panel, promised a year ago?

Chairman Roberts has been the great ally of the White House in covering up the administration’s bad acts on the WMD and flawed-intelligence fronts. He got the Democrats on his committee to agree to split up the Senate’s Iraqi WMD investigation — investigate flawed intelligence before the 2004 election, investigate political manipulation of intelligence and other administration bad acts after the election.

Like Lucy with her football, once the election was safely past, Sen. Roberts announced that his committee couldn’t make time for the promised second phase of the investigation. “It’s basically on the back burner,” Roberts said about phase two of the investigation in a speech in Washington last March. “The bottom line is that [the White House] believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong.” Now more than a year has passed, and nothing.