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.

No doubt Sen. Roberts believes his political fortunes are secure. But the same doesn’t apply to all of those on his committee. Committee members Sens. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) are both up for reelection next year. If they chose to buck Roberts’s stonewalling, they could force the matter in concert with committee Democrats.

And what of the Democrats? What are they doing to press the matter?

That brings us to another matter, the phantom FBI inquiry into who or what groups were behind the Niger forgeries. How about a real criminal inquiry?

Soon after the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Niger papers as forgeries in February 2003, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) asked for an FBI investigation into the papers’ origins. Not long after, Sen. Roberts agreed to join him in the request.

It was on the basis of the subsequently launched FBI investigation that Roberts’s committee specifically ruled out any investigation of the origins of the Niger forgeries or anything else about them before they came into U.S. government hands in late 2002 (see Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, Page 57). But as I wrote in my July 28 column on this page, that investigation appears to have been cursory at best.

Key players received only scant interviews. And the man at the center of the scam — Rocco Martino, the Italian “security consultant” who attempted to sell the forged documents to a reporter in Rome in late 2002 — was never interviewed at all.

FBI sources have told reporters that there’s been no interview with Martino because they haven’t been able to secure the Italian government’s permission to speak to him. But Martino twice traveled to the United States in the summer of 2004, and no attempt was made to speak with him then either.

What it all amounts to is that the Senate intel panel passed up a chance to investigate the Niger forgeries because the FBI was allegedly already on the case. But it seems the FBI never got on the case in any serious way — something Sen. Roberts would at least have been in a position to know. It looks very much like another Roberts bait-and-switch, like splitting up the WMD probe so as to push all scrutiny of the White House until after the 2004 election.

Last but not least, the Italian paper La Repubblica has been running a series this week on the alleged complicity of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI in the creation and distribution of the forgeries.

Repubblica has pointed the finger of blame at a man named Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI and a close ally of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. And they have also reported (and the National Security Council has subsequently confirmed) that Pollari held a secret meeting in Washington on Sept. 9, 2002, with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. That’s less than a month before the forgeries appeared in Rome and right about the time the White House was fighting with the CIA over whether President Bush could publicize the Niger uranium claim.

The Italian Parliament takes the charges seriously enough that Pollari has been called to testify before the relevant oversight committee on Nov. 3.

How about us? When do we here in America get serious about getting to the bottom of this hoax?

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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