Bush to Order Intelligence Inquiry

According to various news sources tonight, President Bush will order an inquiry into intelligence failures related to WMD and the war. On the face of it, I'd almost like to applaud. Finally, I'd like to think, he's doing the right thing.

But we don't have a new intelligence failure here. We've known we had one for a long time before David Kay started making his rounds in the past 10 days. Doesn't matter, you say, because at least he's doing the right thing now?

Yes, it does matter. It matters because months have gone by in which we knew that the Niger claim was bogus (hell, we'd heard the first reports of it being a forgery out of Italy or at least offered up by the Italians) months before the start of the war. Yet months later, in the 2003 (last year's) SotU speech, Mr. Bush cited that yellow cake like it was just about to eat our grandmothers. And that was about six weeks before we began to "shock and awe."

Thus, the meter's been running a very long time (more than a year) on what seemed like incalculable massaging of information coming out of intelligence channels.

Even then, I wouldn't be as worried if I thought Mr. Bush really does want a full inquiry. But I think we can accurately predict right now what kind of inquiry Mr. Bush wants. Look at the 911 inquiry. Look at the months it took for anyone to start an investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame and then having the president say, "nothing will come of it."

In experiments in science, you're supposed to start with a hypothesis, yes. But starting any investigation with the conclusion already written is not an investigation. Excuse me while I go rip more hair from my head.