our dickless "investigations"

when will our country learn how to conduct actual investigations? You know, the kind where investigators ask hard questions to get to the bottom of important issues? If one were to take a guess as to which Federal Agency would be the most capable of providing the type of hard-hitting investigators needed to get answers to (now that the hard work has been done) one of Washington's simplest crimes, one would probably say: The Federal Bureau of Investigation.... right? Not so fast. Newsweek reports:

a senior bureau official, requesting anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, told NEWSWEEK the FBI never interviewed Rocco Martino, the Italian businessman who provided the documents to SISMI. Because there was no apparent violation of U.S. law, the bureau couldn't compel him to talk

But, that doesn't square w/ Josh Marshall at TPM:

this line about not being able to compel him to testify is a crock. I don't know what the Bureau's authority would have been in such a case. But whether they had any power to compel Martino to talk is irrelevant because they didn't even try to contact him while he was here. When Martino came to the US the first time last year, it was in early summer. His identity was then still a secret. At least it hadn't yet been published anywhere. So there's no way to know whether the FBI investigators would have known that this sixty-something Italian man flying into New York was a central player in the forgeries drama. The second time he came, however, was in early August. And by that time his name had been splashed across papers in several European countries, as well as in the Financial Times, which of course you can find on newsstands in most large US cities. He flew to New York under his own name. And no FBI, law enforcement or intelligence officials made any attempt to contact him during the several days he remained in the US. There have now been a number of press reports about the alleged FBI investigation into the forgeries story. The Bureau has stated publicly that they have closed the investigation and that they did so after determining that there were no political motives behind the hoax, only a desire to make money. They made that determination without figuring out who forged them or even talking to the guy at the center of the story. And the reasons they're giving for not talking to him are, frankly, bogus. None of that adds up. Something's wrong.