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Commissions, Inquiries, and Effectiveness

© Carey Goodman

What are some things governments tend to do very well? Spend money? Yes. Create, sponsor, and fund commissions to investigate serious issues? Yes. Continue to express support for these commissions regardless of the absurdity of their findings? Absolutely.

The authority and necessity of governments to initiate investigations and establish commissions of inquiry to find solutions to issues that desperately need solving are very important functions, but often the tasks presented to these commissions enter the realm of the absurd. Consider some old and new examples. The Warren Commission was established during the 1960s to determine who assassinated US President Kennedy and why the act was done. Given the fact that the alleged assassin was himself dead, the conclusions of the Commission seemed foredrawn, and since as they say: "dead men tell no tales", the Commission could not exactly bring in anyone directly involved with the plot to testify. Hence the "magic bullet theory" was conjured to allow the Commission to draw conclusions that were widely presumed when the Commission was formed.

A more recent example is the joint US House and Senate committee which was selected to investigate the Iran Contra scandal. The Select Committee was intended to prove that in 1986 the Reagan White House engaged in inappropriate and perhaps illegal conduct when it clandestinely adopted the policy of using weapons sales to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to bargain with Iranian terrorist groups to attempt to gain the release of several Americans who were then held as hostages in the Middle East. At its inception the Committee knew misdeeds were done, and it knew who were the most involved participants. At the end of its existence when Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was chosen to continue the investigation, the Committee concluded that misdeeds were done, and it established that the participants who were most closely involved with the policy would be further investigated. Again a government-created committee successfully proved the obvious facts at great expense to US tax payers.

The latest version of the "we need a committee for this" mantra is the proposal that a bipartisan commission be selected to investigate the events of 11 September 2001. From its inception the commission knows what happened, who is guilty, and that the US intelligence services majorly bungled their jobs. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the commission probably will conclude that Al-Qaeda committed the terrorist acts and that the lack of proper security measures and intelligence gathering were contributing factors. Then the commission members will all make the talk show rounds to explain why it took them three or four years to make these obvious findings. The typical interview will be something like this: