One possible obstacle to moving quickly: many members of the commission have close ties to the elite financial institutions that played a central role in the crisis, and several are known as dogged supporters of the political party that named them to the panel. Will the inquiry truly turn over every rock and question every tight-lipped bank executive? We could begin to see the  answer today. In the meantime, let’s meet the investigators.

Phil Angelides: The commission’s chairman was most recently in public view as the Democrats’ 2006 nominee for California governor, but he has vowed to use famed 1930s financial investigator Ferdinand Pecora as a model and pursue a non-partisan, just-the-facts approach. Angelides’ first test may be the reluctance of White House or Wall Street officials to abide by subpoenas for testimony; such refusals became a problem for the 9/11 Commission in its early days.

Bill Thomas: During his years as GOP chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, Thomas earned a reputation as a brilliant and fierce combatant in the fight for broad deregulation of industry. He voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that allowed banks to amass unprecedented amounts of risk, and he raised $1.8 million from the financial industry during his political career.

Brooksley Born: This former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission became a folk hero of sorts after the economy began its free fall, when her struggle to regulate the shadowy world of derivatives trading burst into public view. Born lost the battle she waged in the late 1990s with then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, then and now a senior White House economics adviser. But she could well be the most vocal commission member when it comes to unmasking the government’s failure to guard against financial risk – because she had a front-row seat.

John W. Thompson: Formerly chairman of the high-tech company Symantec, Thompson was singled out by the Center for Responsive Politics as the commission’s most prolific political campaign donor. During the 2008 cycle alone, he and his wife gave more than $405,000 to Democratic candidates.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.): This former chairman of the intelligence committee is no stranger to bank-industry cash, raising $2.1 million from financial firms during his career.

Keith Hennessey: This former economic adviser to President George W. Bush could be a witness for the panel, were he not a member. Hennessey joined the White House in late 2007, and he told Foreign Policy magazine last month that few on the president’s team saw the financial crisis coming until it hit in mid-2008.

Byron Georgiou: Based in Las Vegas, Georgiou is an attorney whose firm represents shareholders in several lawsuits filed against bailed-out banks, including Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: After heading the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office during the GOP’s years in control of Congress, Holtz-Eakin left to start his own private consulting firm and serve as a senior economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign last year. Whether the CBO-era Holtz-Eakin or the more partisan McCain-era Holtz-Eakin will emerge should be interesting to watch as the commission digs deeper into the crisis.

Peter Wallison: This GOP appointee, a longtime fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has already claimed to have uncovered the cause of the financial crisis – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in helping low-income homeowners obtain mortgages. While Fannie and Freddie were certainly not blameless, Wallison’s narrative is shared almost exclusively by other conservatives.

Heather Murren: Named to the commission by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Murren is a veteran managing director at Merrill Lynch, the firm that paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses in the final days before its shotgun wedding with Bank of America.

With the commission stacked with so many of its friends, the financial industry is likely breathing a little easier than it was when the panel was proposed in April.

But the problem with the critics’ argument is that, while the strategy they oppose has yet to be tried, the alternatives they suggest already have been — and they led to failure in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For years, U.S. commanders in both countries focused on killing insurgents and minimizing the numbers and exposure of U.S. troops rather than pacifying the country. The result was that violence in both countries steadily grew, until a counterinsurgency strategy was applied to Iraq in 2007. As for limiting U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to attacks by drones and Special Forces units, that was the strategy of the 1990s, which, as chronicled by the Sept. 11 commission, paved the way for al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington.

Cede the “killing insurgents/minimizing exposure” point. But the 9/11 Commission most certainly did not document “attacks by drones and Special Forces units” in Afghanistan in the 1990s. For one thing, no one could figure out how to equip a Hellfire missile on a Predator drone in the 1990s, and discussion of even whether to send a Hellfire-equipped Predator could not proceed until the fateful spring of 2001. You can check this all out on pages 210 to 214 of the 9/11 Commission report. (Page 211: “[T]he Hellfire warhead carried by the Predator needed work. It had been built to hit tanks, not people. I tneeded to be designed to explode in a different way, and even then had to be targeted with extreme precision. In the configuration planned by the Air Force through mid-2001, the Predator’s missile would not be able to hit a moving vehicle.”

Your Special Forces line — I don’t know where you got that from either, but it sure didn’t come from the 9/11 Commission report, which documented in painstaking detail that ground troops of any kind were not a seriously-considered option. Page 349:

Officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations regarded a full U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as practically inconceivable before 9/11. It was never the subject of formal interagency deliberations.

Lesser forms of intervention could also have been considered. One would have been the deployment of U.S. military or intelligence personnel, or special strike forces, to Afghanistan itself or nearby – openly, clandestinely (secretly), or covertly (with their connection to the United States hidden). Then the United States would no longer have been dependent on proxies to gather actionable intelligence. However, it would have needed to secure basing and overflight support from neighboring countries. A significant political, military, and intelligence effort would have been required, extending over months and perhaps years, with associated costs and risks. Given how hard it has proved to locate Bin Ladin even today when there are substantial ground forces in Afghanistan, its odds of success are hard to calculate. We have found no indication that President Clinton was offered such an intermediate choice, or that this option was given any more consideration than the idea of invasion.

Argue all you like about the untenability of the Afghanistan critics’ proposals, as that’s right and good and healthy. But don’t rewrite the 9/11 Commission report, and history, to say that all the alternatives have been tried and already failed.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) (rushholt.com)

After years of examining CIA operations of dubious legality, an important member of the House intelligence committee is exploring an option that many in the intelligence community view with apprehension: a comprehensive investigation of all intelligence-community operations over years and perhaps even decades. The model is the famous Church and Pike committees of the 1970s, which exposed widespread CIA lawlessness; created the modern legal and congressional oversight structures for intelligence; and cleaved the history of the CIA into before- and after- periods.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a progressive who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chairs a special oversight panel that helps write the intelligence budget, has been increasingly comfortable talking about a new “Church committee.” He floated the idea in an interview with TWI on July 14, again to the Newark Star-Ledger the next day, and even attempted to discuss the Church committee’s precedents for congressional oversight with Lou Dobbs on CNN on July 20.

“I’d like to see something on the scope of the Church committee,” Holt told TWI in a Friday phone interview. The congressman said that it had been a  “few decades” since Congress took a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence community’s impact on “the relationship between the individual and her or his government, as well as the role that the U.S. plays in other countries around the world, outside of declared military activities.”

Holt said he did not have a concrete proposal prepared for the creation of such an investigation, and was at the stage of seeing what colleagues and members of the intelligence community made of such a move. “There’s agreement with the idea,” he said. “An awful lot of people have not really thought about how many unanswered questions there are or unresolved issues there are out there about how we do intelligence in the United States.”

He declined to name any members of congress with whom he has discussed such an investigation, but said they were members of the House intelligence committee and the oversight panel he chairs. “Are we close to commissioning a study in the way I’m conceiving it? No, not yet,” he said. A House Republican aide, who requested anonymity, was unaware of Holt’s early feelers, raising questions about whether Holt’s envisioned inquiry would have Republican support. And a spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the House intelligence committee chairman, did not return a request for comment.

Many in the intelligence world and on the right view the committee investigations led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) as representing an apex of progressive congressional attempts to geld the intelligence community. Empaneled in response to a New York Times article by Seymour Hersh in 1974 reporting widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens, the investigations unearthed other abuses, such as repeated CIA assassination attempts on foreign heads of state. It resulted in the passage of laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to prevent warrantless domestic surveillance and the creation of standing committees in Congress to oversee intelligence activities. Some conservatives view the investigations as an example of congressional overreach. “I think they undermined our capabilities in some respects,” former Vice President Dick Cheney told his biographer, Stephen F. Hayes.

Holt said that he is “not talking about upsetting the applecart, I’m talking about analyzing the full applecart” of intelligence activities. He rejects the idea that such a comprehensive investigation necessarily entails eroding U.S. intelligence capabilities. “Is giving your kid a test in school an inhibition on his free learning?” Hold said. “Sure, there are some people who are happy to let intelligence agencies go about their business unexamined. But I think most people when they think about it will say that you will get better intelligence if the intelligence agencies don’t operate in an unexamined fashion.”

But over the past several years, the intelligence committees and official commissions have peered into intelligence matters repeatedly. In 2002 and 2003, an unprecedented joint House-Senate intelligence committee investigation looked into intelligence work on al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks, work that the 9/11 Commission took as a point of departure. A panel created by the Bush administration examined intelligence work on weapons of mass destruction. The Senate intelligence committee, from 2004 to 2007, undertook a multi-tiered look at intelligence failures preceding the invasion of Iraq. At the moment, the Senate intelligence committee is conducting a study into the CIA’s interrogation and detention practices after 9/11, and the House intelligence committee on which Holt serves is examining recent revelations of a shuttered CIA program believed to be tied to strengthening assassinations capabilities.

Holt said that such inquiries still left a host of unexamined activities. “There’s a lot to look at, [and] not just who told what to whom, or the treatment of detainees or [renditions], or interrogation, or domestic surveillance or national security letters or on and on and on,” he said. “Church looked at everything since the OSS,” referring to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA. “The recommendations of the Church committee, in large part, have been eroded, ignored or violated since then. The world situation has evolved, and the technologies, methodology and organizations of the intelligence community have evolved, [and] also the look back then, in a sense, has been forgotten by some.”

Representatives from the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not return messages seeking comment.

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, said that in some respects it was surprising that no one had proposed a Church committee-like investigation. “It’s the shoe that has not dropped yet,” Aftergood said. “The Church committee was established following a series of revelations of disturbing intelligence community activities. To a remarkable extent the series of events precipitating the Church committee has been replicated in recent months and years. The famous December 1974 Seymour Hersh front-page story in The New York Times talking about domestic surveillance [presaged] the December 2005 [James Risen and Eric Lichtblau] story in The New York Times about domestic surveillance.”

Aftergood said that a new Church committee was “overdue,” and disputed the characterization of the 1970s congressional investigations as weakening U.S. intelligence. “While to some people in the intelligence business the name of Frank Church is a dirty word, it’s also true that the structures that emerged from the Church committee benefited intelligence by introducing stability and predictability into intelligence policy,” Aftergood said. “The idea that this was a disaster or an assault on intelligence is shortsighted to the point of misunderstanding. The Church committee yielded the framework that the U.S. intelligence community needed to grow and to regain at least in some measure the confidence of the public and the rest of the government.”

Along those lines, Holt said that he’s heard representatives of the intelligence community say, in “breathtaking honesty and self-awareness,” that a thorough investigation might enable them to better do their jobs. “In a representative democracy, there is a very important role for the legislative branch to help the CIA and the intelligence community determine and understand their proper role and give them the tools and the latitude to carry out” lawful intelligence activities.

It was instantly clear after Sept. 11, 2001, that our security agencies knew little about al Qaeda’s inner workings, could not detect its operatives’ entry into the country, nor predict where it might strike next.

Uh, except for the daily brief that President George W. Bush received a month before titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” and specifically warning that “a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”

And then there was the acknowledgment from the government’s own 9/11 Commission that important relevant information about the attacks “was available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001″ but it “too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance in terms of a probable terrorist attack.” And the commission’s conclusion that “the Intelligence Community failed to fully capitalize on available, and potentially important, information.”

Is is really “the inspectors general report” that “ignores history and plays politics with the law,” as The Journal’s headline puts it?

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Yoo starts things off with his typical flourish of disingenuousness:

Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and entering Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters. What better way of detecting follow-up attacks? And what president — of either political party — wouldn’t immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers?

Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve.

Those inspectors general, in Yoo’s imagination, aren’t overworked bureaucrats in wrinkle-free shirts, cotton Dockers and overgrown haircuts, buried under endless reams of paper. They’re useful idiots for Osama bin Laden. In truth, the reason why the inspectors general don’t entertain that scenario is because it’s absurd. If the intelligence community knew what the “electronic communications” signatures heading into and out of Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan headquarters were, they could very easily obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, because they’d possess individualized suspicion. This is an unproblematic case, fitting easily under the aegis of the law on Sept. 12, 2001.  It has absolutely nothing to do with what the inspectors general call the “President’s Surveillance Program.” That’s also why the battery of Justice Department leaders like Acting Attorney General Jim Comey, Associate Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Philbin fought to rein in the surveillance activities — because they were overbroad and outside of FISA, which Congress explicitly made the “exclusive means” for conducting legal foreign surveillance. Yoo continues:

It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States.

Actually, it’s absurd to think that a law like FISA does. Yoo cites the 9/11 Commission, saying it found that “FISA’s wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence” proved to be such a hindrance, but that’s a misrepresentation. FISA has no such wall. The “wall” was an invention of the Justice Department under Janet Reno to separate foreign-collected surveillance from criminal investigations, nothing even close to “live military operations,” and in practice that bureaucratic restriction went too far and inhibited necessary FBI-CIA collaboration. The Bush administration’s response wasn’t to get Congress to change FISA; it was to entirely circumvent it.

Clearly, the five inspectors general were responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination, not consulting the long history of American presidents who have lived up to their duty in times of crisis. More than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, domestic or international, of persons “suspected of subversive activities . . . including suspected spies.”

You know what law, passed in 1978, didn’t exist when FDR was president? Yoo goes even further, and takes selective quotations from Jefferson and Hamilton to suggest that his long-discredited theory that presidents have king-like powers during times of war, and yet he never comes out and says it, because even in The Wall Street Journal people can recognize absurdity.

What’s amazing about Yoo’s caustic attack on the inspectors general report is that the report itself embarrasses Yoo but does little else. There’s no suggestion of prosecution, no recommendation of additional investigation, no harsh language. It says simply that Yoo says what he says in this op-ed and that his superiors at OLC were cut out of that loop. That’s all. Yoo’s not even in danger, if reports about Attorney General Eric Holder’s potential new investigation are to be believed, of moving into the crosshairs of the Justice Department. Today’s attack on the inspectors general is Yoo’s response to having his own words quoted back at him. Which, perhaps, is insult enough. It’s like seeing the next 30 years of your life unfold before your horrified eyes.

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Here’s an argument for the DNI’s control, as related by Ambinder:

Reasonably, if the DNI can’t appoint his own representatives, then he has indeed become a glorified presidential briefer.

To which the CIA or the authors of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 creating the DNI would rejoinder that the one of the major goals of the huge intelligence restructuring of the last five years was to formally separate the head of the intelligence community from the operational tasks of intelligence collection and analysis. The 9/11 Commission and others judged that too deep an involvement in those tasks created a dangerous myopia — specifically, the CIA director’s preoccupation with running CIA instead of seeing a broader, community-wide picture was a contributing factor to structural intelligence failures that weakened U.S. defenses against a terrorist attack. I’m not mediating the dispute — I’m no Joe Biden — just explaining some of its background arguments.

Now for Biden to settle T.I. vs. T.I.P.

In the [Obama administration's] view, a commission would expose secrets without any means of determining whether they’re properly protected or not, and they’ve been warned that the nation’s spy services would simply cease to function effectively if they’re forced to surrender exacting details about their immediate past conduct. The administraiton further worries that the Commission would be carried out in the context of vengeance and would not focus the rage on lessons learned for the future. This, again, is the point of view senior administration officials; it may or may not be my own.

My emphasis. On the effectiveness point, the history of the CIA is a history of telling Congress that looking at its operations too deeply will cause the entire apparatus to shatter. If it’s true, then the nation isn’t getting what it should be getting for its $50 billion annual intelligence budget anyway. But it’s a dubious point. The CIA did not cease to function “effectively” after the Church/Pike commissions in the 70s; after the 9/11 Commission and the Silberman/Robb Commission and the Intelligence Reform Act of the 2000s. It entered periods of adjustment after its excesses were exposed. Many if not most of those excesses resulted from the magical thinking of policymakers, a point often lost in the rush to blame CIA for assorted failings.

But speaking of those commissions. The recent history of the United States proves that it’s possible to have a thoroughgoing inquiry about the most politically explosive and potentially toxic events in American history and emerge with a consensus. The 9/11 Commission was not without its flaws, but it demonstrated that a group of wise men can avoid rancor, maintain the good faith of both political parties, display independence, yield an authoritative history of an American trauma and do this all in an election year.

That commission didn’t recommend prosecutions. Indeed, it labored to avoid placing guilt, to the point of copping out. That may or may not be appropriate in this case — let an investigation determine that conclusion — and I’m don’t mean to suggest that a truth commission on torture needs to follow the 9/11 Commission to the “T.” But its example refutes the idea that a commission into torture is necessarily an instrument of persecution and vindictiveness. That’s probably why its executive director favors repeating the experience.