Gov. Kean should call for the 9/11 Commission to return

by: Hopeful

Thu May 12, 2011 at 04:15:00 PM EDT

...after the actionable intelligence is drained from the bin Laden documents, it would be useful to reconvene the 9/11 Commission and have them review the ten-year hunt for bin Laden. It's not helpful for something that looked like a failure on May 1 to be retconned into an inevitable, inexorable success on May 2. The tale of the bin Laden hunt -- and the lessons to learn from it -- is the logical final chapter of the commission's  2004 report. And the gravitas of the 9/11 Commission, delivered through a public report, would create the closest thing possible to a narrative that can stand proudly before history.

There is a lot at stake because we need to know what really works as well as understanding bin Laden's role for the sake of history. Marcy Wheeler says it better than I ever could:

In addition to assessing whether torture, skilled interrogation by al Qaeda experts, or something else worked, the Commission could also review whether dragnet illegal wiretapping or targeted, legal wiretapping worked better; whether human missions or drones did; whether ground wars or smaller responses worked better (particularly when the ground war had nothing to do with terrorism). The Commission could develop a sense of where our counterterrorist investments paid off, and what served primarily to enrich contractors.

I hope Tom Kean will step forward one more time for his country and offer to reconvene the 9/11 Commission to assess what worked (and what didn't) now that we have experienced a decade of the "War on Terror."