We Need a 7/7 Commission

This week saw the release of two documents related to the 7 July bombings which took pace in London last year. The first was the government’s official account of what happened. The second was the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report dealing with the question of whether the attacks could have been prevented. Both documents were interesting, insightful even. The government’s paper revealed how little we still know about the attackers and their background. (Contrary to press reports, the document doesn’t claim that there were no links to a wider network: it simply says that it’s too early to tell.) The Committee report makes some sound criticisms of government, calling for more resources, more local policing, and better research into what drives young British Muslims to embrace extremist ideologies. Taken together, though, the two reports still left me unsatisfied. Is this really all we can learn from the most devastating terrorist atrocity that has ever happened in England? Britain has a proud tradition of public enquiries. Whether it is about food safety, child care, or institutional racism, whenever something goes wrong in government, the great and the good are summoned to investigate. True, these commissions are sometimes tedious and their final reports hardly make it on many people’s holiday reading lists, but they have produced substantial change and uncovered many ill-practices, which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. They are, in other words, an indispensable part of the British system of checks and balances with which to hold bureaucrats accountable and improve the way government works. Why not have one about the failure to prevent the 7 July bombings? Indeed, had such a massive blunder happened in any other part of government, a public inquiry would be well on its way. Intelligence, though, seems to be different. It is secret, and it deals with matters of national security. But does that mean it should be beyond public scrutiny? One may argue that it is precisely because its proper functioning is vital to national security that its procedures and organisation ought to be subject to constant monitoring and evaluation, and that an outsider’s perspective could help in making that process more objective. There are big questions that need to be talked about. Does it make sense to divide intelligence into ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ when we deal with terrorists who recognise no national borders? Is the co-operation between the various branches of the intelligence system working as well as it could? How can we persuade Muslim communities to cooperate better with the authorities? How can more Muslims be recruited into the police and intelligence services? In the United States, the 9/11 Commission provides a good example of how it can be done. Despite all its limitations and the subsequent criticism that its remit was too narrow, even the sceptics now agree that having a public inquiry into the working of the intelligence machinery was a useful exercise. It laid bare many of the long-established bureaucratic rivalries that had blocked effective co-operation among the different agencies for decades. It challenged received wisdom about the And, perhaps most importantly, it improved the public’s understanding of the intelligence process. The 9/11 Commission also showed that a public enquiry into intelligences doesn’t need to compromise national security. Most meetings were held in public, but some were in closed session. Everyone understood, and there hasn’t been a single complaint by any official that national security was put at risk. The Home Secretary, John Reid, says that a public inquiry would be a distraction, preventing the services from doing what they need to do to protect the country. But how can they hope to a good job if they refuse to learn the lessons from failure? No doubt, the intelligence services will try to play the secrecy card as long as they can. By definition, they are obsessed with keeping things out of the public domain. And like any other bureaucracy, they don’t like the idea of having to justify their ways of doing things. If, however, further attacks are as inevitable as we are always told, the services should recognise that it is in their own best interest to embark on that process while the public still gives them the benefit of the doubt.