I've said it before on this forum, if there was a sincere effort to hold those accountable for negligence, I'd give up on MIHOP immediately. It's sort of the Al Capone strategy of convicting the mob boss on tax evasion as opposed to the slew of obvious other crimes.
A "sincere effort to hold those accountable for negligence" would require a seismic shift in US politics, which has been notoriously split very nearly 50/50 between the two major parties for more than a decade, with one or other party regularly controlling one or both houses even when there is a President from the opposing party in office. Put simply, nobody has sufficient political capital to waste on revisiting an issue which dates back 11 years, especially not when "those accountable" logically include senior Republican politicians, so that attempts to prosecute them would immediately cause a closing of the ranks on party lines. The same can also be said for all of the fallout from the subsequent war on terror under Bush and now Obama - the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and sundry other disasters since.
It'd help to pay attention to how the 1970s committee investigations came about - because of a truly major political scandal which temporarily knocked the Republicans out of office and reduced their delegations in Congress and the Senate, so that the
94th Congress saw the Rockefeller Commission into the CIA, and the
95th Congress saw hearings into MKULTRA. The 95th Congress also had a filibuster-proof majority, which undoubtedly helped to shut down any attempts to throw sand in the cogs of the committee hearings. These two congresses also saw the
House Select Committee on Assassinations function from 1976-1978.
The other reason why these committees could investigate previously hushed-up or sidelined issues was because the relevant war (Vietnam) was over, Saigon having fallen in 1975.
The US has had several moments of closure in the past few years, starting with the pull-out from Iraq and continuing with the death of Osama Bin Laden. But the ongoing war in Afghanistan coupled with the gridlock in US politics as a whole means that there is not yet a comparable window of opportunity to reopen old wounds as there was between 1975-1979.
Incidentally, the US government has
only this week declassified a slew of documents relating to US knowledge of the Katyn affair which took place a whopping 72 years ago. It took
11 to 12 years for the US to acknowledge this as a Soviet crime, during the Korean War, after it had long become obvious that the Soviet Union was not a US ally. The same conditions don't, of course, apply to Saudi Arabia, which
is still a US ally.
But if it takes the US government 72 years to release potentially quite embarrassing documents on an event in 1940, then it's a fair bet that none of us are going to see the last i dotted regarding 9/11 in our lifetimes.
So all in all, waiting until "a sincere effort to hold those accountable for negligence" may amount to the same thing as waiting for pigs to fly.
