Daniel's prompt today starts from a specific grievance. The Israeli government has, for close to three years, refused to cooperate with an independent state commission of inquiry into the events of October seventh. The prime minister has wanted to handpick the commissioners, the security establishment has run its own internal probes, and the whole thing has sat there like an open wound. Then in April the High Court stepped in and gave the government until July first to propose a framework. That deadline has now passed, the elections are a month away, and the question is still unresolved. But Daniel's actual question is bigger than the Israeli case. He wants to know where this institution even comes from, the public commission of inquiry, this idea that a matter of sufficient public importance deserves a formal fact-finding process. How have different countries done it at different moments in history, and where does our modern sense of what a best practice commission looks like actually come from?
And the Israeli case sits inside that history as the latest chapter, not an anomaly. That's the thing I want to hold onto from the start. When a government resists an independent inquiry into its own failures, it's not breaking with the tradition. It's participating in the oldest part of it.
That's a grim place to begin.
It's the truthful place. Because a commission of inquiry is a strange creature from birth. It's the state creating a body to examine the state. The state funds it, the state defines its mandate, the state decides who gets to sit on it, and then the state is supposed to accept whatever that body concludes, even when the conclusion is that the state failed catastrophically. That tension isn't a bug that crept in over time. It's the founding condition.
So before we get to the history, let's name the Israeli specifics, because they're the sharpest current example of that tension. October seventh, twenty twenty-three, was the worst single day in Israel's history. Over twelve hundred people killed, hundreds taken hostage. And the immediate demand, from the public, from the opposition, from large parts of the security establishment itself, was for a state commission of inquiry, the strongest form Israel has. Headed by a Supreme Court justice, with statutory powers to compel testimony and documents. Netanyahu has resisted that from the beginning. He's argued, among other things, that it should wait until the war is over, that the army should finish its own investigations first, that a commission headed by the court's former president would be biased against him. And in the absence of a state commission, what we've gotten is exactly what Daniel said. Internal military probes, a civilian comptroller's review, and a prime minister floating his own preferred list of commissioners.
Then the High Court ruled in April that the government had to propose a framework by July first. That deadline came and went. And now we're in September, with elections scheduled for October, and the inquiry question has become a campaign issue. Which means the timing of any commission, the mandate, the membership, all of it is now being negotiated in the shadow of an election. That's the state of play.
And notice what's already happened there. The question has shifted from what happened on October seventh to who gets to investigate what happened. That's the appointment problem Daniel's pointing at. The credibility of the inquiry becomes inseparable from the credibility of the people picked to run it. And the government knows that. Every government knows that.
So where does the institution itself come from? You said it's a strange creature from birth. Take us back.
The lineage goes much further back than most people assume. The standard story is that the modern public inquiry is a twentieth century invention, the British Tribunal of Inquiry Act of nineteen twenty-one and everything after. But the actual practice starts in medieval England. The Crown would issue commissions to investigate local grievances. A dispute over land boundaries, corruption by a local sheriff, a bridge that collapsed. The king couldn't be everywhere, so he'd commission a group of local worthies or royal officials to go find out what happened and report back. The key word is commission. The authority came from the Crown. The commissioners were the Crown's men, investigating on the Crown's behalf.
So from the very beginning, the investigator was appointed by the power being investigated.
And that's not a cynical observation, it's just the structure. The medieval commission wasn't designed to hold the king accountable. It was designed to extend the king's reach. To gather information so the Crown could act. The idea that a commission might turn around and find the Crown itself at fault, that took centuries to develop.
And what changed?
The nineteenth century. Parliament grows stronger, the franchise expands, the press becomes a real force. And you start to see commissions used as a tool of parliamentary oversight rather than royal administration. A scandal breaks, the newspapers are full of it, the opposition demands answers, and the government of the day sets up a commission to investigate. Sometimes to find the truth, sometimes to buy time, sometimes to bury the thing under procedure. But the form is now public. Hearings are open, witnesses are called, reports are published. The commission is becoming a democratic institution rather than an administrative one.
And then the twentieth century formalizes it.
Nineteen twenty-one. The Tribunal of Inquiry Act. The British Parliament passes a law that gives a formal legal framework for setting up these inquiries. The crucial innovation is that a tribunal under the Act gets the powers of the High Court. It can compel witnesses, demand documents, punish contempt. Before that, inquiries relied on voluntary cooperation. If someone didn't want to testify, they just didn't. The nineteen twenty-one Act changes that. Now the inquiry has teeth.
And that's the model that spreads.
It becomes the template. The statutory inquiry with coercive powers, public hearings, a published report. And after the Second World War, it becomes the standard response to national scandals and disasters. The Aberfan disaster in nineteen sixty-six, when a coal tip collapsed onto a school in Wales and killed a hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults. The inquiry there, led by Lord Justice Edmund Davies, was extraordinarily thorough. It found the National Coal Board had known about the danger and done nothing. And it named names. The board's chairman was effectively forced out. That inquiry became a benchmark for what a public inquiry could do.
And then Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday is the other end of the scale. Nineteen seventy-two, British soldiers shoot dead thirteen unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry. The first inquiry, the Widgery Tribunal, was held almost immediately and was widely seen as a whitewash. It exonerated the soldiers and blamed the victims. And that report sat there poisoning things for twenty-six years until Tony Blair, in nineteen ninety-eight, announced a new inquiry, this time led by Lord Saville. That inquiry ran for twelve years, cost nearly two hundred million pounds, heard from over nine hundred witnesses, and in twenty ten produced a five thousand page report that found the killings were unjustified. The soldiers had lied. The first inquiry had been wrong.
Twelve years. And that's considered a success.
In the sense that it finally established the truth. But twelve years is a long time for a wound to stay open. The families waited nearly four decades total. And that's one of the recurring features of this institution. It operates on a timescale that has nothing to do with the public's demand for answers. The public wants resolution, the inquiry wants thoroughness, and those two things are often in direct tension.
So that's the British tradition. What about the American one?
The American version developed differently. The US doesn't have a single statutory framework like the nineteen twenty-one Act. Instead, you get ad hoc commissions created by Congress or the President, each with its own rules and powers. The most famous modern example is the 9/11 Commission. Created in late two thousand two, after enormous pressure from the victims' families. It was co-chaired by a Republican, Tom Kean, and a Democrat, Lee Hamilton. That bipartisan structure was deliberate. The idea was that if both parties were represented at the top, neither side could dismiss the findings as partisan.
And the commission had real resources.
Over eighty investigators, a staff of dozens, a budget in the tens of millions. It interviewed more than twelve hundred people, reviewed millions of documents, and in two thousand four produced a five hundred sixty-seven page report that became a bestseller. The report was remarkably blunt about the failures of US intelligence. It named specific agencies, specific officials, specific missed opportunities. And it led directly to the biggest reorganization of American intelligence since nineteen forty-seven, the creation of the Director of National Intelligence.
But it had limits.
It did. The commission couldn't compel testimony from everyone it wanted. Condoleezza Rice initially refused to testify publicly, and only did so after significant political pressure. The White House fought over access to certain documents. The commission's mandate was also narrow. It was asked to look at the attacks, not at the broader question of whether the Iraq war was justified. And some of its most important recommendations were never implemented. The report's call for congressional oversight reform went nowhere.
So even the gold standard American example had the same appointment problem. The commissioners were appointed by a president and a Congress who had their own interests in what the commission would and wouldn't find.
And that brings us to Chilcot. The Iraq Inquiry, announced in two thousand nine by Gordon Brown, chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This is the one that gets held up as the modern gold standard. It ran for seven years, heard from over a hundred fifty witnesses, examined two point six million words of evidence, and in twenty sixteen produced a twelve volume report of two point six million words. The report found that Tony Blair had taken Britain to war based on flawed intelligence, that the legal basis for the war was far from satisfactory, and that the planning for the aftermath was wholly inadequate.
Seven years. Two point six million words. Twelve volumes. That's not a report, that's a bookshelf.
And that's part of what made it credible. The sheer weight of it. Nobody could claim it was a rushed job or a cover-up. The inquiry had full access to classified documents. It held public hearings where Blair was questioned for hours. It had the power to compel testimony. And the findings were devastating for the government of the day. Blair's reputation never recovered.
So what made Chilcot work where others failed?
Several things. Independence. Chilcot was a retired civil servant, not a political appointee. The inquiry was set up by one prime minister, Brown, and reported to another, Cameron, which insulated it from the immediate political pressure. It had full access to documents, including the most classified material. It held public hearings. It had adequate funding and time. And crucially, there was the political will to let it do its work. Nobody pulled the plug.
But that political will is the fragile part. It's not guaranteed by any law. It's a choice the government makes.
And that's the point Daniel's really getting at. The best practice model, the Chilcot model, depends on a government being willing to be investigated. Willing to hand over its documents, willing to let its officials be questioned in public, willing to accept findings that may destroy careers. When that willingness isn't there, the whole structure collapses, no matter what the law says.
Which brings us back to Israel.
Let's do that. Because the Israeli case is the stress test. Israel has a specific legal form for this. The state commission of inquiry, established under the Commissions of Inquiry Law of nineteen sixty-eight. It's headed by a Supreme Court justice, appointed by the president of the Supreme Court, not by the government. It has full subpoena powers. It can compel testimony and documents. Its findings are not binding in a criminal sense, but they carry enormous moral and political weight. The Agranat Commission after the Yom Kippur War, the Kahan Commission after Sabra and Shatila, the Winograd Commission after the Second Lebanon War. These are the precedents. These are the inquiries that forced resignations, that named names, that changed the course of Israeli politics.
And the government knows exactly what a state commission would do. That's why it's resisting.
Netanyahu has been explicit about this. He's said he doesn't trust the Supreme Court, that a commission headed by a court-appointed justice would be biased, that the court is out to get him. So instead he's proposed his own framework. A political commission, or a governmental commission, where the prime minister appoints the members. And he's floated names. People he considers allies, people he thinks will be sympathetic to his narrative.
And that's the appointment problem in its purest form. The government wants to choose its own investigators, and it wants to choose investigators it believes will not find the government at fault.
The internal probes have been conducted in the meantime. The IDF has run dozens of investigations into specific failures on October seventh. The Shin Bet has done its own review. The state comptroller, who is a Netanyahu ally, has been working on a broader report. But none of these are a substitute for a state commission. The army investigating itself is not the same as an independent body with subpoena power and public hearings. The army has an institutional interest in its findings. It wants to preserve morale, protect careers, maintain public trust. Those aren't necessarily the same as establishing the full truth.
The High Court's intervention in April was the judiciary trying to force the issue. The court said the government had to propose a framework by July first. That's a rare move, the court inserting itself into what the government considers its prerogative. And it's now September, and the framework hasn't materialized, or at least hasn't materialized in a form the court or the opposition accepts.
The timing matters enormously here. October elections. The inquiry issue is now a campaign issue. The opposition is running on accountability. Netanyahu is running on, among other things, the claim that the court and the left are trying to remove him through legal means rather than at the ballot box. And so the inquiry itself becomes a political weapon. Whoever wins the election will shape the inquiry. If Netanyahu wins, he'll continue to resist a state commission. If the opposition wins, one of their first acts will be to establish one with a broad mandate.
The inquiry has become a hostage to the election, and the election has become partly about the inquiry. That's a feedback loop that does nothing for the families of the dead, nothing for the hostages, nothing for the public's need to understand what happened.
This is where the comparative dimension gets uncomfortable. Because Israel is not unique. Look at the US after 9/11. The Bush administration initially resisted any independent commission. It argued that Congress was already investigating, that the intelligence committees had oversight, that an independent commission would leak secrets and undermine the war effort. The families of the victims had to fight for over a year, with public campaigns and lobbying, before the commission was created. And even then, the administration fought over access and testimony.
The UK after Iraq. Blair only agreed to the Chilcot inquiry under enormous political pressure, years after the war, and even then the inquiry was initially held in private. The decision to hold public hearings came later, after criticism.
Australia after Robodebt. The Royal Commission into the automated debt recovery scheme ran from twenty twenty-two to twenty twenty-three. It found the scheme was unlawful, that it had pursued debts against people who didn't owe them, that it had caused immense human suffering. And the government that set up the commission, the Albanese government, did so precisely because it wanted to hold the previous government to account. The commission was a political weapon as much as a truth-finding exercise.
The pattern is consistent. Governments resist independent inquiries into their own failures. They agree to them only under pressure. And even when they agree, they try to shape the mandate, the membership, the timeline, the access. The instinct for self-preservation is older than the institution itself.
That's the deeper problem Daniel's pointing at. The preferred investigator taint. When a government appoints its own allies to investigate its own failures, the findings are pre-judged as illegitimate, regardless of their content. It doesn't matter if the commission does honest work. If the public believes the commissioners were chosen to reach a particular conclusion, the report is dead on arrival. The appearance of independence is not a luxury. It's the entire ballgame.
What does best practice actually require? You laid out the Chilcot features. Independence from the appointing authority, statutory powers to compel evidence, transparent methodology, adequate funding and time, and the political will to accept damaging findings. But the last one is the one that can't be legislated. You can write a perfect law, and if the government doesn't want to be investigated, the law is just words.
This is the thing I keep coming back to. The commission of inquiry is a democratic institution that depends on a pre-democratic virtue. It depends on the government being willing to submit to something that might destroy it. That's a strange thing to ask of any institution. It's like asking a patient to consent to a surgery that might find the cancer is terminal.
You would know about that.
I would. And in medicine, we have a name for the patient who refuses the scan because they don't want to know. We call it denial. And denial doesn't cure the cancer. It just means you find out later, when it's worse.
Where does that leave the Israeli case? The elections are a month away. The court has set a deadline that's already passed. The government is resisting. The opposition is promising an inquiry. The public is caught in between.
The most likely outcome is that the election resolves the immediate impasse. If the current government falls, a new government will establish a state commission quickly, and the inquiry will proceed. If the current government survives, the impasse continues, and the question becomes whether the court has any real power to force the issue. The court can rule, but it can't enforce its own rulings against a government that refuses to comply. That's the constitutional crisis waiting in the wings.
The knock-on effect are already visible. The longer the inquiry is delayed, the more the public's memory of October seventh becomes contested. Different narratives harden. The army's internal probes leak selectively. The government's allies push one version, the opposition pushes another. The truth becomes a political commodity before any commission ever gets to establish it.
That's the real cost of delay. Not just that the inquiry is late, but that the space the inquiry was supposed to fill gets filled by something else. By partisan narratives, by selective leaks, by social media. The commission of inquiry is supposed to be the place where a society agrees on what happened. If that place doesn't exist, the disagreement just gets worse.
The Israeli case reveals something uncomfortable about the whole model. The commission of inquiry works best when it's least needed. When a government is already willing to be held accountable, the commission functions smoothly. When a government is determined to resist, the commission becomes just another battleground.
Yet the alternative is worse. No commission at all. Just the government's own version of events, unchallenged. That's the pre-modern condition. The medieval Crown investigating itself and finding itself blameless.
The institution is fragile, flawed, and indispensable. That's a strange combination.
That's most democratic institutions. The ones that matter are always the ones that can be broken by a determined enough actor.
Hilbert: They can be broken by paperwork too.
Go on.
Hilbert: I worked on Bloody Sunday. Junior clerk, early two thousands. My job was cataloguing witness statements. Boxes and boxes of them. The evidence room smelled like old paper and dust, and the boxes were so heavy you needed two people to lift some of them. I spent eighteen months putting statements into a database, and at the end of it I couldn't have told you what any single witness actually said. I could tell you the box number, the shelf location, the date it was logged. But the content, no. It was just volume. Thousands of pages, and the meaning of them was somewhere in the aggregate, not in any one document.
The scale of the evidence became its own kind of obscurity.
Hilbert: That's what I'm saying. Everyone talks about Chilcot's two point six million words as a strength. I look at that number and I think, who read all of that? The commissioners didn't. They had staff. The staff didn't read all of it. They had summaries. The summaries were written by other staff. By the time the final report comes out, it's been filtered through so many layers that the actual evidence is just a mountain in the background. You can't see the shape of it. You just know it's there.
The volume becomes a weapon.
Hilbert: It can be. Bloody Sunday's final report was five thousand pages. Took two years to write after the hearings finished. By the time it was published, the public had moved on. The news cycle doesn't wait for a five thousand page report. The day it came out, it was the top story for maybe a week. Then it was something else. The families read it, the lawyers read it, the historians will read it. But the public, the public got the headline and moved on.
The thoroughness that makes the inquiry credible also makes it indigestible.
Hilbert: My wife's uncle worked on the preparation for Chilcot. Civil servant. He used to say the real decisions were made in the corridors, not in the hearings. The public sessions were theater. The actual negotiation happened in private meetings about what would go into the final report, what would be emphasized, what would be buried. The hearings were real, the testimony was real, but the shape of the final product was decided by people who never sat in the hearing room.
That's a significant claim. That the appearance of independence is partly a performance.
Hilbert: I don't know how much was performance and how much was real. But he was there, and that's what he saw. The public sees the hearing, the cross-examination, the witness in the chair. What they don't see is the meeting afterwards where someone decides whether that witness's testimony makes it into the summary. The report is a document. Someone writes it. Someone decides what goes in and what stays out. And those decisions are political, even when the people making them think they're just doing their jobs.
The best practice model, the Chilcot model, the gold standard, might be less independent than it looks.
Hilbert: I'm not saying Chilcot was a whitewash. It wasn't. Blair got hammered. But the process that produced that hammering was not as clean as the public imagines. It was a negotiation. A very long, very careful negotiation between people who all had different interests in what the final report would say. The independence was real, but it was also managed.
That complicates the picture. We've been talking about independence as a set of structural features. Statutory powers, appointment by the court, access to documents. But if the real decisions are made in private meetings about emphasis and framing, then the structural features only get you so far.
Hilbert: Structure matters. But it's not the whole thing. The people matter too. Who's writing the summaries, who's deciding what the commissioners see. That's where the power is, and it's power nobody audits.
The Israeli government's resistance, the refusal to cooperate, the insistence on its own appointees, that might be more honest than the theatrical independence of a Chilcot-style process.
Hilbert: I wouldn't go that far. A rigged commission is still worse than a managed one. But the difference between them is smaller than people think. They're both trying to control the narrative. One just does it more politely.
The public's trust depends on not seeing the management. On believing the theater is real.
Hilbert: That's the whole trick of it. The institution only works if people believe in it. And the belief is fragile. Once you've seen the backstage, you can't unsee it.
Have you seen the backstage?
Hilbert: I've seen enough. I catalogued the evidence. I saw what got logged and what didn't. I saw the boxes that were opened and the boxes that stayed sealed. I'm not saying anything was suppressed. But the process of selection starts long before the report is written. It starts with what gets put in the database. And that was my job, and I did it the way I was told.
From the very first step, the inquiry is making choices about what counts as evidence.
Hilbert: That's what an inquiry is. A series of choices about what matters. And the people making those choices are human. They have opinions. They have bosses. They have a sense of what the report is supposed to say, even if nobody ever says it out loud.
That's a heavy thing to sit with.
Hilbert: It's the job. I did it for eighteen months and then I left. The pay was fine. The hours were long. The boxes were heavy. Claws don't help with the filing, I'll tell you that.
Where does that leave us? If even the gold standard is partly a performance, and the performance itself has value, then the question becomes whether the Israeli government's refusal to perform is more honest or just more destructive.
I think it's both. It's more honest in the sense that it doesn't pretend the government is willing to be investigated. But the honesty doesn't help anyone. The performance, even if it's partly theater, creates a shared narrative. It gives the public something to believe in. The refusal to perform just leaves the wound open.
The wound has been open for nearly three years. The families of the dead, the hostages, the survivors, they're still waiting. And the longer they wait, the more the truth becomes contested, the more the narratives harden, the more the possibility of a shared national reckoning recedes.
The fragility of the institution is the point. It depends on a government's willingness to submit. When that willingness is absent, the institution fails. And the failure is not just a legal problem. It's a social one. A society that can't agree on what happened can't agree on what to do next.
That's the open question we're left with. If the appearance of independence is partly a performance, is the performance still worth having? Does it create something real, even if the process behind it is messier than the public imagines? Or is the Israeli government's resistance actually a more honest acknowledgment of what the institution really is?
I don't know the answer. But I think the performance matters. A society needs rituals of accountability, even if the rituals are imperfect. The alternative is a society where the powerful never have to answer for anything, and that's worse.
The commission of inquiry is a fragile institution. It depends on a government being willing to be investigated, which is always in tension with its instinct for self-preservation. That tension may never be resolved. It may just be the price of democracy.
On that cheerful note, we should probably let Hilbert get home.
Thank you, Hilbert, for producing the show as always. And for the eighteen months of evidence cataloguing.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast. If you want to send us your own prompt, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
