Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Ben-Veniste

Legal language rarely admits emotion, but Ben-Veniste sneaks a quiet dare into the sentence: we are going to look everywhere, and we are going to do it in a way that no one can later dismiss. The key phrase is "very broad inquiry" - less a promise of curiosity than a claim of jurisdictional muscle. After 9/11, the political instinct was to narrow: identify culprits, fund wars, restore normalcy. A commission empowered to roam threatens every convenient storyline, which is why he foregrounds statute. He is telling skeptics (and perhaps the White House) that this isn't a courtesy interview tour; it's a mandate.

"Thorough, complete" reads like a lawyer's redundancy, but it functions as insulation. The 9/11 Commission operated in a climate of grief, fear, and bureaucratic defensiveness, where agencies guarded turf and politicians feared blame. By stacking synonyms, he signals that partial answers are politically unacceptable, and that the commission knows it will be accused of either overreach or whitewash.

The most loaded clause is "withstand the scrutiny of history". That's courtroom thinking projected onto the future: history as appellate review, the record as evidence, the report as an exhibit that must survive hostile cross-examination. He is also conceding the distrust already in the room. If you have to promise durability, you know people expect a document engineered for the news cycle. Ben-Veniste frames the investigation as something sturdier: not catharsis, not choreography, but a factual architecture meant to outlast the moment that demanded it.