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Graham on financial inquiry commission: “We’re not prosecutors”

Posted Jul 16, 2009 by William March

Updated Jul 16, 2009 at 05:06 PM

Former Florida senator and elder statesman Bob Graham, who will be on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to find the causes of the nation’s financial meltdown, said in an interview today he hopes to find out why some nations, including Canada and Australia, were comparatively little affected by the global financial crisis.

Asked whether the commission should fix blame on individuals, he said, “We’re not prosecutors, we’re not trying to indict people for their bad conduct. Our goal is to determine why did the system fall down and what steps can be taken to try to assist with the current crisis and reduce the chances of a future occurrence.”

He noted that the chairman, former California Treasurer Phil Angelides, will decide what witnesses are called and for what purpose.

Graham will be one of 10 people, six appointed by Democratic congressional leaders and four by Republican leaders, on the commission. It’s intended to be similar to the commission that investigated the causes of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Graham said he hopes partisanship won’t hinder its work.

“I’m still chairing a commission on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which has exactly the same makeup—four Republicans and five other Democrats,” he said. “We were able to get a very strong, unanimous report.”

Without unanimous backing by members, Graham said, reports by such commissions lose much of their force.

Some criticized the 9/11 commission for watering down its conclusions in order to achieve that unanimity.

“There’s something to that, and in our WMD report we sometimes used language in order to get unanimous support that wasn’t as sharp as I would have written myself,” Graham said. “But we were still able to get a set of conclusions that I think were hard-hitting.”