Two former members of the 9/11 Commission tell National Review Online that they are interested in serving once again on a commission to investigate the nation’s national-security apparatus. Tom Kean, the 9/11 Commission’s co-chairman, says that he would be “open to the idea” if the congressional investigations of the Christmas Day bomb plot on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 become too partisan. Another commission member, John Lehman, the former secretary of the Navy, agrees. “I think bringing back the 9/11 Commission is a great idea,” says Lehman. “These issues need to be discussed in a forum that has worked before and with the foundational knowledge that our commission developed over two years of focus on these issues.”

At least one member of Congress, Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) is already pushing to make such a commission a reality. On Tuesday, Wolf sent a letter to President Obama urging him to invite Kean and Lee Hamilton, the commission’s other co-chairman, to evaluate the implementation of the recommendations made by the commission nearly six years ago. “We could bring them on for six months to look at what has been adopted and what has not,” Wolf tells NRO. “There’s been a failure to address our national-security and intelligence concerns on a bipartisan basis. President Obama has asked some people in government to investigate what went wrong with Flight 253, and that’s fine, but we need more: We need members of the commission to come back, with their outside perspective, and help us fix these problems.”

“Our recommendations have only been partially implemented, and that’s very troubling,” says Lehman. “One of our main findings was that there was too much bureaucratic bloat, with too much layering of personnel.” President Obama, he says, “needs to find a way to streamline the bureaucracy,” but Obama won’t be able to unless he enables an outside group to take an objective look at his administration’s failures. “Secretary Napolitano was right,” says Lehman. “The system worked, if only in the sense that the system was already flawed. The president and others want to focus on the process of national security, but they’re missing the point. This near-disaster on Christmas Day wasn’t because of the process. It was about human beings, and the decisions they made. Until we take a closer look at what’s going on, it will remain dysfunctional.”

“The Obama administration has been inattentive on national-security issues,” says Kean. “They’ve been distracted by everything: health care, global warming, etc. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have good people in leadership positions, but the president just didn’t give national security the attention it deserved until after the Christmas Day attack.” That failed bomb plot, Kean says, “was a hell of a wake-up call,” and “makes it necessary for the administration to make a more serious commitment to national security.”