Peter Desbarats, a former journalism dean at the University of Western Ontario, was one of the commissioners on the ill-fated Somalia inquiry. Following the amputated commission’s final report, Desbarats produced his own account, Somalia Cover-up: A Commissioner’s Journal. Based on a putative diary he kept at the time, the book says more about Desbarats than the events he investigated.

Desbarats, a late replacement on the commission, seems to have needed some time gathering his bearings. His account of early testimony relating to events before the army deployed overseas adds little to our understanding of the situation. It is only with the scandal-within-a-scandal of document tampering at National Defence Headquarters that the former journalist asks the right questions, fingering heroes and villains, outraged that something like this could happen in Canada.

His anger – and despair – grow as he recounts the Liberal government’s shutdown of the commission early in 1997, and the public indifference to what, even the commission’s critics now agree, was a gross infringement on the democratic rights of Canadians.

However, Desbarats’ defence of the commission blinds him to its evident failings, particularly the persistent badgering of witnesses by commission chair Gilles Letourneau, which led to his thundering exchange with Vice-Admiral Larry Murray, the acting chief of the defence staff. Desbarats ignored the growing resentment toward Letourneau, which Murray skillfully exploited to broaden support for the inquiry’s shutdown.

In the final and least satisfying chapter, Desbarats dons his journalist’s fedora and interviews key witnesses the commission didn’t call – deputy minister Bob Fowler, for example – but his line of questioning is objective to a fault: by pursuing a simple “he-said-she-said” style of journalism, Desbarats fails to address the deeper questions he originally set out to answer.

This belies Desbarats’ thesis, which is that with our peacekeeping military forces now discredited, journalism is the only functioning institution Canadians have left. It is “the one part of the system that leaders of our society do not totally control and that they fear,” he writes. That may be true, but it is an odd conclusion to draw from the Somalia coverage, where news of a scandal involving a major military mission was broken by a small newspaper near an Ontario army base because the major Canadian media had assigned no reporters to accompany the troops overseas.