Recently by David Lindorff: Holiday Greetings: President and Man-of-Peace Obama Has a Xmas Present forAfghanistan
Nobody in the corporate media mentions it, but the war in Afghanistan which President Barack Obama just ramped up by 50% this year, with the dispatch, first of 17,000 troops last spring and now with another 30,000 troops, to begin deployment on Christmas, is being fought on the shaky legal basis of a hastily passed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) voted by Congress back in October 2001, more than three years before Obama was even elected to the Senate.
Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan on a lie to fight in an illegal war
That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with almost no debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.
A Foreign Policy of Fr...
Best Price: $0.25
Buy New $8.85
(as of 06:20 UTC - Details)
While Congress saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization to launch an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (an attack that quickly toppled the Taliban government, but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to its being called off half a year later so troops could be shifted to a new war in the making against Iraq), Bush and Cheney interpreted it as a “declaration of war” in a “global war on terror,” which they claimed had no border, no end, and which they even tried to claim extended to within the boundaries of the US.
So anxious were Bush and Cheney to be permanent wartime generalissimos, unfettered by Constitutional constraints, that just minutes before the measure went to the Senate for a vote, according to then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, they sought to add the words “in the United States” after the phrase “appropriate force” in the language of the resolution. As Daschle, who wisely refused their request, notes, “This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas – where we all understood he wanted authority to act – but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens.”
The point though, is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an authorization to use military force to go after terrorism. It was not an authorization to conduct a full-scale war against another nation, or to become enmeshed in a civil war in another nation, which is what is going on in Afghanistan today. That, in fact, is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF to authorize his invasion of Iraq.
December 4, 2009
