Congresswoman Lee was the only member of Congress to oppose the 2001 AUMF. At the time, Congresswoman Lee wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that the authorization “was a blank check to the president.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, the 2001 AUMF has been used to justify US military action at least 41 times in 19 countries.
The full text of the legislation is available here. The bill has 46 original cosponsors.
(5.3.2019) Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) discuss new legislation they introduced that would effectively end the US war in Afghanistan. #CNN #News
If passed, the AFGHAN Service Act would also permanently end America‘s involvement in Afghanistan and overturn the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, said the lawmakers, who serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
„It is time to declare the victory we achieved long ago, bring them home, and put America‘s needs first,“ Paul said.
(c) REPEAL OF AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE
—The Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40) is repealed effective on the earlier of —
(1) the date that is 395 days after the date of the enactment of this joint resolution: or
(2) the date on which the Secretary of Defense certifies that all United States Armed Forces involved in operations or military actions in Afghanistan (as described in subsection (a)(1)(A)) have departed from Afghanistan.
(29.5.2018) The William Safire column, „You Are a Suspect,” was published in the Times in 2002—two years before Facebook was created. And Safire isn’t talking about social networks or digital advertising—he’s discussing Total Information Awareness, a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) program that proposed mining vast amounts of Americans’ data to identify potential national security threats. The virtual grand database was to belong to the Department of Defense, which would use it to identify behavior patterns that would help to predict emerging terrorist threats.
(29.8.2014) Die nach den Attentaten vom 11. September in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika dem Präsidenten vom Kongress persönlich ausgestellte Vollmacht, der ein nun fast dreizehn Jahre andauernder weltweiter Terrorkrieg a.k.a. „war on terror“ folgte, ist in Deutschland immer noch weithin unbekannt.
Radio Utopie dokumentiert dieses in jeder Hinsicht verheerende historische Ermächtigungsgesetz im Wortlaut.
(14.9.2018) Seventeen years ago the US went to war on the strength of a single sentence: 60 words that were written, debated, and voted upon before the US even knew for certain who was behind the 9/11 attacks. In those panic-stricken early days, action mattered more than knowledge. And on Sept. 14, 2001, three days after the attacks and with the rubble in New York and Washington still smoking, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, by an overwhelming margin: 98–0 in the Senate, and 420–1 in the House.
(16.8.2018) According to findings by the Lead Inspector General of Operation Inherent Resolve, the United States-led military coalition against the Islamic State, the terror group is much larger than previously thought and still poses a significant threat.
(9.8.2018)
incredibly, the most widely supported effort to improve on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a resolution that has been stretched past the breaking point by successive presidents, would actually legalize war in all of the places it is presently being waged and radically increase the president’s ability to legally expand the Forever War.
America has a war problem. Government officials assure us we’ve brought Al Qaeda to its knees and prevented ISIS from establishing a caliphate. Yet with every passing year since 9/11, we’re at war with more groups, and in more countries, than before. And there’s no end in sight.
No one seriously thinks Congress had this in mind back in 2001,
Trump has championed American hard power and his ability to launch punitive missile strikes on enemy targets, be they militant redoubts in Afghanistan or the airfields of the Syrian regime.
Under his watch, coalition forces unleashed a relentless air campaign against the Islamic State, pulverizing the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa. Months later, volunteers are still digging bodies out of the rubble, while rights groups point to an untallied civilian death toll that may number in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.
(17.4.2018) the new Authorization for the Use of Military Force, introduced by Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, and the Democrat Tim Kaine, may end up doing the opposite.
Senator Kaine is right that, as he said in a speech about the bill, “for too long Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war.” The 2001 authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and aimed at the perpetrators of those attacks, has done just that. Three presidents in a row have warped its limited authority into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.
The Corker-Kaine resolution won’t bring an end to the Forever War; it will institutionalize it.
(12.4.2018) It would be hard to overstate the depth and breadth of our concern about reports of the new AUMF. Not only would the Corker AUMF almost irretrievably cede to the Executive Branch the most fundamental power that Congress has under
Article I of the Constitution—the power to declare war—but it also would give this president and all future presidents authority to engage in worldwide war, sending American troops to countries where we are not now at war and against groups that the President alone decides are enemies.
(18.4.2018) New AUMF would cement forever war and give the phrase ‚world police‘ new meaning.
Joining others who have already made their opposition clear, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—who in 2001 was the sole member of Congress to vote against the original Authorization for Use of Military Force in the wake of the the 9/11 attacks—is raising her voice once more against a bi-partisan proposal introduced this week that she says would only strengthen, not curb, the „blank check for war“ that Congress has bestowed on the president.
Saying she has „grave concerns“ about the bill introduced by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Lee on Tuesday warned it „would continue all current military operations, allow any president to unilaterally expand our wars, and effectively consent to endless war by omitting any sunset date or geographic constraints for our ongoing operations.“
Read the text of the bill—officially titled „The Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2018″—here (pdf).
(17.4.2018) The replacement AUMF would formalize a reversal of the Constitution, allowing the president to declare wars and Congress — if it dares — to veto them.
(29.8.2014) Die nach den Attentaten vom 11. September in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika dem Präsidenten vom Kongress persönlich ausgestellte Vollmacht, der ein nun fast dreizehn Jahre andauernder weltweiter Terrorkrieg a.k.a. „war on terror“ folgte, ist in Deutschland immer noch weithin unbekannt.
Radio Utopie dokumentiert dieses in jeder Hinsicht verheerende historische Ermächtigungsgesetz im Wortlaut.
(5.5.2013) The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and provides the legal cornerstone for the so-called US „war on terror“. Only one brave Congress member opposed it. It allows the US government to wage war at anytime, any place and on anyone deemed a threat to national security – with remarkably little evidence needed.
(17.1.2014) Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world.
„For too long, Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war. We‘ve let the 9/11 and Iraq War authorizations get stretched to justify wars against multiple terrorist groups in over a dozen countries, from Niger to the Philippines,“ Kaine said. „Our proposal finally repeals those authorizations and makes Congress do its job by weighing in on where, when and with who we are at war.“
April 13, 2018, 3:05 PM EDT
The U.S. Congress will play a clear role if President Donald Trump decides to strike Syria for using chemical weapons: bystander.
In response to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s claims that President Trump has authority to strike Syria under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Human Rights First’s Rita Siemion issued the following statement:
9/11/2001 Records of the White House Communications Agency (George W. Bush Administration)
(17.1.2014) Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Here‘s how it came to be, and what it‘s since come to mean.
(28.10.2017) The law, commonly called the A.U.M.F., on its face provided congressional authorization to use military force only against nations, groups or individuals responsible for the attacks. But while the specific enemy lawmakers were thinking about in September 2001 was the original Al Qaeda and its Taliban host in Afghanistan, three presidents of both parties have since invoked the 9/11 war authority to justify battle against Islamist militants in many other places.