Tuesday, September 20, 2011
By Michael Ratner
McClatchy-Tribune
Ten years ago Sunday, the United States set itself on a destructive course.
Sept. 18, 2001, was the day President Bush signed a bill just passed by Congress called the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Today, America’s use of military force is still going strong, with wars from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen, and from Libya to the Horn of Africa.
Under this law, the president has unlimited power to use force against anyone in the world — that’s any nation, organization, person, associated forces and so forth who the president determines was in any way involved in the attacks of 9/11.
There’s no geographical limit and no time limit.
The president has that power forever. He (or someday she) can try to use it to support an entire domestic spying initiative contrary to established law, as we first learned in 2005.
NSA’s crimes
That’s when it became known that Bush was authorizing the National Security Agency to break a law requiring warrants for the monitoring of the phone calls and e-mails of individuals and organizations inside the United States.
At the time, it was a scandal for the NSA to be searching for evidence of terrorist activity minus the court-approved warrants required for domestic spying under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Now, thanks to congressional amendments to the law in 2008, that previously unlawful activity has legal backing.
Like Bush before him, President Obama claims that the Authorization for Use of Military Force gives him the right not only to make war and kill people, but also to capture anyone he suspects of terrorism anywhere in the world and imprison them forever without trial.
Similarly, the Obama administration uses the authorization to defend its policy of targeted killings against suspects in the so-called war on terror even if they are outside a war zone.
Obama ran for president on his record as a constitutional law professor and promised to return transparency and lawfulness to America’s governing structures. Now, unforgivably, he is embracing summary executions.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force was always an invitation to presidential abuse of power. We should withdraw it right away.
Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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