Senate majority leader Harry Reid is finally, finally backing efforts to revisit the Eternal War that Bush started...and maybe finally putting an end to it.
Although Reid did not take a specific stand on how the law should be changed, in an interview with BuzzFeed he argued the time has come to revisit the Authorization of Use of Military Force.
“It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but 9/11 was a very difficult time in the history of this country,” said Reid, who voted for the law in 2001.
“[But] I definitely think its something we should definitely take a look at. I think 9/11 is a long time ago, and it’s something that needs to be looked at again. I have no problem with that,” Reid added.
The AUMF gave military and intelligence agencies wide leeway to pursue individuals and organizations with suspected ties to al Qaeda. The law provided the legal groundwork for the administration’s aggressive counterterrorism strategy, from armed drone strikes to “kill/capture” missions, raids similar to the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
Although anti-war elements in Congress have long complained about the broad scope of the scant 60-word law, over the last several years members on both sides of aisle have increasingly raised concerns with the law, worried that it can be used for attacks across the globe against people or groups that were never intended by Congress.
“We are still operating in a war declared on Sept. 14, 2001,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Wednesday during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And both the Bush and Obama administrations have determined that that war can be carried out against members of al Qaeda, against anyone who associates with affiliates or associates of al Qaeda, no matter when those associates pop up … so long as the al Qaeda or affiliated organizations have violent intentions against the U.S. or coalition partners. That’s sort of a vague phrase.”
“I don’t think Congress passing that AUMF Sept. 14, 2001, that 13 years later we’d be still engaged in war,” Kaine added.
The Warren Terrah will be 13 years old in September. That's how long we've been at "war" with Al Qaeda and terrorism, a third of my entire life. It's ridiculous and it needs to end. I'm glad we're finally taking the first steps to see this come to a close. It's cost us millions of lives and trillions of dollars over the last 13 years.
It has to end. Now's the time. I'm all for this.
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2 comments:
The War on Terror was always a sick propaganda joke.
Twenty five
years ago I did some work in Utah. When I would go back east to Ohio
for Christmas people would try to tell me about the threat from political
Islam; I would smack them around, point out that this "threat" was the
merely the military-industrial complex casting about for another Great
Big Enemy to replace the Communists who had recently folded up their
Global Domination Threat tent and slunk home, and scream in vain that we
had our own gangs of terrorists festering out in the desert.
No one ever listens to me.
So
in the wake of the hijackings, it didn't take a global nucular strategy
theorist to see that the Scary Brown People Threat was just an excuse
to open up some cans of wupass that had been planned out for a decade in
the furtherance of some toxic private agendas. And all that security
theatre at the airport was just mass psychotherapy for the placation of
the gullible: every time an American took off his shoes, Osama bin Laden
would laugh and laugh and laugh. He knew, that only we could defeat
ourselves.
So it's about f*cking time that someone declared the whole farce over and won. Mission Accomplished indeed.
Well, good leftie that I am I have a difficult time getting worked up over the plight of Jill Abramson.
Discrimination is a problem, it's very real and we have to take serious action to correct it, but the people at the very tippy top of the pyramid live by different rules from peons like you and me: you get to the top by scheming, connections, and a great deal of luck, and you can get toppled at any moment for any reason.
You may remember Larry Summers, who got fired as president of Harvard. The was a big uproar because shortly before he was canned he had given a speech to a group of women scientists in which he speculated that women were not being promoted because they were stupid. He didn't get fired because of that speech, he got fired because he was an asshole and everyone hated him so much that he couldn't govern effectively, but that notorious incident allowed ideologues on the right to paint him as a victim of political correctness run amok.
In my opinion, the parallels with Abramson are exact: sexism may have played a role, but she lost her job because she failed at playing to the power games at the top.
As an aside, it really irks me that the meager protections - for which so many people have fought and some people have died - that provide a smidgeon of protection for the common working people about whom we never hear, and which fail so many of us, are being mobilized to (potentially) hand millions of dollars to a nasty member of the elite who wouldn't deign to blow her nose on a working woman if she were on fire.
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