All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Heather Brandon-Smith from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That is the great Quaker lobby for peace in Washington, D.C.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
Thank you very much for having me.
Very happy to have you on the show here, and you wrote this really important thing, the 2002 Iraq AUMF, what it is and why Congress should repeal it.
Somebody might presume that since Iraq War II officially ended at the end of 2011, that that AUMF would be obsolete, defunct, de facto repealed somehow anyway, no?
Yeah, I think that would be a correct assumption to make, and it is an assumption that many people made.
You know, when President Obama declared the Iraq War to be over at the end of 2011, a lot of people thought, okay, yeah, the law that authorized that war is obsolete.
It's defunct, you know.
It's unnecessary.
It's over.
And what we have seen since that time, though, is presidents from both sides of the aisle reinterpreting that law to justify some of the current operations that are happening today.
And, you know, most recently we saw President Trump claim that this 2002 Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of an Iranian general in 2020.
So yeah, I mean, I think you're correct that people would think that this law shouldn't really have any relevance today, but we're seeing that presidents don't seem to agree with us.
And then, so when Obama launched Iraq War III in August of 2014, did he invoke this AUMF, or he only invoked the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaeda?
So he justified it primarily under the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Basically the rationale given was that ISIS used to be called al-Qaeda in Iraq.
At the time they had a connection to al-Qaeda core in Afghanistan and that, you know, going back into Iraq, it made sense to, you know, do that under this 2001 al-Qaeda AUMF.
They've always said, though, since that time, that although the 2002 Iraq AUMF should be repealed, it provided some sort of additional authority for operations in first just Iraq and then Iraq and Syria against ISIS.
So yeah, that was, that was what they said.
But it's the primary legal basis has always been for, for current operations has always been the 2001 al-Qaeda AUMF.
Which really does, you know, raise the important point, though, that they did not vote to launch Iraq War III.
So there was no new authorization from Congress whatsoever.
They just had to pretend that the AUMF against al-Qaeda counted against ISIS, which had explicitly split from al-Qaeda in 2013.
Exactly.
And not only had it explicitly split, but the two groups were actually fighting each other.
So the way that the Obama administration had sort of added additional groups to this 2001 al-Qaeda AUMF was by saying that these groups were associated forces of al-Qaeda.
And they couldn't claim this when it came to ISIS, because ISIS, not only was it not associated with al-Qaeda, it was actively fighting against al-Qaeda.
So they concocted this really strange, tricky legal rationale and started saying that, well, the leader of ISIS is the true inheritor of Osama bin Laden's legacy.
That's actually a quote from the press secretary at the time.
So if you sort of like track back their DNA, you know, this group ISIS somehow goes back to the core of al-Qaeda and to bin Laden.
And that somehow gives authority for the administration to to fight ISIS, you know, many, many years later.
Even though that's blatantly false, right?
Even though no one ever said that Baghdadi had ever laid eyes on Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Right.
And at the time, you know, legal scholars were shocked at this new interpretation that this al-Qaeda AUMF that had been stretched to cover associated forces of al-Qaeda could now cover an entirely different group that was at war with al-Qaeda.
We scratched our heads.
And it's kind of a real shame that the head scratching has sort of ceased a little bit, to be honest.
Well, they got away with it.
But, you know, I mean, as you're saying there, in fact, you're even skipping over the part where they just got away with adding the term associated forces to the AUMF when those words aren't in there either at all.
And they never asked Congress to add those terms to that like you would do if you were amending a law.
Yeah, no, exactly.
That's true.
And that's really how we've had the biggest expansion of the 2002 al-Qaeda AUMF is through this term associated forces, which isn't even in the law itself.
The law is actually pretty clear.
It authorizes force against those who were responsible for the 9-11 attacks and those who harbored them.
So, you know, al-Qaeda and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, it's actually pretty clear.
Associated forces is nowhere in there.
We have seen the administration try and use this term, though, in other contexts.
So in the Guantanamo Bay detention context, for example, that's where we first saw them use the term associated forces by saying that those people who are on the battlefield with al-Qaeda but might not actually be a member of al-Qaeda, we can detain them as well.
But that is very different from saying you can detain the guys fighting next to an al-Qaeda fighter from saying you can kill people from al-Shabaab in Somalia in an entirely different country.
So they sort of, this is how they get there.
They claim that Congress has made these little approvals, but they've never amended this law, this 2001 AUMF, to actually say, yes, you can kill all these other people.
Right.
Well, and of course, in 2001, Tom Daschle and, well, I guess Senator Leahy essentially, you know, struck out a bunch of Cheney's proposed language for the AUMF.
And I don't know if it included the exact term associated forces, but something like that.
They wanted it to be overly broad.
And to their credit, the Democrats in the Senate said, no, you're not going to do that.
The guys who attacked us and the people who, as it says here, planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks or harbored such organizations or persons, which, as you say, was clear that that meant at most the Taliban regime in Kabul, rather than anybody you feel like between now and 2021.
Exactly.
So, you know, yeah, you're absolutely correct.
You know, the Bush administration proposed a really broad AUMF that would have authorized this sort of global war on terror that was being discussed.
And Congress explicitly rejected that.
And you know, you can look at the congressional record.
You have members on both sides of the aisle pointing that out.
You know, Lamar Smith, for example, a Republican, you know, commented and said, look, this is only against those who attacked us on 9-11.
Same with Jan Schakowsky.
They said this is a very clear, narrowly tailored authorization to authorize force only against those responsible for the 9-11 attacks and those who harbored them.
So yeah, Congress is very clear when it enacted the 2001 AUMF.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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All right, now, so back to the role of the 2002 Iraq AUMF in Iraq War III.
So they invoked, they said, well, ISIS, same difference, might as well be al-Qaeda.
So we're going to invoke the 2001 AUMF rather than the 2002 AUMF, which after all, I don't think named the Baathist regime explicitly or something.
But I'm just curious, was it like some kind of very narrow circumstance where they felt like they needed to also invoke the Iraq War II AUMF to cover a certain base or something?
What was that?
So what we really heard is that the executive branch likes to be able to rely on as many sources of authority as possible for their operations.
I think it possibly comes from the fact that they know that what they're doing is really a legal stretch.
So instead of just saying, hey, we've got this one law from 2001 and it definitely authorizes force against a group that didn't exist at the time that Congress passed it, they sort of invoked the Iraq War AUMF as well, just to sort of bolster that as well.
They even invoked at one point, the president has constitutional authority to use force without Congress to defend the United States in very limited circumstances.
Sometimes they invoked that as well.
So that's sort of really what we've been seeing, this sort of being unclear about exactly how these laws apply, but still invoking several of them to to sort of bolster their legal argument that they have the authority to conduct these operations.
And then so in Syria, they promised at first no boots on the ground, no boots on the ground.
Then, of course, they put boots on the ground, but they had to say that long enough to kind of smuggle it in under the same anti-ISIS war, even though, I mean, it's true that they did create an Islamic state.
I don't think it really matters whether it had been recognized by the U.N. or anything like that.
But then again, once the Americans and their Kurdish friends in Syria started bombing the crap out of it pretty quickly, you could say like the Americans were preventing the Syrian Arab army from retaking all of that territory.
But essentially, they had recreated the state of Syria with the old Sykes-Picot border there again and all of that.
And so they're not at some point pretty quickly, right in 2014 or 15 at the latest.
They're not really fighting the Islamic state.
They are in they are at war in the sovereign nation of Syria without any authorization at all.
Right.
And without the authorization of the government in Damascus.
Exactly.
And I think this is sort of the key to the problem that, you know, you open this door a crack to, you know, say, oh, well, you know, we're authorized to fight this other group.
And then we go in there.
And then before you know it, you have this mission creep.
You have U.S. military forces being used for purposes that are far beyond what even the administration claimed was their reason for going back in.
And you have these, you know, ever expanding wars.
And that's how we get into the situation that we're in now, where we're in these forever wars.
And, you know, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get out of them, partly because the approach has really not been particularly successful.
So, you know, we can never declare victory and then we can never get out.
Right.
Now.
So here's the thing.
There's a piece by Michael Hirsch in foreign policy dot com about, say, oh, I don't know, three weeks ago, maybe four and maybe five.
I tried to get him on the show.
I need to try again.
Anyway, he says in there that and I think this is somewhat plausible, if not completely, that there's the group of three, the president, his right hand man, the secretary of state, Blinken, who's been his guy for 30 years or something, 20 years at least.
And then Sullivan, who was Hillary's guy, but who apparently he's got a pretty good rapport with there.
And I guess worked for him when he was vice president for a while as well.
Yeah, right.
After she left, because she was she was only secretary of state for four years.
I think he went to work for Biden after that.
So they have a real good relationship, these three guys.
And according to Michael Hirsch, they really want to wrap up the terror war and not just get us out of Afghanistan, but they want to essentially declare victory by defining it as well.
Core al-Qaeda has essentially been destroyed.
And then anything else?
And I love this.
Believe me, I just wrote a book called Call the Whole Dang Thing Off.
They say, well, anything else is just a regional problem.
You know, al-Shabaab or what's left of ISIS in Iraq, something like this.
These kinds of things.
In other words, these can be delegated to regional friends of ours.
And we don't really have to do this anymore.
And so it seems like, I mean, well, obviously goes without saying that they would be up against every institution in Washington, D.C. if they really thought that they were going to be able to do that.
If they really wanted to push to be able to do that.
They really need support.
And so how about a major effort to go ahead and repeal not just the 2001 Iraq AUMF or maybe even never mind that.
Maybe let's focus on the real big one at issue here, the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaeda that they have stretched so far all this time.
And one more thing about that before I be quiet is that I gave a talk in Montana to the Republican, a Republican committee of the state Senate, and they passed House and Senate.
And I forget if the governor signed it yet or what, but they have passed a resolution demanding that the 2001 AUMF be repealed.
The Montana state House and Senate have.
And so it seems like a lot more like that from the states and a lot more activism from the very best of the activists, meaning, of course, the Friends Committee focusing on this right now and especially when it can be spun in a way that we support the president on this.
We read this article in Foreign Policy by Michael Hirsch that says he really wants to end this.
Well, we want to help him end it.
We want to help set the narrative that the American people are with him.
If all of D.C. is against him, all of the rest of the USA is for any amount of rollback and an ending of the terror war.
And if we could do that with by repealing the AUMF of 2001, that would be the most important step of all.
Right.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
And it's really interesting to see state legislatures starting to take their own steps about this.
You know, when you look at public polling, you know, the American people by far want Congress to reclaim their war powers, to, you know, be the body that decides if we're going to go to war, if a war is going to get expanded, you know, that sort of thing.
So the fact that, you know, we're seeing this independent action happening in states is really emblematic of how the American people feel about these wars.
Yeah, the 2001 AUMF, people call it a blank check for endless war because that's really how it's been used by successive administrations.
And if we are going to end the forever wars, you know, that's going to have to come off the books.
The reason why, you know, we are very focused on repealing the 2002 Iraq war AUMF at the moment is because it's a step in the right direction.
It has been so difficult to make any headway when it comes to repealing the 2001 AUMF.
And I will say we fully support that.
Representative Barbara Lee has a bill out there that would actually sunset that law after eight months, which we are fully on board with.
But these efforts to repeal it or to even just sunset it like that have not sort of borne fruit yet.
And very often they have been combined with an effort to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF and the whole thing has failed.
So the way that we see it is to take that first step towards Congress finally reasserting their constitutional war powers towards finally starting to really bring an end to these forever wars from a congressional perspective is let's get this Iraq war AUMF off the books and then let's tackle this much more complicated 2001 AUMF.
Because you know, as you and I might agree that this should be repealed.
We are unfortunately not the only voice in the conversation.
So it's proved to be much more complicated and difficult, but we will keep we will keep at it.
Well, like I say, if you can integrate into that argument that this is what the president wants and we're supporting him, then yes, that ought to help with at least some people, you know, with with important people on the Hill, especially if you can get not just, you know, a Michael Hurst story, but you can get confirmation of that, that they really, you know, they they said that they're doing a review now of the entire drone war and the entire special operations war against Al Qaeda and Associated Forces right now.
So what if there was a tidal wave of we're against the whole dang terror war coming in from everyone right when they're looking at this?
You know?
Yes.
No, absolutely.
And, you know, if if that review takes a really honest look at how things are going, you know, it really should recommend that we bring these operations to a close.
You know, we don't really often talk about what the costs of these wars have been.
We know that they haven't really been a success.
We know that, for example, we have, you know, four times as many extremist groups than we did on 9-11, that, you know, the Taliban now has more territory in Afghanistan that they have at any time since the U.S. first went in there.
We know that there is no military solution to that problem and frankly, to the problem of terrorism.
There are many other tools that we have been under resourcing that need to be used to deal with this.
And we're really creating more groups by, you know, going into these countries and using military force, killing civilians as collateral damage.
For example, you know, there have been over 800,000 people killed in these wars.
There have been 335,000 civilians killed in these wars and they have cost more than $6.4 trillion.
So when you look at that, you know, it's really been very costly and, you know, the results are very questionable.
So we're really looking forward to seeing what the results of this review come out with.
You know, if they reflect what's actually been happening on the ground, then, you know, the recommendation should be that, you know, we really end this sort of war-based military first approach to trying to deal with this problem of terrorism.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder if it was Sullivan that wrote the statement for Biden when he announced the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He did say that, you know, the reason we can leave Afghanistan is because the terrorism problem, you know, the safe haven problem, it isn't really isolated to Afghanistan.
These guys have metastasized throughout the region.
And he didn't sound like he was implying calling the whole thing off as much as continuing essentially, that if not with the military trying to prop up the base in Kabul, narrowing the mission to, as Biden calls it, counterterrorism only, counterterrorism plus, whatever, night raids and drone strikes against bin Ladenites, but not changing regimes and propping up regimes and this kind of thing, then that could continue indefinitely for the next four or eight years.
You know, it's so interesting as well that you mentioned the safe haven issue because that has really been proven to be a myth.
If you actually look at how the 9-11 attacks were planned, they were not planned from Afghanistan.
They were planned from hotel rooms in Germany, from, you know, flight schools in Florida.
They were planned from all around the world.
Yes, you know, Osama bin Laden gave his blessing for them, but, you know, the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks is someone called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's currently in Guantanamo Bay in pre-trial hearings for, you know, carrying out the 9-11 attacks.
And this whole concept of Afghanistan being this safe haven from which this catastrophic attack was planned, it's really a bit of a myth.
And so how can you ever prevent something that never really existed in the first place from never happening again?
I apologize for all those double negatives there, but this concept of a safe haven is just really, you know, not accurate and not what, you know, it's not something that it's sort of possible to prevent.
You know, like you said, groups have metastasized, and you don't need one country to be able to plot this sort of attack.
It's just not the way that the world works.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when, and thank you to Aaron Maté for this one.
I had missed this.
But from, I think it's 2017, Brett McGurk admitted that actually, you know, in the Idlib province is the largest safe haven for al-Qaeda anywhere in the world since Afghanistan before September 11th, which there were only 400 men in Afghanistan before September 11th.
But when he says the Idlib province, that's where al-Qaeda are the moderate rebels and the USA and the Turks support them over the, and against the wishes of the Syrian regime, which would finish them off with the Russians if the Americans and Turks would get the hell out of the way.
So now who wants to bring up a safe haven myth about the Afghan-Pakistan border?
When USA has been backing these guys for years, right there, a stone's throw, anyway, from the Mediterranean shore.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, and so these terms like safe haven that get thrown around, they just don't reflect reality.
You know, we need to look at what's really happening, what's really worked, what hasn't worked.
You know, the Biden administration is correct that, you know, al-Qaeda core in Afghanistan has been, you know, largely degraded.
That was, that actually happened under the Obama administration.
So we really need to sort of look at why did we authorize these wars, you know, or this war I should say, you know, in Afghanistan, which is really what was authorized and then the Iraq war.
Have we achieved those, those aims, you know, are these other operations that we're conducting helping or really harming U.S. national security and global security?
We have to really, you know, take a proper look at this.
And so we're hopeful that that is actually what's going to happen under this, this administration.
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Well, now the rumors are that Amin al-Zawahiri is dead.
And I guess if he's alive, the idea is he's hiding out in some intelligence officer's basement in Pakistan somewhere.
Is that it?
I'm not sure what the rumors are, but I mean, I do know that the U.S. is really incredible at conducting counterintelligence and counterterrorism surveillance and operations to probably make that determination.
If you look at the killing of Osama bin Laden, that was really done as a sort of intelligence operation.
So, you know, it's not really necessary to sort of have a war to be able to keep these people in check or ensure that they can't plot future attacks against the U.S.
So I think we need to sort of reorient the way that we think about fighting terrorism today.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, look, as much as I like the narrative that there's not much of a problem to be dealt with here, I think that's really not right.
And that really, like you're saying, everything that they've done has failed and worse even has been so counterproductive in terms of diminishing these groups.
And there are so many more than ever before.
And now a lot of these times, you know, you call someone a bin Ladenite, but it's really just a foot soldier doing what he's told in his own hometown kind of thing.
But when it comes to actual internationalist bin Ladenite terrorists, there still must be more now than maybe not at the peak in 2015 or something like that, but still far more than what we were dealing with 20 years ago.
And even though the Americans even back these guys and take their side, like in Syria and in Yemen, that's sure not to buy their loyalty, you know, as we saw with the Benghazi attack in 2012 there, where the U.S. was helping the jihadist ship fighters and guns off to the war in Syria.
But that didn't buy their loyalty at all.
And our guys got stung anyway, you know, stationed in the middle of a hornet's nest there.
So but then the overall policy of dominance in the Middle East hasn't changed.
And that's what drove the terrorist war against us in the first place.
So we could, you know, you could have a real problem if, on one hand, doves like you and I win the argument that we really got to stop with these, you know, violent drone strikes and special operations raids and all of this and call off the war on terrorism.
If the overall policy of dominance in the Middle East, meaning propping up local dictators and training their security forces for use against them and, you know, all of the political pressure on them to manipulate oil prices and and continuing support for the Israeli occupation.
All these things don't change.
And we decide to call off the war on terrorism, which has always been counterproductive anyway, I know.
But I'm saying we get attacked after that and the hawks have a huge win that we just absolutely have to stay at war everywhere forever.
You know, if we don't get to the real core of the problem, which is American dominance over there and another part of the world in the first place.
So not that I'm saying we'd be better off keeping the war going, but just I'm worried about that narrative of, you know, now it's peacetime again and we can forget about the problem that we used to have.
You know what I mean?
Which is really not right.
Yes.
No, and I completely agree with you.
And I don't want it to seem like I'm saying that I don't think there is a problem.
I think there is a terrible problem that has been exacerbated by nearly two decades of a military first war based approach to this.
You know, you said, you know, I'm pretty sure there's more terrorist groups than there were before.
Yes, absolutely.
There are 105 more terrorist groups listed by the State Department than there were in 2001.
You know, this approach that we have been taking has only served to exacerbate the problem.
And so we need to look at a different approach.
It's really interesting if you I feel that the people who advocate for more peace and or diplomacy, development, other sorts of solutions are held to a much higher standard than the military approach.
You know, the military approach has not been successful.
And yet the response has often been to use more of a military approach.
Well, maybe it's just that we're not doing enough.
Right.
You know, so we're held to very different standards.
That is the world that we live in.
So as you said, we're going to be up against that.
And, you know, the response can always be from the hawks that will therefore we need to use more of a military response.
But there really are really critical non-military tools that are under resourced.
You know, you talked about, you know, disrupting terrorist finance flows, for example.
That's really critical.
Also, just using a law enforcement approach to, you know, prosecuting terrorism suspects.
You mentioned Libya.
The mastermind of the Libya attacks was actually, you know, brought to the U.S. through cooperation with the Libyan government, put on trial in the U.S.
Abu Qatala is his name, convicted and is now serving a sentence in a supermax facility in the United States.
Same thing with Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, who was captured in 2013, convicted in 2014, and is now serving a life sentence.
So there are other ways to deal with these, you know, these people who threaten the United States other than, you know, taking this military first approach, which has so many other side effects that really just serve to exacerbate the problem.
Right.
I'll tell you what, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, you guys are the real heroes.
You know, you don't just talk the talk, but you guys do such important work constantly up there on Capitol Hill, lobbying for reason in American foreign policy.
And it's so important.
And I am so appreciative of your time on the show today, Heather.
Thank you.
Well, no, it's great to have fantastic partners like you out there.
And I really appreciate you having me on.
All right, you guys, that is Heather Brandon-Smith, legislative director for militarism and human rights at the Friends Committee for National Legislation.
That's F-C-N-L dot org.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
