All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Christopher Anders.
He's senior legislative counsel in the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Very important subject.
Doesn't seem to be getting much coverage on TV out of the corner of my eye here, but I guess it wouldn't since it's so important.
Perhaps, anyway, maybe you can explain.
A new declaration of worldwide war without end is what it's called at ACLU.org.
And this is a proposal, I'm not sure how far it's gotten in Congress by some Republicans, to replace what they are saying is outdated, the authorization to use military force passed by the Congress after September 11th, with a new one, which says what and does what and how's it going and what can we do to stop them?
Well, this amazingly has gotten very far.
Basically, what Congress did, the House of Representatives House Armed Services Committee, which is a committee with oversight over the Department of Defense, last week, literally in the middle of the night, it was about five minutes after midnight, passed out a provision that would basically have the United States be put into a war state with almost the entire world.
So what it does is it says that the United States is in armed conflict with al-Qaeda, Taliban, Associated Forces, and that the president has the authority to use the military.
Wherever people fitting in those categories are, including against nations that harbor them.
So what this means is basically the United States would be in a global war, in a real war, but a global war with suspected terrorists wherever they are and against whatever nations are harboring them.
And so it's a huge expansion of the war authority that had been given to the president 10 years ago, to President Bush, as his tool to get into Afghanistan and go after the plotters and planners of 9-11.
It takes that and really puts the whole thing on steroids and makes it permanent.
So there's no limitation, there's no requirement of any tie to any harm to the United States, there's no tie to any specific threat to the United States.
It just is saying to this president, any future president, you have the okay from Congress to use the military wherever you want as long as there's a suspected terrorist involved.
Alright, so I want to make sure I understand this right, where George Bush had the phony excuse of nuclear weapons programs in three countries that had safeguards agreements operational with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And none of whom were making nuclear weapons at the time, his axis of evil and all that, and that being the threat that we must preempt, that they could give nuclear bombs to terrorists who could nuke us in our jammies in the middle of the night.
You're, I think, explaining to me that Obama, or any other president after this legislation, wouldn't need any such thing, they could refer back to this authorization to use force the way it's written, in a way where, say for example, if this had been the law after 9-11, Bush could have just done Iraq without seeking a separate authorization from Congress at all, right, he can just go on to any country that he wants from here without ever going back to Congress again.
Yeah, and it sounds like basically it's kind of a six degrees of separation game from al-Qaeda or the Taliban, so if someone can make a claim that there's some support that's been given by somebody to a terrorist anywhere, whether it's true or not, that that can be the basis for the U.S. military being used.
And the result of that means that this president or some future president could decide, we're going to war in Somalia, or we're going to war in Yemen, or we're going to invade Iran, all those things would be in the range of possibilities without ever having to go back to Congress.
So the U.S. forces could be sent in, our servicemen and women could be sent into those countries, and without Congress ever okaying that.
And now one of the scarier parts about this whole thing is that it's also had almost no debate in Congress.
Literally last week after midnight in committee there was six minutes of debate.
This is buried deep inside a much bigger bill called the National Defense Authorization Act.
And then what's going to happen next is probably on Wednesday or Thursday of next week the full House of Representatives is going to debate the bill.
And we're hoping that there's going to be an amendment made in order to strike out that provision so that the full House of Representatives will have an opportunity to vote on this.
But this is something that until today for how big this is, it's amazing that the way that they've been trying to do it is to sneak around, stick this, it's literally section 1034, 1034 in a three or four hundred page bill.
And it's literally four paragraphs in this big bill, and they're trying to pull a fast one on the American public.
And how is it in the Senate right now?
In the Senate, Senator McCain introduced a bill that has this in it, and he introduced that I guess in March, and with some other supporters of his on the Armed Services Committee.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Carl Levin from Michigan, is going to be marking up, considering the same kind of legislation, the Defense Authorization Bill, in June, probably the week of June 13th.
And the votes on it are going to be close, because that's a very closely divided committee.
And there are some people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are pushing very, very hard for this, because they believe that the military should be used everywhere and anywhere.
And they don't believe that we're just in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they believe that the war is everywhere, including within the United States.
And so their view is that the President should have the power to use the power to bring the military force wherever terrorism suspects are.
And now, so when they say associated forces, I mean, how silly is it for me to say, Chris, you better watch your back, right?
Because look at what you're doing as legislative counsel up there, opposing laws like this.
You don't have to be providing aid and comfort or anything like in the old law.
Could they not just say this is a battlefield and the ACLU are the enemy?
Yeah, and I would hope it won't go that far, but there is no definition of it.
And one of the things that— I mean, that's the point.
The precedent is set, right, where they could do this to anybody's little sister at this point.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, and I think that one of the things that I'm sure you know from your own legal work on this is that— Oh, no, that's the other Scott.
I'm the radio host.
He's the anti-torture international human rights lawyer.
But the real concern, you know, a real concern of this is that even when the United States is in a war, the only people that the United States or any government has the right to kill are people who are directly engaged in hostilities, basically people that really are soldiers and all.
And the way this is set up is it's people that are supporting people who are supporting terrorist activities.
And so at least as you read this, it starts to look like the military would have the authority to kill people whose involvement might be helping somebody who is helping a charity that knowingly or not was giving money to a terrorist organization.
And then ironically, it doesn't even require that that terrorist organization have any tie whatsoever to any connection to any American interest.
So for example, there could be some nut on the other side of the world who is a terrorist, but the most that person has the ability to do is set off a pipe bomb maybe in the local village market.
And as bad as that might be, that's not a threat to the United States.
It's not a threat to the United States' interest, not a threat to the United States' citizens.
But under this, the United States military can and should be used to take that person out.
And not only that, I mean, they'd never have to provide any evidence of any of these things to anyone.
Yeah, and I think that part of it is that if you look at the run up to the Iraq war, and certainly there were lots of mistakes, lots of debate back and forth about whether that was a good process or not a good process, or whether the vote was a good vote or not a good vote.
But in that process, Congress held 15 hearings before it voted on this authorization for use of military force for Iraq.
It gave President Bush the authority to go into Iraq.
Here, there have been zero hearings.
There have been zero votes.
Members of Congress, the version that was voted on in committee last week was the fifth different version of this.
The very original version of this was drafted by President Bush's Justice Department in 2008.
It's morphed a little bit, but now nobody even knows exactly what it means.
Some people are arguing it's a declaration of war.
Some people are arguing it's authorization for use of military force.
Some supporters are saying, oh, no, no, we're just trying to redefine a few things and make things a little clearer.
But we're really not changing anything.
We're just kind of cleaning things up.
And the fact is that I think everyone can agree that whatever it is that they're doing, it's big.
It's going to have consequences.
It's going to have consequences 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road.
And it's a power that if Congress gives it to the president, it's never going to get it back.
Well, we can see with the War Powers Act, which itself is unconstitutional and gives the president the authority to start wars kind of in general, like some kind of general warrant on the world or whatever, which is unconstitutional anyway.
But they say, okay, you've got 60 days to start a war.
Then you've got to come back to us.
Here we are 60 days on Libya, and the attorney general is putting out things that say, oh, come on, this is David Addington's theory of the inherent plenary authority of the president granted from God or something because it ain't in the Constitution.
It says he can do whatever he wants, and he's getting away with it in practice, which is what counts.
And the Congress ain't going to stop him.
So I don't know why they even bother passing laws at all anymore, really.
One of the things that's been interesting about this issue is as it has started to get attention, there are members of both parties who are starting to really engage.
And in today's Detroit News, there is a terrific opinion piece by Jason Amash, who is a freshman Tea Party-endorsed Republican who expresses a lot of concern about this provision and basically says that Congress should be careful with this power that the Constitution has given it to decide when the nation should be going to war and shouldn't just be handing over all of its power to this president or a future president.
And I think some of the members of Congress from both parties are starting to realize that this is not a good way to operate.
But I think the problem, and for your listeners, it really is important for people to contact their members of Congress, who right now, today, because the House of Representatives is in recess, that most of them are at home in their home district.
And so this is a very good time to open up the phone book or figure out how to contact your member of Congress in their home state, because that's where they are right now for most of them, and say, no, this is something we don't want.
Or you can visit the ACLU's website, ACLU.org, and as soon as you get on there, you'll see a logo that says, Tell Congress No Worldwide War, and it gives you a way to contact your member of Congress by sending an email, and it will automatically find your member of Congress and send your member of Congress an email.
Or you can do both, call and email, and doing that, I guess, gets you some extra credit.
Well, I'm sorry.
I completely misstated the theory behind the continued war in Libya at this point, and the 60 Days of the War Powers Act runs out.
It's not that baby Jesus gave him the authority like David Addington used to say about George Bush.
It's that, or I don't know what it was, maybe the spaghetti monster.
Somebody gave Bush the authority.
It wasn't in the Constitution.
But Obama's actually just saying, no, it's because we handed it off to NATO makes it not our war anymore, even though it's at least American droids doing all the fighting over there.
Yeah, well, there seem to be a couple different theories, and they also put out an opinion from the Justice Department that basically says, well, past presidents have taken the military into action around the world on their own, so because they've done it, it must be okay, which is the kind of excuse I get from my 9-year-old sometimes about things that he shouldn't be doing.
But that's not the kind of legal analysis that should be coming out of the Justice Department to justify significant military action.
And those are decisions that the Constitution says should be made by Congress.
And there's a reason for that, which is that for a decision that's as important as where the United States is going to be using lethal force, military force around the world, that the country should be engaged on that decision, and it should be engaged not just through the president but through Congress, especially the House of Representatives that still is the people's house and the closest institution to the people.
And when any president cuts everybody, cuts Congress out, it means that there's no check on the decisions that he or she is making.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure how much they are the people's house anymore, but it's funny because that bogus argument that, hey, well, Lincoln and FDR did it and whatever, or George Bush did it, as silly as that is on its face, it's very revealing, I think, of the fact that that is actually exactly how it works, right?
If FDR and Truman did it, then Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson can too, and just change all the names to our time.
That is exactly what it is.
If Nancy Pelosi is elected in 06 and the first thing she does is go on Tim Russert and announce that impeachment is off the table, there is no law that George Bush could break that would result in us impeaching and removing him from power, you have my solemn vow on that, well, then that means, in effect, that's right.
He is, and any president, is now completely unimpeachable.
They can kill whoever they want, tap whatever phone they want, break any law they want, do things however they want, pass laws like this that are completely unconstitutional, whatever, and they'll always get away with it forever, just like she said.
Just like in their bogus argument that that's what makes it okay.
I think that here, one of the arguments that's being made in a terrific article in The New Republic, if you go onto The New Republic's website, there's an article by a law professor at Northwestern, Joe Margulis, and he talks about his concerns about this new war provision, worldwide war provision.
And one of the things that he makes as a point, which I think is really interesting, is that when Congress, right after 9-11, at the very height of people being in a panic, being afraid, being scared of what was going to happen next, that Congress still passed a law that had some limits to it, that basically still focused on the people that caused the 9-11 attacks.
And here, 10 years later, with Osama bin Laden dead, and with all that has taken place since then, for Congress now to say, oh no, what we're doing is we're going to go back and change that law and take off any limitations that Congress had put on 10 years ago after 9-11.
What would that say about us as a nation, that we're actually more in a panicked state now, 10 years after 9-11, than we were a week after 9-11 when this legislation passed?
And I think it is a big problem, because I don't think the United States should not be in a permanent state of war.
It's not good for the country, it's not good for the economy, certainly.
It's not good for our system of checks and balances, it's not good for civil liberties, it's not good for lots of different things.
And if there are people in Congress who believe that there's a specific threat that needs military action somewhere around the world, then go and do the hard work of making the case and holding hearings and talking about why that is a threat, and why American servicemen and servicewomen should be put into harm's way for it.
But don't just try to sneak a provision in, literally in the dead of night, into a much bigger bill and hope that nobody notices, and then put the United States in a perpetual state of war.
Well, am I right then that these are, my understanding, these are pretty much specifically the provisions that Daschle and Leahy refused to go along with, right?
Dick Cheney and them requested an authorization to use military force that was more or less this broad, right?
And that was rejected by the eventual recipients of the anthrax letters a week or two later.
Yeah, and that's my understanding, too.
I actually never saw what it was that the Bush White House had sent over, but my understanding is that what they looked for initially was broader than what actually passed, and Congress, which was a Republican-run Congress on the House side, looked for something that's narrower and focused.
And that law has been, unfortunately, very broadly interpreted by both the last administration and this one, too.
But if you read it on its face, it does have some limitations, and it's mostly focused on the 9-11 attacks, entirely focused on the 9-11 attacks and the people that harbored the people that planned the 9-11 attacks.
And this takes off all of those limitations and just strengthens it, broadens it out, and with no limitations, no limitations by geography, no limitations by time, no requirement of any harm to the United States, that you end up with a state of endless worldwide war.
Yep, well, that's where we are so far.
Bush used to like to call it the first war of the 21st century.
We're just getting started here, everybody.
Look out.
No, but I think that the important thing for people to know is this is not a done deal.
This is something unlike the old Bush days when things would be announced on high.
This is something, it is going to get a vote next week in the House of Representatives.
People can go and express to their members of Congress that they are shocked that this is even being discussed now and that this should be voted down.
And then the Senate is going to be dealing with it this summer.
And then President Obama, of course, is going to have to make a decision on whether he vetoes it if it ends up managing somehow to come through Congress.
But there's a lot that people can still do on this.
So this is not one to just be kind of angry at what's already happened.
This is something where people can take action.
They can stop this from happening.
And the first step is to let people know.
And I think, you know, I really appreciate your show focusing on this today because part of it is really just getting the word out right now that this is something that's in play.
It's going to get a vote next week in the House of Representatives.
It's something the Senate is going to be dealing with this summer.
And people have to be making very clear no.
Right, well, yeah, and I'm sorry for being so pessimistic, especially, you know, talking with a guy from the ACLU who works on Capitol Hill and actually where the rubber meets the road to really try to stop these things.
You know, I think the ACLU does a lot of really great work along those lines.
You'd have a lot more support if you were for the Second Amendment too, I think.
But anyway, that's a different show.
But, you know, without you guys actually doing the work, things would be much worse and they would have already been much, much worse over this last decade.
And so, yeah, I certainly don't mean to sell you short.
You know, I urge you guys to do, and I thank you guys for doing everything you can to try to stop this.
You know, hopefully one day we'll be successful in repealing the 21st century.
But stopping this expansion of it would, you know, be a good start.
Yep.
Be a good precedent set too that, see, we can do it, right?
Yeah, yep.
All right, everybody, that is Chris Anders.
He is the Senior Legislative Counsel in the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office.
Thanks very much for your time.
Great.
Thank you.
All right, bye-bye.
