the Hidden US Intelligence Machinery of War on Terror: Top Secret America

Three Days, Sixty Words The legal architecture of the post-9/11 security state was built in days, not years. On September 14, 2001 - three days after the attacks, the wreckage at the World Trade Center was still burning - both chambers of Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. President Bush signed it into law on September 18. The resolution itself runs to only about sixty words: it authorizes the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against any nation, organization, or person he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or harbored those responsible, in order to prevent future acts of international terrorism. The brevity of the text belied the scope of what it authorized. The AUMF carried no expiration date, no list of specific countries, and no requirement that Congress vote again before the president extended military action to a new front. By 2017, according to research compiled by legal scholars, it had been invoked more than thirty times to justify American military operations in more than a dozen countries - from the initial invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, to operations in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, and Syria, to President Obama's 2014 decision to bomb ISIS forces without seeking any new congressional authorization at all, on the theory that a terrorist group founded years after 9/11 was nonetheless covered by a law written to address the perpetrators of that specific attack.