Violating the Constitution: Obama's Illegal War on Afghanistan

Karmadillo

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Sat Dec-05-09 12:33 PM
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Violating the Constitution: Obama's Illegal War on Afghanistan

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff12042009.html

Obama's Illegal War on Afghanistan
The Epicenter of Mendacity
By DAVE LINDORFF

Nobody in the corporate media mentions it, but the war in Afghanistan which President Barack Obama just ramped up by 50% this year, with the dispatch, first of 17,000 troops last spring and now with another 30,000 troops, to begin deployment on Christmas, is being fought on the shaky legal basis of a hastily passed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) voted by Congress back in October 2001, more than three years before Obama was even elected to the Senate.

That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with almost no debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.

While Congress saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization to launch an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (an attack that quickly toppled the Taliban government, but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to its being called off half a year later so troops could be shifted to a new war in the making against Iraq), Bush and Cheney interpreted it as a “declaration of war” in a “global war on terror,” which they claimed had no border, no end, and which they even tried to claim extended to within the boundaries of the US.

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The point though, is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an authorization to use military force to go after terrorism. It was not an authorization to conduct a full-scale war against another nation, or to become enmeshed in a civil war in another nation, which is what is going on in Afghanistan today. That, in fact, is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF to authorize his invasion of Iraq.

President Obama is trying to finesse this by falsely claiming, with a straight face, that Afghanistan is part of the “epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda” in the world. He is deliberately trying—and getting full support from the complicit corporate media—to conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda to justify his absurd claim, too, by also falsely claiming in his speech that several unnamed “extremists” have been apprehended in the US who were sent here recently from some ill-defined terror central inside of Afghanistan.

The truth is that not one act of terrorism outside of Afghanistan has been attributed to the Taliban of Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban, while admittedly a brutal, reactionary, fundamentalist group of militant Islamists, are not global jihadis bent on wreaking havoc in the Western world or even in the rest of the Islamic world. They are a domestic Afghan military and political movement that is seeking to return to power in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda, the organization that was the target of the Congressional AUMF resolution in 2001, has long since abandoned Afghanistan for safer, greener pastures.

This being the case, Obama’s war in Afghanistan, and especially his decision to intensify it dramatically, is being conducted illegally, without any actual authorization from Congress, as required by the Constitution.

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