Many of the inmates had been swept up on the Afghan battlefield and sold to the US for bounties by opportunists who insisted they were al-Qaida. In January 2002, the Guantánamo Bay camp was opened on a US-run sliver of Cuba, with the intention of keeping terror suspects in indefinite detention beyond the reach of the US legal system. A bipartisan alternative with more constraints was brushed aside, and the bill was rushed through a vote before most members of Congress had even read it. Within days of the AUMF’s passage, the Bush administration submitted the USA Patriot Act, which gave the FBI and other agencies broad new powers to collect phone records and other communications of terror suspects. It is the founding text of the “forever war”.Ī separate AUMF was passed in 2002 for Iraq, which is heading towards repeal, but America’s top general, Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told Congress the “2001 AUMF is the one we need to hang on to”.
It has broadly been interpreted as being applicable to Islamic State but the full list of groups and individuals targeted by the AUMF is secret. And those are just the operations that the public knows about. In the subsequent 20 years, the 2001 AUMF has been invoked more than 40 times to justify military operations in 18 countries, against groups who had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaida. “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” “Let us pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control,” Lee warned at the time. Photograph: Adam Traum/APĪmid all the calls for vengeance, only one member of Congress voted against it, the California Democrat Barbara Lee. The authorisation was not limited in time or space.īarbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorisation for Use of Military Force in 2001. It gave George W Bush, who subsequently signed the measure into law, a mandate to hunt down all those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Septemor harbored such organizations or persons”. The AUMF was passed by Congress on 14 September 2001, three days after the attacks. “The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror,” Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s non-fiction book critic, wrote this week. Their conclusion echoes what civil liberties organisations have been saying for the past two decades, that 9/11 is America’s auto-immune disease: the response did far more damage than the original attack. New books argue that lines can be drawn tracing the spread of disinformation on the internet and the direct challenge to democracy posed by Donald Trump and his supporters – culminating in the 6 January insurrection – all the way back to decisions taken in the febrile atmosphere that followed the attacks on New York and Washington two decades ago. The torture of suspects carried out by the CIA and allowed by legal memos issued by the Bush administration has mired the case of the 9/11 suspects at Guantánamo in tainted evidence, leaving the prosecution unable to move forward or abandon the process. But it is still used as the legal underpinning for drone strikes and other military operations ordered by Joe Biden around the world, most with nothing to do with al-Qaida.
The Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that became law on 18 September 2001 was supposed to give the president the tools he needed to combat al-Qaida. More than a decade since the last attempted al-Qaida attack against the country, America’s society and its democracy are shaped – and arguably badly corroded – by how it responded in the first few weeks after the twin towers fell. As the US approaches the 20th anniversary of 9/11, it is clearly not just about history.