60 Words and a War Without End: The Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Sentence in U.S. History
Excerpt from Buzzfeed's longform article on the passage and ramifications of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force:
Barbara Lee, a 55-year-old congresswoman with short black hair and the worn-through voice of a lifelong activist, had stayed silent during the first caucus. There had been enough people talking, and as a second-term congresswoman from the liberal California San Francisco Bay Area, she was still relatively junior. But now, as support for the resolution seemed to be gaining momentum, she decided it was time to speak up.
Lee knew what she was about to say would be unpopular, but she had been unpopular before. As a child growing up in El Paso, Texas, during the 1950s, her mother sent her to Catholic school instead of segregated public schools, and later as a high school student in California she broke the color barrier to become the first black cheerleader at her high school.
“This is still a blank check,” she said when it came her turn to speak. The faces staring back at her looked somber and reflective, but Lee could sense the undercurrent of anger running through the room.
“Let’s take a step back,” she begged. “We don’t know what the implications of our actions will be.” A few heads had started to nod along with her, and as Lee sat down, several other members stood up to voice concerns about the dangers inherent in such a broad resolution.
By the end of the meeting, it was clear that this was the resolution, a single sentence and 60 words:
That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
That was it. After more than a day of negotiations between the White House and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, this is what had emerged. Congress could take it or leave it. There would be no going back to the drawing board.
Lee spent much of the night on the phone. Congress was moving forward with the resolution. The only question that remained was how she would vote. She needed to get a sense of what her district back in California was thinking, and she wanted to talk.
“I can’t believe this,” she kept saying into the phone. “Am I missing something?” None of her friends had an answer. They could tell her what they were hearing in California and list what they saw as the pros and cons of different votes. But that was it. No one wanted to give advice.
It was her vote, and it would have to be her decision.
The Senate moved first. Early on Friday morning, Minority Leader Trent Lott came to Daschle with a request. The Republicans in his ranks were getting restless. The White House was telling congressional allies that the resolution was ready, and with the attacks already three days in the past, Lott’s members were tired of waiting. They wanted action.
If Daschle wanted the Senate to speak with one voice, he needed to call a vote. Otherwise, Lott told him, some Republicans might start to move on their own. Typically, voting on something like this started in the House before moving to the Senate and then to the president, but typically the House would have taken the lead in drafting the resolution. The protocol was already out of order. Daschle agreed with Lott’s assessment, and when the Senate was gaveled back into session at 10:16 on Friday morning, he was ready with the resolution.
“Let me say, before I do read this request,” Daschle said as he fiddled with his reading glasses, “how much I appreciate, once again, the leadership of our Republican leader.” Glancing across the aisle to where Lott stood in the mostly empty chamber, Daschle continued: “As he has throughout the week, he has been remarkable. We could not be where we are today, this country or this institution, without the strong partnership and leadership he has shown.”
The White House had organized a prayer service at the National Cathedral for noon, and in an effort to save time, Daschle asked the senators to vote from their desks. Friday had turned into a dreary, rainy day, and they still had a nearly 15-minute drive uptown.
“We want to get on the buses just as quickly as possible after this vote,” Daschle told his colleagues. “They will be right down in front of the steps."
Carl Levin, a portly 67-year-old senator from Michigan with boxy glasses perched low on his nose, addressed the floor.
“This authorization for the use of force is limited to the nations, organizations, or persons involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,” he said. “It is not a broad authorization for the use of military force against any nation, organization, or person who were not involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”
Later that day, Levin’s Democratic colleague, Joe Biden, seconded his interpretation of what the Senate had passed to The New York Times. The current resolution, Biden claimed, was nothing like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had been used to justify military escalation in Vietnam for nearly seven years until it was repealed in 1971.
The Senate, Biden and senior Democrats like John Kerry suggested, had learned its lesson. No one wanted another Vietnam. That, after all, is why they had insisted that Flanigan and Yoo add the War Powers language. But in the rush to draft and pass the resolution, no one had managed to insert a sunset option — a time limit on the use of force. The legal authority Congress was giving to the president would last until Congress took it back. There was no end date, just a vague sentence and the broad authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force.”
On Sept. 14, 2001, no one was thinking about how the war would eventually end, only that it needed to begin.
Just as Daschle had hoped, the voting was over in minutes. Each of the 98 senators present voted in favor of the resolution, and Jesse Helms, who had been stuck in traffic for much of the morning, later took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues he would have voted yea. Only Larry Craig of Idaho, who years later garnered further national ignominy, failed to vote or explain his absence.
On the other side of the building, in the Democratic cloakroom, Lee was still wrestling with her vote. She had already decided to pass on the memorial service. The House was scheduled to vote on the resolution on Saturday and she wanted to spend most of Friday making calls and thinking about what to do.
As everyone else was gathering to get on the bus, Lee sipped from a can of ginger ale and chatted with Elijah Cummings, a close colleague from Maryland. “Are you going?” Cummings asked.
“Well,” Lee hesitated. “I think I’m going to stick around.” But as she spoke, Lee could feel something inside her shift. She couldn’t explain it to Cummings then, or even to herself later. She just knew she needed to go. She needed to be present.
“You know what?” Lee interrupted. “I’m going.” Then she turned and walked out of the cloakroom still clutching the ginger ale as she moved down the steps, through the rain, and onto the bus.
Inside the neo-Gothic cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue, Lee found a seat in the left several rows behind the cluster of former presidents who had gathered in the front. For the next 30 minutes, as the church slowly started to fill, she sat silently listening to the organ and praying. Around her, a few people were already crying and several were whispering softly, a faint rustle that could be heard between hymns.
Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon opened the service with a short reading and a prayer. The next speaker, Nathan Baxter, a third-generation priest and dean of the cathedral, held to a similar script, reading from Jeremiah 31:15: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamenting and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children and she refuses to be comforted because they are no more.”
The tall African-American priest paused briefly to look out across the darkened cathedral as he moved from Jeremiah’s words to his own. “Now let us seek that assurance in prayer,” he said in a slow, deliberate baritone. “That as we act we not become the evil we deplore.”
That’s it, Lee thought from her seat. For much of the past 24 hours, she had been looking for a reason to vote no. In her heart she knew that was the right vote, but she hadn’t been able to articulate why. Baxter’s words did it for her: “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”
She was as angry and heartbroken as anyone else. Her chief of staff had lost a cousin when Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania. But she wanted a measured response, not a blank check for a perpetual war. Something else was bothering her as well. Several of the speakers seemed to be more focused on retaliation than remembering the dead.
This is supposed to be a memorial service, Lee thought. Not a rush-to-war service.
Part of the tone was deliberate. President Bush and his advisers had wanted to strike a note of defiance. In his own remarks, Bush gave voice to the attitude that would come to define his administration. “Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history,” he said from the cathedral’s lectern. “But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
As Bush stepped down, everyone else stood. The marble and stone echoed as the congregation sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Late that afternoon, Lee received a phone call in her office. The vote that had been scheduled for Saturday had been moved up. The hours of prep time she had been counting on to get the language of her floor statement just right were gone. If she wanted to speak, she needed to get to the floor.
To read the full article, click HERE.