Reply With Quote
Russia and China aren't part of NATO.
I'll have to look that up, but I doubt it. They don't need justification for not sending troops other than "We choose not to".
This would be a hard thing to find, as I'm not sure who would have "standing" to bring this case to the courts.
What exactly do you mean by NATO? After all, Russia and China are also part of NATO, and they disagree with us quite often.
Even if we're bound to help by treaty, there's no one person who has the oversight to effectively enforce it. At the most, they could collectively agree to kick us out of NATO, which isn't going to happen.
Russia and China aren't part of NATO.
Here's one example of a US/NATO disagreement.
http://aknews.com/en/aknews/4/196479/
You're moving some serious goal posts.
Your original question was as follows:
The Hamdan decision is that example. The fact is that SCOTUS has recognized that treaties place binding obligations on the Executive - obligations that impair the CiC function. Are you arguing that Hamdan did anything other than limit the Executive's war powers?
Now, you're asking me for a treaty governing how US military troops will be deployed? Obviously not. Clearly, no treaty dictates where, when, and how US troops will move in battle. I don't know why this is relevant anyway. The North Atlantic Treaty obligates the US to defend other member states - it says absolutely nothing about how the US must deploy troops.
Right - there is probably enabling legislation somewhere in the US code. But that would just codify the terms of the treaty as US law.
As mentioned above - we now agree that treaties can limit the CiC clause by placing binding obligations on the executive's war powers - obligations that cannot be ignored.
Please find where the link states that - in the event a member is attacked - the US is cons ionally not obligated to provide military assistance.
Argh. My bad, I was thinking of the Security Council.
Note the mandatory "shall" and "will" language. How does the US say "we choose not to send any troops" given Article 5.
Besides that, you seem to say that there is no such authority - right?
Pretty sure military personnel would have standing. But that's besides the point. You're saying there's no such authority, right?
I mean the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - Not Russia or China b/c they're not a part of the treaty.
Regardless of what would happen - member states could kick us out. I'm more than willing to concede that there is no "real world" ramification to us welching on our obligations. My point from the get go has simply been that we have obligation.
I'll give you that I did move some goalposts unfairly.
I'll try to do some more research. What I thought upthread was fairly open-and-shut now doesn't seem to be. Learn something new every day, I suppose.
Though, by the wording on NATO's own website, the discretion to send troops is ultimately up to each nation.
However, if we posit a hypothetical were the member states of NATO collectively demand US military assistance in the form of personnel/equipment, that might bind our CiC to action due to our treaty.
As I stated in the post above though, if NATO were to collectively demand our assistance, it would liekly bind the CiC to war per the treaty. (Yes, I've changed my stance on this, kudos.)The final decision on whether to contribute troops and equipment to a NATO-led operation or mission is taken by national capitals, who communicate continuously with NATO through their permanent diplomatic missions, national military representation, or partnership liaison teams.
It does seem so. I want to do a little more research, but I'm temporarily conceding this one to you (which I will take back if I can find evidence contrary to this.)
I'd place more faith in the Treaty's terms over a FAQ on the NATO website.
Frankly, this has all been academic. To think that NATO is anything but a European extension of the US military is beyond re ed. Given that, there would probably never be a situation where the US KoolAid_Man'd its obligations the a member nation. In other words, this scenario would never happen in the real world.
Awesome, awesome inside joke.
But yes, I realize it was a mostly academic argument. I learned from it anyways though.Thanks.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/q...g-on-the-aumf/I participated in an extraordinary hearing before the Armed Services Committee today on the scope of the AUMF. Lawfare readers interested in the scope of the AUMF will want to watch the hearing video carefully (or read the transcript, when available). I have not had a chance to watch the hearing video, and I won’t today. According to my notes of the hearing (and thus this is all provisional, pending review of the tape) DOD officials:
- Acknowledged that they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there. At first they strongly suggested that the AUMF provided the domestic authority, but at the very end one DOD representative tried to walk back that suggestion and said that the authority to use force in those places didn’t necessarily rest (or some such formulation) on the AUMF. As best I can tell he did not walk back the claim that some authority exists and that it might be the AUMF.
- Emphasized that they were satisfied that current authorities suffice to meet the threat. In light of the extraordinarily broad interpretation of extant authorities on display today, and the secrecy of AUMF determinations, it is hard to assess that claim. DOD officials also said that they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities.
- Discussed the “murkiness” and “shifting” nature of memberships and alliances among al Qaeda affiliates, and how challenging it is to make “associated forces” determinations under the AUMF.
- Emphasized that the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over. At one point one DOD official claimed that the end of the AUMF conflict was “a long way off.” At another point an official said the conflict would last “at least 2-3 years.” At another point an official used the figure of 10-20 years, although as Senator Levin pointed out this may have been a reference that included extra-AUMF Islamist terrorist threats, and not AUMF groups themselves.
- Stated that they would provide the Committee with a list of terrorist groups covered by the AUMF. (That should be an interesting (and probably classified) list. But: Why does the Armed Services Committee – which supposedly receives regular briefings from DOD about the shadow war – not know the answer to that question!?)
- Appeared to state that the legal determination of groups covered by the AUMF is made within DOD subject to inter-agency scrutiny.
My general impression of the hearing was that (1) DOD officials were very uncomfortable talking about how they interpret the AUMF and what groups are covered by it, (2) those officials interpret the AUMF very broadly, and (3) several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF. I came away thinking that Congress cannot address the problem of extra-AUMF threats until it gets a handle on how the AUMF is being interpreted and deployed. I also came away thinking more than ever that Congress needs to re-engage in a serious way about the nature and scope of the conflict against al Qaeda and affiliates. Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...n-terror-obamaLast October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted "disposition matrix", a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be "disposed of": indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:
"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified thatThat the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this [not] to be so.
Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.
In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:
'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.'"In response, I wrote that the "war on terror" cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of "terrorism"), and (2) the nation's most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for "at least" another 10-20 years?
The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America's innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.
Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?
Then there are the threats to Americans' security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as "A Nation at War" and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years).
And then there's the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and ins utionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.
Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.
long form journalism in Buzzfeed? I had no idea.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohn...ry-of-the-mostIn the span of a few hours, the U.S. had launched a pair of raids — one successful and one not — 3,000 miles apart, in countries with which the nation was not at war. Hardly anyone noticed.
More than a dozen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, this is what America’s war looks like, silent strikes and shadowy raids. The Congressional Research Service, an analytical branch of the Library of Congress, recently said that it had located at least 30 similar occurrences, although the number of covert actions is likely many times higher with drones strikes and other secret operations. The remarkable has become regular.
The White House said that the operations in both Libya and Somalia drew their authority from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a 12-year-old piece of legislation that was drafted in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks. At the heart of the AUMF is a single 60-word sentence, which has formed the legal foundation for nearly every counterterrorism operation the U.S. has conducted since Sept. 11, from Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes to secret renditions and SEAL raids. Everything rests on those 60 words.
Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow the president — any president — to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohn...ry-of-the-mostWhat was supposed to be a rather routine Senate hearing early in Obama’s second term provided a glimpse into just how expansively the administration had been interpreting the sentence at the heart of the AUMF. On May 16, 2013, the Defense Department sent a quartet of officials to the Capitol to answer questions about the AUMF and the current state of the war against al-Qaeda. In the course of their joint testimony, Michael Sheehan and Robert Taylor, who were speaking for the four, both claimed that the 2001 AUMF and its 60 words were “adequate” for the administration’s needs.
Sheehan, a balding former counterterrorism official with the New York Police Department who looked like he had forgotten to shave that morning, spoke first. The administration, he told the senators, was “comfortable” with the AUMF as it was currently structured because it didn’t “inhibit us from prosecuting the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”
Sen. John McCain was incredulous. Shuffling through some papers, the 76-year-old senator pulled out a copy of the AUMF and started reading. Twenty-four seconds later he finished the 60-word sentence, and then he started to lecture. “This authorization was about those who planned and orchestrated the attacks of September 2001,” McCain said, staring down toward the witness table. “Here we are, 12 years later, and you’re telling us that you don’t think it needs to be updated,” he continued. “Well, clearly it does.”
Other senators piled on. Angus King, a professorial-looking Independent senator who had hosted a public access television program called Maine Watch for 17 years in the 1970s and 1980s, told the four officials that this was “the most astoundingly disturbing hearing I’ve been to.”
“The AUMF is very limited, and you keep using the term ‘associated forces’ — you use it 13 times in your statement — that is not in the AUMF,” King said, before adding, “I assume [the AUMF] does suit you very well because you’re reading it to cover anything and everything.”
Toward the end of the panel, as the chairman was preparing to dismiss the Pentagon officials, Sheehan raised his hand. “Just one clarification,” he said. “Certainly the president has military personnel deployed all over the world today, in probably over 70 to 80 countries, and that authority is not always under AUMF.”
Sitting behind the witnesses, waiting his turn to testify, Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration lawyer, was shocked. Exactly how many of the 70 to 80 countries where military personnel are deployed fall under the AUMF? he asked the next day on Lawfare, a legal blog he co-founded. “The phrase ‘not always’ suggests a high number.”
“The hearing made clear that the Obama administration’s long insistence that it is deeply legally restrained under the AUMF is misleading and at a minimum requires much more extensive scrutiny,” Goldsmith wrote. Goldsmith’s post and Sheehan’s public evasions raised a key question: Twelve years after 9/11, who exactly is the U.S. at war with?
When I contacted the Pentagon to get an answer, a spokeswoman emailed back: “The list is classified and not for public release.”
endless war, what a bore . . .
fifteen years later, Obama is relying on the 9/11 AUMF:
http://www.charliesavage.com/?p=934I wrote a half-reported, half-analysis article in the New York Times today that brings to public light a novel interpretation of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the 9/11 perpetrators. The Obama administration believes it authorized the massive American airstrike in Somalia that killed 150 alleged low-level Shabab fighters — even though the government still does not consider the Shabab, as a group, to be covered by the 9/11 war authorization.
Readers who are interested in the ways in which the nearly 15-year-old 9/11 war authorization keeps getting stretched to erode limits on presidential war-making powers — a push that is fueled, in a vicious cycle, by Congressional fecklessness and paralysis — can look to two parts of Power Wars for insider backstories that help explain what is going on.
Chapter Six (“Targeted Killing”), Section Sixteen (“Is the United States at War with al-Shabaab?”)The story of the argument as it erupted early in the Obama administration’s first term. The primary poles were Harold Koh, then the State Department legal adviser, and Jeh Johnson, then the Pentagon general counsel. Some of this material first came to public light in a Times story I wrote in September 2011 and in Daniel Klaidman’s 2012 book, Kill or Capture, but I had figured it out even more by the time of writing Power Wars and so was able to fill in blanks, add a previously unknown twist about a specific targeted killing dispute between Koh and Johnson, and make the whole thing more coherent and understandable. (pages 274-279 in the hardcover edition)
Chapter Twelve (“The Tug of War”) Section Fifteen (“Extending the 9/11 War”)The story of Obama’s decision to start bombing the Islamic State in the late summer of 2014 and how and why he came to say that he already had all the legal authority from Congress he needed to wage that fight from the 2001 9/11 war authorization, even though the Islamic State was Al Qaeda’s enemy. The description of the internal deliberations and the choice put to Obama — by Neil Eggleston, his White House counsel, and Brian Egan , then the National Security Counsel legal adviser and now the State Department legal adviser — about whether to make the controversial claim that the Islamic State war was part of the Al Qaeda war or whether to say it was a new and different war that would eventually need Congressional authorization, has not appeared elsewhere. (pages 685-690)
~19 years later, the House rescinds the 2002 AUMF
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
