60 Words

It’s been 25 years since 9/11. Today we talk about the 60 words that ushered in everything that came after.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Matt Kielty. So, we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Actually, a week from today, it'll be the 25th anniversary. And a while back, I co-produced a story that was about the legacy of 9/11. Only, it wasn't about any aspect of 9/11 that I had ever heard before. It's about one single sentence, 60 words long, written in the panicked, grief-stricken days right after 9/11, that ended up defining America for decades. In the story, it's a sort of like strange side door into this legal world behind the longest war in our country's history. We have a couple of updates for you at the end, so stick around for that. But for now, we're just gonna jump in.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  So, here we go.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait, you're listening. All right.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Radiolab.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  From WNYC. See? Yep.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Rewind.

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  Okay, ready? Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

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  I'm Robert Krulwich.

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  And this is Radiolab.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Today, we've got a story about the crazy power of words.

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  In particular, 60 words.

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  Single sentence.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  That is, well, that has, you could say, defined America for the last 12 years.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Number two.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the place to start is a difficult one.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  This just in, you are looking at, obviously, a very disturbing live shot there.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  September 11th, 2001, 8:46 a.m.

• 1:34Speaker 04

  A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don't know anything more than that. We don't know--

• 1:40Speaker 00

  This is a day that anyone who is old enough to remember does remember. We can remember where we were, who we were with.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  So, you have no idea right now--

• 1:48Speaker 05

  Oh, there's another one. Another plane just hit. Right, oh my gosh, another plane has just hit--

• 1:54Speaker 00

  And, of course, we can remember how we felt. Tell me what you just saw. Oh, shit. It fell down. A smoking, oh my god. What happened? It is the worst attack ever on American soil. But--

• 2:15Speaker 00

  If you really want to understand the world we live in now, you've got to jump ahead one day to September 12th, to a corner office in the White House, where there's a lawyer sitting at a computer, trying to figure out, how are we going to declare war?

• 2:31Speaker 05

  And one of the things that everybody realizes after sort of an initial discussion is, yes, we'd like to declare war, but we have no idea upon whom we should declare war.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  That is Gregory Johnson.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  The Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow at BuzzFeed.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Now, the reason this lawyer--

• 2:48Speaker 05

  A man by the name of Timothy Flanagan.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  The reason Flanagan is sitting at a computer in an office is because then-President George Bush had to do something. He had to act, and he didn't want to act alone. He wanted congressional approval.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  Right.

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  I mean, technically, in an emergency--

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  The president can defend the country.

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  He is the commander in chief, after all.

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  He doesn't have to go to Congress and say, hey, do I have authorization to use force?

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  Not in an emergency. That's Ben Wittes, by the way.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  But President Bush needed Congress on his side, he felt. You know, it was important that we project unity, that we were all standing together as one. And second, if this was an act of war--

• 3:26Speaker 01

  The power to declare war in the Constitution is given to Congress, not to the executive.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  And when Congress declares war, suddenly, the president has a very clear and powerful mandate. Now--

• 3:39Speaker 01

  The Declaration of War is kind of a dead instrument of international law. I mean, nobody's declared war since World War II. But the modern incarnation of the Declaration of War is the authorization to use force.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  The authorization to use force.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  What's called the authorization for the use of military force.

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  Or, as it's commonly referred to, the AUMF.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Right.

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  So, our lawyer in the White House, Flanagan--

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  He's given a task--

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  Go write an AUMF that Congress can send to the president.

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  He really has no idea, so he goes back to the last time that the US did this.

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  Last time Congress passed one of these things.

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  He does a quick sort of search on his computer--

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  Boom, finds it. 1991, Iraq, the Gulf War. Flanagan grabs the text--

• 4:27Speaker 05

  And then he copies that into a Word document, and that becomes his template. He makes some cuts, he makes some changes, he deletes some words.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  And then? He hits send. Our war on terror-- A just war. And he sets in motion this bewildering series of events. A US drone strike linked to Al Qaeda-- In the war, bring the troops home now. This madness that is basically the world we live in.

• 4:54Speaker 06

  15 members of a wedding procession were killed by--

• 4:58Speaker 00

  And if you're like me-- Bizarre, even sadistic treatment. If you're like me, and you find yourself flipping through the channels, seeing the news, basically ignoring it, but then every so often thinking, wait a second-- Terrorism targets in Africa.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  From Libya now, the US Air Force-- A drone strike in southern Somalia.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, how are we doing this in all these different places? 100 prisoners are on a hunger strike-- And like that? In protest of their indefinite detention. How are we detaining people for so long?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  You mean, is it okay to do that?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Well, just who signed off on this?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  You know? And it turns out, we all did, because it was in that document.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  This is the legal foundation for everything that the US has done. Everything from Guantanamo Bay, to drone strikes, to secret renditions, to SEAL raids. It's all been hung off these 60 words.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  And that's the crazy part. The body of this document, the part that really matters, and the reason that when I was reading Gregory's reporting on this, I was like, what? Is that it all goes back to one single sentence.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  60 words, one sentence.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Can you read it?

• 6:00Speaker 05

  Absolutely. 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 11th, 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.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  60 words.

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  Today, a collaboration with BuzzFeed--

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And with reporter Gregory Johnson.

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  We're going to try to decode those words.

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  And ask, where do those words come from? And how did they come to mean what they mean?

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  Which is not what you think they'd mean.

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  No.

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  And how did they end up leading us into what is arguably the longest war in American history?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And nobody saw it coming. Absolutely nobody. That's the weirdest part.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Well, nobody minus one. Let's start there. Maybe you should introduce us to Barbara Lee.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Right. Barbara Lee is a Congresswoman from right around Berkeley, California.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Hello?

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Hello, hello.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Hi, it's Barbara.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  And she is someone who has been, in many ways, a lifelong activist.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Going all the way back to when she was 15 in high school in San Fernando Valley.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Because I wanted to be a cheerleader.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  But, you know, since this was the early 60s--

• 7:36Speaker 03

  You had to have certain criteria, like, at least whether it was stated or not, blond and blue-eyed.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  That would have been hard for you, I would figure.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  That was really hard. So, I went to the NAACP.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  She got them to pressure the school to change the rules.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  And I won.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  And she became the first black cheerleader at her high school.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  That's just by way of introduction. Fast forward many years, she becomes a Congresswoman, she gets elected to a second term, and on that day--

• 8:03Speaker 04

  There is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  She was at the Capitol.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  No one knew where to go, so the police officers just said, run, run, run, go, go, go.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  This was an apparent terrorist attack on our country.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  So, I ran out of the Capitol--

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Down Pennsylvania Avenue. I remember looking back and saw a lot of smoke.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Which was, you know, the Pentagon.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  You know, clearly, the country's under attack. Clearly, people have died. Clearly, we've got to deal with whoever did this. Whatever it takes.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Fast forward two days, September 13th, Barbara Lee is back at the Capitol to meet with her Democratic colleagues to review that document that Flanagan had sent over.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  The mood in the room was very somber and very angry.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  The thing we have to keep in mind when we're talking about this is, all of this was done within 72 hours after the worst terrorist attack in United States history.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  And very confused. What would be the appropriate response?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  So, as she and her colleagues read those 60 words--

• 9:03Speaker 05

  There was a lot of debate going on, back and forth.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, oh, yes, from everyone.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Because this actually wasn't the first draft. Flanagan had sent one over the night before.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  September 12th, 2001.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And that one--

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Was something that almost no one agreed to.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  According to Gregory, that early draft had a few extra lines in it.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  One gave the president the power to preempt any future acts of aggression against the United States.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  And Barbara Lee and her colleagues knew--

• 9:28Speaker 05

  That, look, so many things can be packed into this word aggression, that if we sign on to this, that if we give the president this power, the president may never have to come back to Congress ever again and request authorization for military force, because he can say that anything is aggression, and we're also giving him the power to preempt.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  So, they kicked it back to the White House, Flanagan took out those words, and now they have this new draft.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  That the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Which is what you heard. But still, when Barbara read that and saw phrases like "all necessary and appropriate force," she thought, what does that even mean?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  I said, this is too broad. It's not definitive, it's open-ended.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  And as she was speaking, this is taking place in the basement of the Capitol Building, she sees some of her Democratic colleagues start to nod.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yep, people were nodding. People were nodding.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Because everybody there knew the danger of ill-defined words. You just had to go back 50 years.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  To the Gulf of Tonkin.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Gulf of Tomkin.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  Tonkin.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Tonkin, Tonkin with an N.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  To explain.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  My fellow Americans, as president and commander in chief--

• 10:40Speaker 00

  1964, LBJ announces that two American ships--

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  Two US destroyers--

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  parked in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam were torpedoed by North Vietnamese boats.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  By a number of hostile vessels.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Many people now argue that one of these attacks never even happened. Nonetheless, President Johnson wanted to strike back, so he asked Congress--

• 10:59Speaker 05

  To pass a resolution.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Which they did, giving him the power to, quote, "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Making it clear that our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures--

• 11:22Speaker 05

  In support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Now, it is the broad language of that document, most people believe, that opened the door to the worst part of the Vietnam War.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  The Rangers and Marines took casualties, mostly from hidden snipers. The thousands and thousands of casualties.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  They just keep dropping in. There's nothing you can do.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Horrific atrocities.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Charges have been made that troops killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians during a sweep in March 1968.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  And in a television interview in 1969, when President Johnson was asked to justify it all, he said, "You can't just blame him."

• 11:59Speaker 06

  Congress gave us this authority in August 1964.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  To do whatever may be necessary. That's pretty far-reaching.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  That's, the sky's the limit.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  So the lessons of the Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam, that was very much in the air in that meeting on September 13th, 2001.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Several key leaders hoped to avoid a repeat of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  So it was understandable that when Barbara Lee stood up and said to her colleagues that she was worried about some of this language.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  People were nodding. People were nodding. So there was a lot of uncertainty about what to do.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  But in the end, those concerns were ultimately outweighed by another desire.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  We've got to be unified with the President. We can't show political divisions.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  Let's have the nation, let's have Congress, speaking with one voice.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  It was a time for unity and for action. And so, walking out of that Democratic Caucus meeting.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  On the evening of September 13th.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Congressional leadership decided that these 60 words.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  This is the version. There's no going back to the drawing board. And so, at 10:16 a.m., September 14th, 2001. Senate will come to order. The Senate is gavelled into session. The clerk will call the roll. Daschle calls a vote. Mr. Akaka, Mr. Allard, Mr. Allen. There are 98 senators on the floor. Mr. Durbin, Mr. Gornovich. All 98 of them vote, "Yay." No senator voted in the negative.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  So was a sweep.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Later in the day, the resolution would go to the House, where Barbara Lee was a representative. Daschle had actually rushed the vote through the Senate.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  Because the White House has called for a national prayer meeting at the National Cathedral.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  For the victims of 9/11.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  That's supposed to start right at noon. And so.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Right after the vote.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  All the senators pour out of the Capitol and get onto the buses, trying to get through the drizzle.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  It was actually raining that day. Now, at that moment, Barbara Lee.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  She hadn't decided how it is that she was going to vote.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  I struggled with it.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  For the previous two nights, September 12th and 13th, she'd stayed up late.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Calling back to advisers, to friends in California.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  We talked every day.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Including this guy. This is Ron Dellums.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  I served for over 27 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Barbara used to be his chief of staff, and when he resigned, she won his congressional seat.

• 14:11Speaker 06

  You know, she would say, "Well, what about this? And what do you think about that?"

• 14:15Speaker 03

  And we kind of talked through the emotional state of the country.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  That we are feeling pain, anger, we're shocked.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Both Barbara and Ron were trained as psychiatric social workers, so they both knew that when a person is feeling all of those things, it's generally better to do nothing.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, psychology 101. You don't make decisions when you're mourning, afraid.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  On the other hand.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  I believe, you know, in unity too. I want to be unified with the President when the country's under attack.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  I understood.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  And he didn't tell me, he didn't say which way I should vote.

• 14:48Speaker 06

  But I did say to her, "Barbara, however you vote, I will always respect you. You will always be friend. You will always be family."

• 14:58Speaker 00

  So at that moment, with the memorial service about to start and a few hours till the House vote, Barbara Lee was at the Capitol.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  I was in the cloakroom.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And since she wasn't sure how she was going to vote, she planned to skip the memorial service.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  She wanted to stay. She wanted to think.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  And then, I don't know what it was. It may have been the spirit moving me. I don't know, but at the very last minute.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  She was drinking, actually, a can of ginger ale at the time.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  I said, "I think I'm going to go." And I just ran out. I probably was the last one on the bus. I had the can of ginger ale in my hand and ran down the steps and got on the bus.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  She got to the cathedral. The House buses arrived about 30 minutes or so before the opening. And so, for 30 minutes, she's in the cathedral.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  About halfway back.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  Listening to the organ.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Thinking about the families and those who were killed.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  There are people around her who are sort of whispering.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  The pain and anguish.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  The few people who are crying.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  I said, "I got to pray over this."

• 15:59Speaker 05

  And she's just wrestling with her vote.

• 16:04Speaker 05

  Her heart is saying one thing.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  This is too broad.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  And her head is saying, "Unity. How is it that you can be against the President at this point?"

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Speaking of the President, eventually, President Bush takes the podium.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  We are here in the middle hour of our grief. Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history.

• 16:33Speaker 06

  But our responsibility to history is already clear.

• 16:40Speaker 06

  To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.

• 16:44Speaker 05

  And then, as soon as President Bush steps down, everyone in the congregation stands up.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  And they sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Which is a very powerful, a very moving piece of music. But it's not the sort of thing that is typically sung at a memorial service. It's a very forward and almost aggressive sounding.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  There's the phrase, "Terrible Swift Sword."

• 17:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Oh my God. It was not quite what I expected in a memorial service.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  But the second speaker.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  A reverend by the name of Nathan Baxter.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  He got up and he gave a reading from Jeremiah 31.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  When ancient Israel suffered the excruciating pain and tragedy of militant aggression and destruction.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Hearing that all over again takes me right back there. And I remember.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  A voice is heard in Ramah.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Lamenting and bitter weeping.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Bitter weeping.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Rachel weeping for her children.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Rachel is weeping for her children.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  When he spoke, that's when, to me, it was a memorial.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  And then, he started to pray.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  For the healing of our grief-stricken hearts, for the souls and sacred memory of those who have been lost.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  And he said something that really struck Barbara Lee.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Let us also pray for divine wisdom.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  He said, "As we act."

• 18:42Speaker 04

  That as we act, we not become the evil we deplore.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  That evil that we deplore.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  When he said that, I became very, it was this sense of peace and calm came over me.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  And Barbara Lee says it was right then that she knew what she'd do.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  The clerk will report the title.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  House Joint Resolution 64, Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Later that evening, the House opens up its debate on the AUMF. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution, which authorizes the President to use all force necessary. And congressperson after congressperson. Mr. Speaker. Stands up. I rise in support of this resolution. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to fully endorse and authorize the use of force. One after another. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the authorization.

• 19:40Speaker 06

  I rise today in support of this resolution. We were rightly behind our President.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  16 in a row. Until. A gentleman from California is recognized for a minute and a half. We get to Barbara Lee.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Mr. Speaker, members, I rise today really with a very heavy heart. One that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most cautious would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Now, I have agonized over this vote. But I came to grips with it today. And I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful, yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, "As we act..."

• 20:36Speaker 06

  Let us not become the evil that we deplore.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Just after the vote, Barbara Lee says she was in the cloakroom again, and she starts getting accosted by colleagues.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  All of these friends are coming up to her and saying, "You've got to go back. You cannot vote this way."

• 20:57Speaker 06

  Yes, I'm not changing my vote.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  One of them actually said to her, "Look, you've done so much on HIV, you've done so much on AIDS. This vote is going to take you out. Think of the bigger picture."

• 21:08Speaker 06

  They're saying you're dead. Yeah, but that's the right vote. I'm not going to give any president the authority to go to war, and we don't know what we're doing. You know, only Congress can declare war. Help me on this, guys. Has the House vote? Okay, the House has just now finished that vote.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  And we see one no vote during--

• 21:30Speaker 05

  The final vote for the House was 420 to 1.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  We know it's a Democrat. We don't yet know who. We'll figure that out in a moment or so. But that vote is now--

• 21:41Speaker 05

  Barbara Lee was the only person in the Senate or the House to cast a no vote.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  That must have been a very lonely moment.

• 21:50Speaker 06

  To be perfectly honest with you, I said some prayers for my friend. This was the right thing to do. And, you know, votes like this, you have to be ready to pay the consequences.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Over the next few weeks and months,

• 22:05Speaker 05

  her office was inundated with letters.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Barbara Lee, you are a traitor and a disgrace to the office that you hold. You can find all these letters archived at Mills College. You are a blade on American society, a terrorist yourself.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  So much hatred.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I don't know why you decided to place yourself into the camp of terrorists.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  Those attacks came, and they came, and they came.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Subject headline: What's your [bleep] problem?

• 22:26Speaker 06

  Death threats.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Now off to hell with you. You Benedict Arnold wannabe.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  And so I had to have security day and night.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  I'm yours. Thanks for supporting the Taliban. Hey, Hanoi Barbara Lee. What are you? What do you believe in? If you go to Mills College in Oakland, and we sent a reporter there, you will find 60,000 letters. They're not all negative, but most are.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  But Congressman Lee says she never faltered because right after the vote, when she was in her office--

• 22:50Speaker 06

  My dad called me. Lieutenant Colonel, retired in the Army. He said, "I'm really proud of you." You know, and my dad had been in Korea and World War II. And he sees it the way I see it. Because I really wasn't sure what he would say. Because, you know, I really wasn't sure.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  But she thought, "All right."

• 23:10Speaker 06

  Daddy's proud of me.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Now, we should note that Barbara Lee is still a Congresswoman. She did not pay the price for that no vote. And whatever you think of her vote, whether you think it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, what is interesting to me is that, as we're sitting here looking back on 12 years of war, she was sitting there 12 years ago looking forward. And maybe she saw something about how this would play out, about how these words, these 60 words, would start to grow and expand.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  That's next.

• 23:48Speaker 02

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• 26:43Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 26:45Speaker 06

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  This is Radiolab, and today--

• 26:47Speaker 06

  60 words.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  This is a collaboration with BuzzFeed and reporter Gregory Johnson. The story is based on an article that Gregory wrote about the 60 simple words that have really defined American counterterrorism for more than a decade.

• 27:02Speaker 06

  It's called "The Authorization for Use of Military Force." That's shortened to AUMF, and it was passed by Congress three days after September 11th. And here it is again, read by Senator John McCain.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Which says, "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 or organizations." All right, so why would we be looking at that boring-ass sentence?

• 27:40Speaker 06

  He seems almost bored of saying it.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, he does. Can I just be honest with you for a second?

• 27:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  I generally move through the world with the assumption, which has been proven over and over again to be true, that I don't know how the world works. Like, somehow I miss that day at school or something.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  Are you referring to something in specific? Like--

• 28:02Speaker 00

  No, I'm referring to a general sense that somehow Oz is out there behind the curtain, pulling the levers, and I'm just always going to be stuck on this side, you know?

• 28:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  I think it's what motivates this show for me, is that I feel kind of stupid most of the time. And these shows are a way to engage the world and really examine the world.

• 28:19Speaker 06

  Right, exactly.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And when it comes to these matters of national security, I really feel clueless. And so when I read Gregory's article, I felt like I understood something crucial for the first time about the way words actually operate in the world. Because, again, this sentence, this totally boring sentence--

• 28:38Speaker 05

  This is the legal foundation for everything that the US has done. Everything from Guantanamo Bay to drone strikes, to secret renditions, to SEAL raids. It's all been hung off these 60 words. One lawyer who was in the Bush administration said, "Look, this sentence is like a Christmas tree." All sorts of things have been hung off of this.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  But how? How, like, because you read the thing, and you don't see any mention of Guantanamo Bay in those 60 words.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  It doesn't mention detention. It doesn't mention drone strikes. It doesn't mention drone strikes against American citizens.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Okay, so that guy is one of the first folks we called to help us decode this. That's John Bellinger.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  I served as the legal advisor for the National Security Council from 2001 to 2005, and as the legal advisor for the Department of State from 2005 to 2009.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  You can't do any speed dating with a credential like that because the date will be over.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's my congressional testimony voice, guys.

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And we asked him, like, "Okay, so detention isn't anywhere in this document. So how do you read detention from these 60 words?"

• 29:45Speaker 05

  The argument with which I am comfortable as a legal matter--

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Is this. He says if you go eight words into those 60 words, and you get to the phrase "all necessary and appropriate force."

• 29:56Speaker 06

  All necessary and appropriate force, yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  You've got to ask yourself, what is force? What does that mean?

• 30:01Speaker 06

  What do you-- you know what force is? If I punch you in the face, that's amusing force.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  That's one kind of force.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  You can use force to kill people. But a lesser use of force is to detain them. Detention is simply lesser included in the use of force that comes naturally in a military operation.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  It's like a subset of force, basically. So if you're authorized to use force to kill people, you are also by default authorized to use force to detain them.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  Essentially, to knock them out of the battle in other ways. And that that force is both necessary, and it's appropriate. And the courts have upheld that.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  So that one word, "force," that is how you justify Guantanamo Bay? Well, the controversy surrounding Guantanamo Bay continues. The Authorization to Use Military Force--

• 30:47Speaker 05

  What happened at military commissions? Been the legal basis for the detention of thousands of individuals.

• 30:54Speaker 07

  Now, many of them have been detained for more than 10 years. None have ever been charged.

• 30:58Speaker 05

  And the words detention are never mentioned.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's detention. It gets even trickier if you go just a few words past all necessary and appropriate force.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  To what?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  You get to the mention of the enemy, who the force is supposed to be used against, right? And it seems to be very limited language.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  You mean, we can't shoot everybody or anybody?

• 31:19Speaker 00

  No, only the people who-

• 31:20Speaker 05

  Planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored sexual-

• 31:27Speaker 06

  That sounds much more-

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Sounds very much tethered to 9/11, right?

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Which is why a lot of congressmen and women voted for it. Joe Biden, on the day of the vote, September 14, 2001, he says, "Look, people, don't freak out about this language."

• 31:41Speaker 05

  It relates to the incident, and there's broad authority relating the incident. It does not relate to all terrorism, every place.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Because we're just talking about Al Qaeda, who did this, and the Taliban, who have harbored them, right?

• 31:52Speaker 05

  Nope. Not necessarily.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Gregory Johnson again.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  Over time, what's happened is there's been this other sort of catch-all category that has been read into these 60 words, even though it appears nowhere in these 60 words. And that catch-all category is associated forces.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Associated forces?

• 32:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  What we've been calling the 61st and 62nd words.

• 32:19Speaker 06

  The 61st and the 62nd.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Oui oui. And if you define the enemy as Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, it's a whole different ballgame.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 06

  So when you read those, all those words, it did not include the phrase-

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Associated forces is nowhere in the text. So where does-

• 32:36Speaker 06

  So then, why could people cite something that isn't in the text?

• 32:39Speaker 05

  This is one of the enduring mysteries of this.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  So, the earliest example that we could find of those two words is in a 2004 memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. He defines the enemy as Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces. But the truth is, it may have just been there from the beginning.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  What do you mean?

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Because according to Ben Wittes, from the Brookings Institution-

• 33:03Speaker 01

  There is a concept in the laws of war called co-belligerency. It's the idea that if you're at war with Person A, and Person B is on Person A's side in the war, you're also legally at war with Person B.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Makes perfect sense if you think of it in traditional war terms, because like, we're at war with Germany, Italy joins their side, so by default, we're at war with Italy too.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  So just transpose that here. If we're at war with this group called Al Qaeda-

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And a certain set of groups-

• 33:34Speaker 00

  That aren't them.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Join the war-

• 33:36Speaker 00

  On Al Qaeda's side.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Then you are legally at war with them.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  If you don't think about that too hard, it is crystal clear.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  But then, the question that has arisen over time is, how broad do you make that circle?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Because the problem, obviously, is that we're not talking about nation-states anymore, we're talking about groups.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  So, okay, how close does the link to Al Qaeda and the people who carried out September 11 have to be? So if you have someone who's connected to someone who's connected to someone who's connected to someone who was connected to September 11, is that enough? Or is it only three links? Or can you be an associate of an associate?

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Now, we can't exactly know how broadly the Obama and Bush administrations have defined those words, and we'll talk about why in a second. But you just have to look at the news.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  And you could see that, like, we started with a war that was in Afghanistan, and then it spread to a lot of different places: Pakistan, Libya, Somalia-

• 34:30Speaker 06

  Yemen?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and in Yemen-

• 34:32Speaker 05

  There's a lot of debate and a lot of discussion.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  About like, is this legal? Does this have anything to do with September 11 anymore?

• 34:40Speaker 05

  Because now, the group in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a group that was first formed in 2009, they have their own hierarchy and their own structure, and it's not clear how and in what fashion they take orders from either Osama bin Laden, while he was still alive, or now Ayman al-Dawahari. So, does this make them an associated force, or does it make them part of Al Qaeda?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  The answer, at least on- Good morning, everyone. It is Friday, it's September 30, 2011. Mark it down on your calendar. September 30, 2011, seemed to be yes, when the US assassinated two members of the group.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  This is not confirmed yet, but it could very well have been a US Predator drone strike, that is, a US government attack.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  And to put all this in context, between 2002 and 2014, according to some estimates, there have been about 65 drone strikes in Yemen, killing about 400 people. And so much hinges on how you define those words.

• 35:37Speaker 05

  So much is in the definition. I asked the Pentagon, I said, "Who, what are the list of associated forces?" So, Al Qaeda, yes, the US is at war, that's clear. What about the other groups?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Al-Shabaab, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Armed Islamic Group, Abu Sayyaf, Shemaya, Asamiya, Brotherhood of this, Brotherhood of that.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Who, who are these groups? Who is the US at war with? And the Pentagon emailed me back, and they said, "That list is classified and not for public release."

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Wait, so we, who we are at war with is-

• 36:07Speaker 05

  We don't know. I-

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Wait, so you're saying, when you approached the Pentagon and asked them-

• 36:12Speaker 06

  They say that they will not tell you the names of the people we're at war against. Well, maybe they should. Maybe that's a valuable-

• 36:19Speaker 00

  What do you mean?

• 36:20Speaker 06

  Well-

• 36:21Speaker 00

  They, don't you want to know, as a citizen of America, who we're fighting?

• 36:23Speaker 06

  On the other hand, do I want to know as the, if the United States has determined that I am dangerous to it, if it announces, then that would give me a certain amount of notice, which I may perhaps would be disadvantageous to the United States.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  It could also, though, act as a disincentive for you to take action.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe they will just get quieter, more dangerous.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  I mean, it's true, there might be reasons for this.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  They have not wanted to provide a public list because they-

• 36:57Speaker 00

  This is John Bellinger again.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  One, the groups move all the time, and so if you say, "Well, these are associated groups," well, then, certain people just move from Group A to Group B, and they also want to leave these different groups guessing. But it still raises democratic concerns if the American people don't really know who the executive branch believes is covered by the AUMF. In a democracy, and in a representative democracy, that has to be weighed out. Should the citizens of the United States know who it is that the United States is targeting for death around the world? Who it is that the United States is technically at war with? Should war be a decision that the citizens of a democracy, of a representative democracy, have a say in?

• 37:41Speaker 06

  Well, we're a representative democracy, as you just said, so I'm assuming that the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee knows every item on that list.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  I'm not so sure. Good morning, everybody. The committee meets today to receive testimony on the law of armed conflict. One of the more interesting Senate hearings took place in early 2013. Including the status of the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, the AUMF. It was the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan is the Chairman of the Committee. Senator McCain is on the committee. I'd like to welcome our witnesses.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  And Gregory says the senators called a couple of Defense Department officials to answer questions.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify about the legal framework for the US military operations to defend our nation.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Because they wanted to know, like, now that we're 12 years into this war, how are you using this document? Does it need to be changed?

• 38:33Speaker 05

  So the Department of Defense officials, and there were four of them, came and said, "Look-"

• 38:38Speaker 01

  I believe that existing authorities are adequate for this armed conflict.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  "Don't revisit this sentence, don't repeal it, this sentence is sufficient. It gives us all the power that we need."

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Against Al Qaeda and associated forces.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  And as they're laying out their case, they say those two words-

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Associated forces, associated forces, and associated forces-

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Over-

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Associated forces.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  And over.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And associated forces, and associated forces, and associated force, and their associated forces, associated force, and associated forces.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  And instead of just nodding along, a lot of the senators were like, "What?"

• 39:10Speaker 05

  Gentlemen, I've only been here five months, but this is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  That's Angus King, independent senator from Maine.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  And you keep using the term "associated forces." You use it 13 times in your statement. That is not in the AUMF. And you said at one point, "It suits us very well." I assume it does suit you very well, because you're reading it to cover everything and anything.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  But one of the most striking moments of this hearing is when the head of the committee, Senator Carl Levin, turns to one of the DOD officials and asks him-

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Is there a list now, is there an existing list of groups that are affiliated with Al Qaeda?

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Senator, I'm not sure there's a list per se.

• 39:56Speaker 06

  I'm very familiar with the organizations that we do consider right now are affiliated with Al Qaeda, and I could provide you that list. Would you give us that list? Yes, sir, we can do that. And when you add or subtract names from that list, would you let us know? We can do that as well, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Let me just see if I understand what you just said. At a committee hearing, a US senator asks specifically, so who's on the list of people we're allowed to kill?

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Right. That suggested that the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had oversight, really had no idea.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Which made us wonder, like, all right, if we don't have any idea who we're at war with, and the Senate Armed Services Committee doesn't seem to have any idea, then who does?

• 40:37Speaker 05

  Well, one of the things that became clear to me as I was reporting on this story was that many of the people who were making these decisions had never been elected by anyone to any position, and they were the ones who were making the decision, not the elected representative.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  And so who are they?

• 40:56Speaker 05

  Is that to be in my seat? In prison or anything? I guess so, yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  So we were rooting around for a while, looking for an answer to that question, until we found this guy. This is Daniel Kleidman. He's a journalist.

• 41:08Speaker 05

  And I've covered national security and counterterrorism for many years.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  And based on hundreds of confidential interviews that became his book, Killer Capture, he was able to paint a picture for us of who makes these decisions and how. He told us about these meetings. You say it's the STVS meetings. What are they? Who's in the room? How do the events unfold?

• 41:27Speaker 05

  Well, these are, they call them civics meetings in the vernacular of the bureaucracy. It stands for secure video teleconference meetings.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  He described them as a sort of a massive, top-secret Google Hangout chat where...

• 41:42Speaker 05

  Literally hundreds of people from throughout the national security bureaucracy...

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Log in to decide who's on the list and who isn't, and who should live and who should die. You said literally hundreds?

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Literally hundreds of people. Now, many of them are backbenchers. They're not participating in the call, but they're taking notes before they get together in this meeting.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Many of the folks at this meeting, he says, are given little packets of information on each target.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  They call them baseball cards.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Because they sort of look like it. You got a picture and some stats.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  Like Yogi Berra on one side, and then you got his batting average and his hometown on the back.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Well, the terrorist equivalent of all of that. So who is this person? Where does he rank? And what kinds of operations has he been involved in in the past?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Eventually, a general will come on the screen and say, here's our target.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Objective Akron.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  For some reason, he says, they always refer to the targets by the name of American cities.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Objective Toledo.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  General might say, target is in Yemen. We have a drone overhead.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  There's an opportunity to kill this person.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Can we legally do it? And the fascinating thing, although maybe it won't come as much of a surprise, is that the people he's making this pitch to are not generals, but...

• 42:46Speaker 05

  Lawyers.

• 42:47Speaker 06

  There are lawyers everywhere.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  That is just a basic fact of modern warfare, says John Bellinger. You now have lawyers on the ground...

• 42:55Speaker 05

  With artillery units. Tank commanders.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Lawyers in Kevlar, lawyers in helicopters.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  There are lawyers really almost behind every bomb. Just lawyers everywhere? Yeah, and that's a very good thing.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  That's Harold Coe. He was the top lawyer at the State Department from 2009 to 2013.

• 43:13Speaker 06

  Because it means that we're not just shooting away at people willy-nilly, or because we're angry at them or anything. It's a considered, careful decision.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Now, Harold Coe, according to Dan Kleidman's reporting, was in those civics meetings, and he would often be the one to answer the general's questions. Can we legally kill this person? So we asked him, like, if lawyers are now the ones deciding who we are at war with and who we aren't, how do you do it? And unfortunately for us...

• 43:41Speaker 06

  I don't think I can get into that on this call. There are multiple methods, but I'm not going to go into that.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  He said he couldn't comment on any of it because it's classified. But...

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Harold Coe is a creative lawyer.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  According to Dan Kleidman, who spoke with a lot of people familiar with the process, Coe in particular had a fascinating way of determining who is and is not an associated force. In other words, who we are or aren't at war with. And it seems to be less about the groups as a whole and more about individuals within the group. For example...

• 44:11Speaker 05

  Seniority. That was an important issue.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  For Coe, if you're going to target a guy, he has to be a senior member of a group like Al Qaeda.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  He has to be able to give orders, and he has to be unique within the organization.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  You couldn't simply, under Harold Coe's theory, go after, say, a driver or a cook who was in Al Qaeda, or even foot soldiers, because they were fungible.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Meaning they could be easily replaced.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  Another criteria was whether they were externally oriented.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  For Coe, if they were just participants in a civil war, you couldn't target them. But if they were targeting Westerners or Western interests, then yes. So if you take Dan Kleidman's account of Harold Coe's criteria as a representative, and we personally have no way of verifying it, but if you take that as the norm, then maybe there is a strong vetting process in place.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  But I interviewed numerous people who participated in these meetings, and one of the things that I heard over and over again was that there was this kind of inexorable momentum toward killing, and that the military people in these meetings could speak with a kind of a tone of do-or-die urgency. In fact, two of the people, who I quote in my book, used exactly the same metaphor to describe that sense of momentum that was very difficult to resist. It was like standing on a train track with a train hurtling toward them at 100 miles an hour.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Now, then I guess, like, the important question for me is, like, how often do they say no?

• 45:44Speaker 05

  Well...

• 45:45Speaker 06

  Has the answer been 99 times yes and one time no? Or 50 times yes and 50 times no?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  How many noes are there?

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Well, look, I'd say I did not come across many, many examples.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  But he did tell us about this one instance.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  This was a meeting between the top lawyer at the Defense Department, a man named Jay Johnson, and the top lawyer at the State Department, who was then...

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Harold Coe.

• 46:10Speaker 05

  Harold Coe.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  And according to Dan's sources, Harold Coe and Jay Johnson were faced with determining the fate of a 40-year-old man, roughly 40, named...

• 46:19Speaker 06

  Sheikh Muhter Robo. I think that's the right way to say his name. I'm not sure.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  He was a member of the Somali group Al Shabab. And for context...

• 46:27Speaker 04

  The news, World Cup celebrations have turned to tragedy in the Central African nation of Uganda.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  A few months before this conversation, this is in 2010, Al Shabab bombed a rugby club and a restaurant at the same time in Uganda, killing 74 people.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Broken chairs, smashed tables, and the sounds of pain as rescuers search for the living and the dead.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  So that had just happened, and according to Dan Kleidman, at this moment in intelligence circles, there was a debate raging as to whether Al Shabab should or should not be considered an associated force.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  At the time, their leader had sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden, but their agenda was primarily a local agenda. They had never struck out against the United States or against American interests in the region.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  So you've got the top lawyer at the State Department and the top lawyer at the Pentagon facing off as to whether this fellow, Robo, from Al Shabab, should live or die.

• 47:23Speaker 06

  And how does this work? Does somebody just, like, does someone pound the table?

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Yes. This was a very heated meeting. Jay Johnson argued vehemently that Robo was covered under the AUMF.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  He was, after all, a founding member of Al Shabab.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Harold Coe vehemently disagreed. Harold Coe's conclusion, based on the evidence and the intelligence that he saw...

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Was that Robo was not externally focused. In fact, he belonged to a faction of Al Shabab...

• 47:51Speaker 05

  That was arguing against attacking the United States and other Western interests.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  So according to Kleidman, these two men went back and forth and back and forth until eventually Harold Coe just drew a hard line and essentially said...

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Look, if you do this, you need to know that you will be doing it over the unambiguous objections of the State Department's legal advisor.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  The unambiguous move.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  And that's very strong language coming from a lawyer. And the signal that it sent to the White House was, you will be taking military action even though the top lawyer at the State Department had said that this would be an illegal action.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  All right, so what happened? Did they decide not to?

• 48:30Speaker 05

  They did not do it.

• 48:31Speaker 06

  This is not academic. It's, it's, lives depend on which way the decision goes.

• 49:08Speaker 03

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• 50:38Speaker 00

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• 51:23Speaker 00

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• 52:05Speaker 00

  Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  I'm Robert Krulwich.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  This is Radiolab.

• 52:14Speaker 06

  Today, we've devoted the entire-- we're continuing to devote the entire show to a single sentence, one sentence.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  60 words.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  That's all.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  It's the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force was signed into law on September 18, 2001. And together with BuzzFeed and reporter Gregory Johnson, we have-- we have manhandled these words.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, we have dissected, we have bisected.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Trisected.

• 52:36Speaker 06

  And whatever other kind of sected you could do.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Quadrasected.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  To the AUMF, as it's called.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Yes. And, you know, we've looked at how the sentence has defined our last 12 years of counterterrorism.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  And now?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  How will it define our future? Gentlemen, thank you for being here today. This is a very-- So when we were thinking about that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, we ended up calling someone who sat on the committee--

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Tim Kaine, Senator from Virginia.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  And who was there that day.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a-- that was a very, kind of, hair-raising day.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  And Senator Kaine told us that one of the most hair-raising moments for him was when one of his fellow senators, Lindsey Graham, asked one of the Department of Defense officials-- Do you agree with me the war against radical Islam or terror, whatever description you like to provide, will go on after the second term of President Obama? In other words--

• 53:23Speaker 01

  How long do you think this particular war, as declared in the section, is going to go on?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Senator, in my judgment, this is going to go on for quite a while, and, yes, beyond the second term of the President. And beyond this term of Congress. Yes, sir. I think it's at least 10 to 20 years.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  It was chilling.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Because, like, this is already--

• 53:44Speaker 01

  The longest war in the history of the United States.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Longer than Vietnam. And now a DOD official is saying, add on 10 or 20 years?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  So I said-- Is it the administration's position that-- You tell me if somebody is born after 9/11--

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Let's imagine in 2030--

• 54:01Speaker 01

  They join a group that has just become associated with al-Qaeda.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  In 2030--

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Is it the administration's position that the AUMF would cover them and those organizations? And without hesitation, the administration witnesses said yes. As long as they become an associated force under the legal standard that was set out. It's not limited in time, not limited in geography. Really troubling. But, you know, I'm also troubled by another thing. I mean, you know the iconic-- it's a New York picture of VJ Day kiss in Times Square.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. To see that here we have a combination of every type of person-- August 14, 1945.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  There ought to be a day where those who have served in war, that you declare that the war is over and then you celebrate them.

• 54:51Speaker 06

  Are these people happy? That's the only way to express it. Are you happy? You get asked sometimes by service families, like, when is this going to end? Does it ever come up?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  He told us that something like 1 in 3 people in his state of Virginia are connected to the military, so he does get that question a lot. And the truth is, we all want a VJ Day. We need it. And so, seven days after that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, President Obama--

• 55:26Speaker 06

  It is a great honor--

• 55:27Speaker 00

  --gave a speech.

• 55:28Speaker 06

  --to return to the National Defense University--

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Where he seems to say, basically, it's time.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing authorization to use military force, or AUMF.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Basically, he announces that he would like to get rid of those 60 words and end this war.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 06

  But common sense tells you that these are different kind of enemy, not a state or a government, they just-- they make war in a different way.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Senator McCain has a great line. He goes, "Look, we're in an age of warfare where the war isn't going to end with the signing of a peace treaty on the deck of a destroyer. That's not how it happens these days. There's no clear start and ending."

• 56:19Speaker 00

  And yet, the President--

• 56:21Speaker 01

  He wants to end the war, says Ben Wittes.

• 56:24Speaker 06

  And every war has come to an end.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  He sees himself as a person who came in to a country fighting two wars, and he brought them all to an end. And I think he wants to have done that.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  But how do you do that? How do you end a war when the vast amount of people that you're calling the enemy haven't stopped fighting?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  So what he does--

• 56:46Speaker 00

  America cannot--

• 56:47Speaker 01

  --in the May speech, and it's extremely clever, and, by the way, it's really well lawyered, is he announces a set of rules going forward for drone strikes.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  America does not take strikes to punish individuals. We act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  That he's only going to use drone strikes when there's an imminent threat.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  And it's well-understood by people who understand this kind of stuff, that in the Constitution and also in international law, the President is allowed to act unilaterally in self-defense when there is an imminent threat, meaning it's urgent and you can't feasibly capture that person. Ben fears that what President Obama was doing there by stressing that word--

• 57:35Speaker 06

  An imminent threat to the American people.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Is it, he was laying a new foundation. He was saying, when the AUMF ends, and I want it to end, I do have another way of justifying all these things.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Maybe they wouldn't change.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  So the drone strikes and the raids would continue.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  As long as you have a capacious enough understanding of what the word imminent means, you might be able to continue a whole lot of this stuff, and then you don't have to go to Congress at all. And you can say you've ended the war. And the human rights groups will cheer for you. And we're going to mysteriously find that there are a whole lot of imminent threats.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  For freedom. Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  And in the context of what happened to those 60 words, you do have to wonder what's going to happen to a word like imminent. And all the while, according to Ben Wittes and pretty much everyone we spoke with, we haven't really answered the big questions.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  When do we want to attack the enemy? Who is the enemy?

• 58:50Speaker 00

  And if we're going to be fighting them even when we're not technically at war with them, then what's the difference between war and peace?

• 59:10Speaker 06

  And that's why this whole subject is so unsettling. Like, if you don't know the common sense definition anymore of when you're at war and when you're at peace, then how do you write rules?

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  This was an attempt to begin a war, and so it had the usual beginning questions. Okay, you, who are you? You out there, where? You for how long till you surrender? No, you're not going to surrender. Like, all the usual business of warfare, it doesn't apply in this case. So then you have to think, now, what do we do?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's just like one long improvisation.

• 1:00:15Speaker 07

  Hey, it's Matt again here in the present. There are a lot of updates here and also depressingly a lot that has stayed the same. So Obama never did get rid of the AUMF. In fact, he sort of stretched it out even further. About a year after he made that speech calling to end the AUMF, his administration started using it to justify fighting ISIS, arguing ISIS was a successor to Al Qaeda, even though Al Qaeda publicly rejected ISIS. Obviously, the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 under President Biden. You probably remember that didn't go too well. It was basically a disaster. And on top of that, it still left us in this bizarre place with this AUMF hanging open

• 1:01:00Speaker 07

  despite the fact that so many people claimed the war was now over. It definitely wasn't the VJ day that Tim Kaine was hoping for. And Barbara Lee, our one lonely Congresswoman who voted against the AUMF, has continued fighting against it. Our producer Sarah Kari actually talked to Barbara a few years back. Hello, hello. Oh, it's connecting to audio.

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  All right, hold on a minute. Hold on.

• 1:01:22Speaker 07

  Hi, we can hear you. Right as Barbara was sponsoring a bill to repeal actually a different AUMF. So we just told you this whole story of the AMF after 9/11. This one came in 2002.

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  For the Iraq military action, the invasion and war in Iraq.

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  And just last year, in December 2025, Congress finally passed it, clawing back that second authorization. But as for our big AUMF, like the original one, there are multiple efforts still to repeal or replace it. Barbara Lee herself introduced a repeal bill. She's actually no longer even a Congresswoman now. She became the first black woman elected mayor of Oakland in 2025. But her bill is still out there. There are several other attempts, and as of now, they're all still pending. So the 2001 AUMF remains fully intact today. It is still there on the books, exactly as broad as it was in 2001. So those are the updates. I'm Matt Kielty.

• 1:02:21Speaker 07

  Thanks for listening. Huge thanks this hour to BuzzFeed and to their reporter Gregory Johnson. Check out Gregory's piece.

• 1:02:31Speaker 06

  It's where we started with this.

• 1:02:32Speaker 07

  We will link to it from radiolab.org. It's on BuzzFeed as well. It's called 60 Words and a War Without End: The Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Sentence in U.S. History. That is a title right there. Also, thanks to the great Dylan Keefe for original music and Glenn Cochi for music from his album Adventureland. This hour was produced by Kelsey Padgett and Matthew Kielty and myself. I'm Jad Abubrad.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  I'm Robert Rulich.

• 1:02:57Speaker 07

  Thank you for listening.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Jon Quill, and I'm from Brooklyn. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sorin Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgalka, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vitsa, Ariam Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Young, with help from Gabby Santos and Maya Appleby Malamed. Our fact checkers are Norabell Blydia, Hillary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, and Sophie Samai.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.