The doctrinaires of the current administration have led us to believe that the president’s war powers stretch across all oceans and lands with one exception: a tiny little enclave in Cuba known as Guantanamo Bay, which hosts the world’s most notorious and expensive prison.
This week, more US bombs landed in Syria. Thirty airstrikes hit the city of Raqaa on Monday night alone, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As of mid-November, the US military had already launched more than 1,000 strikes in Iraq and Syria, in its campaign targeting Islamic State militants. It’s worth noting, too, that the operations, at times, have killed civilians, whose survivors are not helped by the president’s refusal to issue guidelines intended to protect the innocent.
Elsewhere, executive authority rains hellfire missiles, too. Military operations continue in Afghanistan. Last month, US drones bombed Yemen and Pakistan. And it has been three months since the last one was officially reported, but Somalia is a routine target of American airstrikes.
What we have here is a global war regime administered by the current president who, like his predecessor, is operating with virtually no congressional guidance.
Given a relatively free rein, President Obama has been able to handpick legal justifications to underpin his current war powers.
In a September letter to the UN, ambassador Samantha Power said strikes against IS targets in Syria are justified since the Iraqi government has a right to self defense and has asked for US military assistance.
However, other strikes in Syria – ones that targeted an alleged al Qaeda offshoot labeled the Khorasan group – were justified beyond Iraq’s right to defend itself. Officials claimed the previously unknown group posed an imminent threat to the US.
According to the administration’s doctrinaires, the legal underpinning for those airstrikes, like others around the world, are rooted in the one sentence of the US Constitution, which states simply “ the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
Like his predecessor, Obama has interpreted that sentence quite broadly, and it’s the reason why the administration argues its war powers are virtually limitless.
One Pentagon lawyer made exactly that case to lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May during a hearing examining the AUMFs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense Department general counsel, Stephen Preston alarmed senators when he said he was “not aware of any foreign terrorist group that the president lacks authority to use military force” against.
That goes beyond al Qaeda and “associated forces,” and applies to any entity deemed a threat by the president.
“In terms of the authority to protect this country against these groups,” Preston said. “Both the statute and the constitution provide authority for the president to use military force to protect.”
Upon hearing that, Senators were befuddled.
“So you’re telling us the AUMF wasn’t necessary?” asked chairman Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).
“We really, as a Congress, don’t need to be involved in this subject at all,” echoed an incredulous Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)
Comparing AUMFs passed by Congress to constitutional authorities inherent in the presidency, Preston said, “These two sources of authority are not and were never intended dot be mutually exclusive. They are largely overlapping.”
In other words, you could get rid any congressional AUMF, and the current war operations would continue on without a hiccup.
President Obama, in a September letter to Congress informing them of re-engagement in Iraq, claimed that both his “constitutional and statutory authority as Commander in Chief” allowed him to carry out the operations.
But there is, apparently, a limit to these expansive executive powers.
Six years ago, President Obama campaigned on closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Since, he has used his constitutional war powers to identify new threats to the US and its allies, and then target and kill or render those threats.
But he has largely refused to use his war powers to change the detention of those alleged threats, and instead ceded power to Congress to legislate the fate of Gitmo.
This maneuver has given the president some semblance of political cover to blame the long-running failure to close the prison on roadblocks set up by Republicans in Congress.
It’s true Republicans in Congress have worked tirelessly to sabotage the president’s efforts to close the prison. Just this week, they forced Senate democrats to negotiate away a measure that would have given the president authority to transfer detainees to the United States.
But why should a president who argues he doesn’t need the permission of Congress to bomb a country like Syria or target an alleged terrorist in Somalia, suddenly need permission to transfer a prisoner of war from one facility to another?
