Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Thursday about the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the legislation that gave President George W. Bush the authority to wage war against “those who planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Times editorial board is for full repeal of the statute, but that’s a minority view. The Pentagon and many lawmakers think that it’s fine as is, or that it should grant the executive even more power than it already does.

For instance Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said war against Al Qaeda would continue “at least 10 to 20 years” and that the statute “suits us very well.”

There was also widespread disagreement over what the A.U.M.F. actually authorizes.



Senator John McCain, the Arizona hawk, said the statute’s not sufficiently expansive, because of the “dramatically changed landscape that we have in this war on Muslim extremism and Al Qaeda and others.”

In response, the acting general counsel of the Pentagon, Robert Taylor, reassured Mr. McCain that the 2001 law already bestowed the right to attack “co-belligerents” of Al Qaeda—not just those somehow involved with the attacks.

The committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, was also of that view. He said the A.U.M.F. gives the president the right to attack anyone who “joined the fight against us” pretty much anywhere, indefinitely.

The conservative Hoover Institution has its own proposal for how to update the A.U.M.F. to suit the “dramatically changed landscape.” It thinks Congress should give the president license to create a list of organizations (organizations of Muslims, most likely) at war with the United States.

That “would essentially concentrate within the executive branch the power to declare and wage war…[And] would effectively allow the use of military force as a matter of first resort against members of any terrorist group that the president so designates,” said Jennifer Daskal, a former Justice Department lawyer who teaches at Georgetown, and Stephen Vladeck, who teaches law at American University, in an Op-Ed article in the Times.

Twelve years ago, after the attacks, Congress responded swiftly with the A.U.M.F., but it was supposed to be an emergency measure. Mr. Bush abused it. He used it to justify indefinite detention without charges, and spying on Americans without bothering to get a warrant. Mr. Obama abused it, too. He used it to justify killing American citizens overseas without due process.

It would be folly to take this already much-abused statute and turn it into a permanent excuse for a never-ending war.