In His Final Days, Obama Quietly Expands War Powers Before Handing Them Off To Trump

from the hey-that's-a-big-deal dept

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Micah Zenko didn’t mince words in the Times when describing what the Obama administration is doing: “It’s crazy,” he said of the administration’s redefining the law out of existence. “This administration leaves the Trump administration with tremendously expanded capabilities and authorities.” Make no mistake: Trump will have a free hand to use the law meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 to wage war around the world, fashioning it to different enemies at his command, and he will be able to point to precedent set by the Obama administration as he does it. Per usual, all the White House’s decisions are being made under the veil of official secrecy. The only reason we know about it is not because the administration announced it, but because the New York Times reported it after unnamed officials leaked it to them.

Trump is now coming into office with ever expanding war powers, and they’re being served to him on a silver platter by the same people who told the American public two months ago that Trump was so unstable and thin-skinned that he couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.

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While we knew it was impossible for President Obama to truly rein in the massive executive powers that he helped expand (following on the massive expansions from previous administrations) concerning national surveillance and war -- we had still hoped that maybe his concern about a President Trump would let him do a few small things to limit some of the most egregious powers. Instead, it appears that President Obama is doing the opposite, and expanding his war powers, just as he's about to hand them to someone that he, himself, has loudly criticized as being unfit for the Presidency.For years now, we've written about how the Obama administration has regularly rewritten the dictionary in order to pretend that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) hastily granted by Congress in the wake of 9/11 enabled him to go to war with basically anyone. If you don't recall, the AUMF granted the President the power to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to go after those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." That's already fairly broad, but over the years basically our entire government has pretended that (1) the AUMF included the ability to also target "associated forces" (even though it does not) and (2) it allowed the President to simply lump in anyone he wanted as an "associated force" allowing him to bomb them without any Congressional authorization. This is how you get a war without end , in which the explicit authorization to go after Al Qaeda is now being used on a surprisingly long list of groups that didn't even exist in 2001.And, just a few days ago, President Obama expanded the list yet again , allowing himself to go after yet another group: Shabab. Now, no one is trying to claim that Shabab, or ISIS or any other group that has been added to the list aren't out to do serious harm to the US. But, this seems to go way beyond the basic functions of the office of the President and the simple Constitutional requirement for Congress to declare war. As Trevor Timm notes at the Guardian, this is a big deal And that's not all. The Obama administration has also given more powers to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) -- the organization that helped find and kill Osama bin Laden. And, again, people are raising concerns about how this power will be used by the next President. As Timm notes:This isn't about which President or which party you support. It seems like we should all be concerned with the ever growing power of the executive branch in general, and especially its willingness to grant itself more powers to go around and kill people.

Filed Under: aumf, donald trump, executive power, president obama, surveillance, war