A week after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Congress enacted the Authorization for Use of Military Force, allowing the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those nations, organizations, and individuals responsible for the attack. Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the only member of Congress who voted against the measure because, she later explained, it “gave the executive branch a blank check to carry out global war in perpetuity.” She voted her conscience but acknowledged the resolution would pass and the nation would go to war.
Twenty-five years later, the United States is still at war, but not against those who attacked us on 9/11. Al Qaeda has been defeated, but the longest war in U.S. history has not delivered meaningful justice or accountability for anyone impacted by the attack or its aftermath. Instead, successive administrations have stretched the AUMF beyond any reasonable interpretation to wage worldwide war, without foreseeable end, against groups that did not exist on 9/11. The judiciary has declined to rein in the executive, which claims a license to fight an expanding conflict without specific congressional approval, denying the public meaningful oversight of when and where the nation engages in hostilities. It is time to repeal the 2001 AUMF and end the Forever War.
The AUMF, together with the USA Patriot Act, was central to many of the worst post-9/11 abuses, including increased detention and surveillance. Early in the so-called “Global War on Terror,” the Bush administration arrested U.S. citizens and residents such as Yasir Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Al Marri, and detained them without charge in military custody, inside the United States, purportedly under the AUMF. The National Security Agency also secretly surveilled the electronic communications of individuals inside the country, including U.S. citizens, without judicial warrants, ostensibly as a use of “necessary and appropriate force” against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
The AUMF likewise caused exceptional damage abroad. In October 2001, acting pursuant to the AUMF, the United States invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban, which had harbored Al Qaeda. The United States sent nearly 800 men and boys, all Muslim, and most captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan, to Guantanamo Bay. Nearly all were held in military custody without charge under the AUMF, often for decades, based on their alleged status as members or supporters of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Others were captured in other countries around the globe, sometimes held incommunicado in CIA black sites for years, and then transferred to Guantanamo where they were held under the AUMF’s authority. The overwhelming majority of detainees were sold to U.S. forces for cash bounties and never committed a hostile act against the United States or its allies. To be sure, some were alleged foot soldiers, propagandists for Al Qaeda, or were actively involved in Al Qaeda operations. Others were there simply because of mistaken identity.
Hundreds of the initial detainees were transferred out by the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, and a few hundred more were repatriated or resettled during President Barack Obama’s failed closure efforts. But fifteen men remain at Guantanamo after two decades, six held under the AUMF without charge. Three of them, including my client, remain in detention without foreseeable end despite their approval for transfer years ago. Nine others, including those allegedly responsible for 9/11, are charged separately with alleged war crimes under the Military Commission Act.
The AUMF has also been cited as authorization for the targeted killing (i.e., drone assassination) program begun under Bush and greatly expanded during the Obama administration. In July 2010, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded in a legal memorandum that the AUMF authorizes the President to use lethal force outside areas of active hostilities against senior terrorist leaders, including U.S. citizens, who it deemed an imminent threat (not because they were necessarily actively planning to attack the United States at that moment, but because they pose a “continued and imminent threat” of doing so in the future). As a result, while Obama denied the United States was engaged in a global war under the AUMF, he claimed there were no geographic limitations on his authority to kill members of Al Qaeda, including U.S. citizens. The Obama administration also claimed authority under the AUMF to conduct “signature strikes” to kill those who fit a profile of suspected terrorist members but were not actually identified individuals.
Despite these positions on the scope of his authority under the AUMF, in May 2013, Obama warned it would be necessary to repeal the authorization eventually. As he said in a speech at the National Defense University, “[u]nless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”
But Obama continued to kill people with drones throughout his time in office, and his successors exploited his legal and policy rationales to kill even more people around the world based on increasingly weak justifications. As of December 2016, the United States claimed authority to use force under the AUMF in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The executive has also unilaterally expanded the list of groups against which it uses force under the AUMF, and has reportedly maintained for years a classified list of individuals and groups targetable under the AUMF.
What’s more, the use of force under the AUMF became fully unmoored from the 9/11 attacks and the conflict in Afghanistan starting in Obama’s second term. The executive now uses the AUMF to target groups that did not exist on 9/11, or were in conflict with those who did attack the United States twenty-five years ago, on the theory they are “associated forces” or “co-belligerents” of Al Qaeda in its fight against the United States. The United States, for example, has invoked the AUMF to fight Al Shabaab in Somalia, an organization that did not exist until 2007 and was not designated by the United States as a terrorist group until 2008. The United States has also claimed AUMF authority to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, notwithstanding the Islamic State arose in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and had long fought against Al Qaeda.
Associated forces is a made-up concept, and co-belligerency is a doctrine derived from the Law of Neutrality that only applies to nation-states, not non-state actors. Ultimately, that may be academic because the courts have in all but a few rare cases declined to take up such issues in deference to continuing claims of executive war powers necessary to fight any group somehow related to Al Qaeda. Even where the AUMF has been challenged directly in court, as in the case of my client who has contested the geographic scope of the AUMF, courts generally have been reluctant to decide the matter. My client’s motion for release under the AUMF has been held in abeyance despite his twenty-two years in U.S. custody without charge, and his approval for transfer five years ago by a group of Cabinet-level officials.
The 2001 AUMF is the still-dangerous product of a bygone era. The United States withdrew from Afghanistan five years ago, and the Taliban have returned to power. Al Qaeda leaders Usama Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri were killed in 2011 and 2022, and the alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack have been detained at Guantanamo for twenty years where they still await a trial. Al Qaeda has not launched a successful attack against the United States directly in nearly a decade. Yet U.S. reliance on the AUMF continues unabated. The Trump administration has continued to expand its use of force under the AUMF to various conflicts, including in Niger and elsewhere in Africa.
The 2001 AUMF was not supposed to be a blank check for any president to wage war – it contains key limiting language (a purpose clause, a description of the groups and organizations it was intended to cover), but those have been read out of existence by the executive and an absent judiciary has acquiesced. Having rejected a broader version of the AUMF that the Bush administration initially sent to the legislative branch, we can also be sure that Congress did not intend the military response to 9/11 to continue forever, certainly not after Al Qaeda was defeated. The only way to curb these abuses, ensure greater transparency, and restore an appropriate balance of power among co-equal branches of government is for Congress to repeal the AUMF—as it voted in December 2025 to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. Prior repeal measures introduced by members of both parties—including then-Senator JD Vance—have failed. But it is time to try again. As we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the country needs more creative, effective, and just approaches to security threats than continuing to rely on a resolution passed in haste while the Twin Towers still burned.
