WASHINGTON - At the Woodrow Wilson Center today in Washington, U.S. Senator Bob Corker, ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, participated in a panel discussion on the future of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against al Qaeda.
“When you look at not only the activities that we have to some degree underway now, but the activities, you know we’re going to have underway in the future, almost everyone would say there is a very thin thread between that AUMF that was authored – 60 words – back in 2001, to where we are today,” said Corker. “Congress needs to have some ownership over this, not in a way to keep us from acting in our national interest, but in a way that as we’re moving along, Congress is involved in helping make these decisions, which Congress will fund, and Congress is involved in helping to sell that back home. I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made by virtue of the way we’ve carried out our activities over the last decade, is very few Americans have any stake or ownership in our foreign policy. And I think that is major problem for our nation.”
For more on the event and archived video, visit: http://bit.ly/1326CzY.
At a March hearing on U.S. counterterrorism policy, Senator Corker called on the Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on updating the AUMF. Current and former counterterrorism officials in both the Bush and Obama administration’s testified about the increasing difficulty of applying the AUMF to today’s terrorism environment and the benefits of greater congressional oversight.
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