When did Congress authorize war in Yemen?

We still have a Constitution, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/middleeast/09intel.html?_r=1

U.S. Is Intensifying a Secret Campaign of Yemen Airstrikes
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: June 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power.

On Friday, American jets killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel Qaeda operative, and several other militant suspects in a strike in southern Yemen. According to witnesses, four civilians were also killed in the airstrike. Weeks earlier, drone aircraft fired missiles aimed at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who the United States government has tried to kill for more than a year. Mr. Awlaki survived.

The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign.

more...

you really don't need congress to declare a war


but if we ever had a president who didn't want to go to war, and congress did, they could force him/her to do it

nt

we got nuthin' anymore

http://www.ellsberg.net/

http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/pentagon-papers-officially-declassified-on-the-40th-anniversary-of-their-publication-40-years-late

<edit>

As Abraham Lincoln explained their intention (in defending to his former law partner William Herndon his opposition to President Polk’s deliberately provoked Mexican War): “The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

As Lincoln put it, the alternative approach (which we have actually followed in the last sixty years) “places our President where kings have always stood.” And the upshot of that undue, unquestioning trust in the president and his Executive branch is: smart people get us into stupid (and wrongful) wars, and their equally smart successors won’t get us out of them.

Either we the people will press elected officials in Congress–on pain of losing their jobs–to take up their Constitutional responsibilities once again and to end by defunding our illegal, unjustifiable (and now, financially insupportable) military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and air attacks on Pakistan, Libya and Yemen: or those bloody stalemates will continue indefinitely.

:thumbsup:

PB

“Syria needs a clear message,” he says. “A message by the West that we do not see Assad as the future of Syria, and as the guarantor of stability in the region. Ambiguity is interpreted by him as a sign of support, as a sign that the West cannot see life beyond him. That is a license to kill, a carte blanche to crack down on the opposition. Without a clear message from the international community, people in Syria are afraid to go that last step and get rid of Assad.”

More than 1,000 Syrians crossed the border to Turkey within the past 24 hours, according to a Turkish official. The refugees say they anticipate a violent crackdown by troops closing in on the northwest border town of Jisr al-Shugur, where earlier in the week 120 members of the security forces were killed by armed gangs, according to the Syrian authorities. Turkish media report that the government in Ankara is preparing for an influx of up to 1 million refugees.

The events in northwestern Syria mark a climax in the unrest that started three months ago and cost more than 1,300 lives, according to human rights activists.

The initiative for a UN resolution is supported by the US, but opposed by Russia and China. A vote on the resolution is expected in the next few days.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0609/UK-France-build-case-for-UN-resolution-against-Syria/(page)/2?du

America = Wars

edited to include Sen. Graham's call to take action in Syria. Remember what the President said about the humanitarian mission in Libya, that it would be days not weeks? America = Wars

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/165943-graham-military-intervention-in-syria-should-be-on-the-table?du

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday that it’s time to consider international intervention in Syria to avoid the further “slaughter” of people there by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

“If it made sense to protect the Libyan people against Gadhafi, and it did because they were going to get slaughtered if we hadn’t sent NATO in when he was on the outskirts of Benghazi, the question for the world , have we gotten to that point in Syria,” Graham said on the CBS' "Face the Nation."

There seems to be some concern that al Qaeda could exploit the power vacuum and take over the gov't of Yemen. The increase in air strikes is probably an effort to keep aQ on the defensive and prevent a takeover from happening.

nt

And, who needs democracy anyway? What do the people know about "necessary" wars that aren't even called wars...except that they have to pay for them and bury their kids bodies. They might object and then what what congress and the MIC do to enrich themselves?