60 Words

**Matt Kielty** (0:02)
Hey, this is Radiolab, I'm Matt Kielty. So we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Actually, a week from today, it'll be the 25th anniversary. And a while back, I co-produced a story that was about the legacy of 9-11, only it wasn't about any aspect of 9-11 that I had ever heard before. It's about one single sentence, 60 words long, written in the panicked, grief-stricken days right after 9-11 that ended up defining America for decades.
In the story, it's a sort of like strange side door into this legal world behind the longest war in our country's history.
We have a couple of updates for you at the end, so stick around for that. But for now, we're just going to jump in. So, here we go.

**Jad Abumrad** (0:49)
Wait, you're listening?

**Matt Kielty** (0:51)
Alright.

**Daniel Klaidman** (0:56)
You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC.

**Jad Abumrad** (1:08)
Okay, ready?

**Matt Kielty** (1:08)
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

**Robert Krulwich** (1:09)
I'm Robert Krollwich.

**Matt Kielty** (1:11)
And this is Radiolab.

**Robert Krulwich** (1:11)
Today, we've got a story about the crazy power of words.

**Matt Kielty** (1:15)
In particular, 60 words.

**Robert Krulwich** (1:17)
Single sentence.

**Matt Kielty** (1:17)
That is, well, that has, you could say, defined America for the last 12 years. And the place to start is a difficult one.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:27)
This, Justin, you were looking at, obviously, a very disturbing live shot there.

**Matt Kielty** (1:31)
September 11th, 2001, 846 a.m. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:37)
We don't know anything more than that.

**Matt Kielty** (1:39)
This is a day that anyone who is old enough to remember does remember. We can remember where we were, who we were with.

**Reverend Nathan Baxter** (1:47)
So you have no idea right now?

**SPEAKER_9** (1:48)
We have another one, another plane just hit.

**SPEAKER_10** (1:51)
Oh my gosh, another plane has just hit.

**Matt Kielty** (1:54)
And, of course, we can remember how we felt.

**SPEAKER_10** (1:59)
Tell me what you just saw.

**SPEAKER_12** (2:01)
Oh shit!

**Tim Kaine** (2:03)
It fell down!

**Benjamin Wittes** (2:05)
Oh my god!

**Matt Kielty** (2:07)
It is the worst attack ever on American soil.
But, if you really want to understand the world we live in now, you've got to jump ahead one day to September 12th to a corner office in the White House where there's a lawyer sitting at a computer trying to figure out how are we going to declare war. And one of the things that everybody realizes after sort of an initial discussion is, yes, we'd like to declare war, but we have no idea upon whom we should declare war. That is Gregory Johnsen, the Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow at BuzzFeed. Now, the reason this lawyer, a man by the name of Timothy Flanagan, the reason Flanagan is sitting at a computer in an office is because then President George Bush had to do something, he had to act, and he didn't want to act alone. He wanted congressional approval.

**Benjamin Wittes** (3:00)
Right. I mean, technically, in an emergency, the president can defend the country.

**Matt Kielty** (3:04)
He is the commander in chief, after all.

**Benjamin Wittes** (3:06)
He doesn't have to go to Congress and say, hey, do I have authorization to use force?

**Matt Kielty** (3:10)
Not in an emergency. That's Ben Wittes, by the way.

**Benjamin Wittes** (3:13)
Senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

**Matt Kielty** (3:16)
But President Bush needed Congress on his side, he felt. You know, it was important that we project unity, that we were all standing together as one.

**Benjamin Wittes** (3:24)
And second, if this was an act of war, the power to declare war in the Constitution is given to Congress, not to the executive.

**Matt Kielty** (3:31)
When Congress declares war, suddenly, the president has a very clear and powerful mandate.

**Benjamin Wittes** (3:38)
Now, the declaration of war is kind of a dead instrument of international law. I mean, nobody's declared war since World War II.
But the modern incarnation of the declaration of war is the authorization to use force.

**Matt Kielty** (3:58)
What's called the authorization for the use of military force? Or as it's commonly referred to, the AUMF.
Right. So, our lawyer in the White House, Flanagan. He's given a task. Go write an AUMF that Congress can send to the president. He really has no idea, so he goes back to the last time that the US did this. Last time Congress passed one of these things. He does a quick sort of search on his computer. Boom. Finds it. 1991, Iraq, the Gulf War. Flanagan grabs the text. And then he copies that into a word document, and that becomes his template. He makes some cuts. He makes some changes. He deletes some words. And then, he hits send.