Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the «Authorization for the Use of Military Force» was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this one broadly-phrased sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Buzzfeed has a brilliant longread on how that sentence came to be, the one woman who voted against it and what it’s since come to mean.

From Weekly Filet #146, in January 2014.