Tim Jones

Welcome to 2014! Some of the fun things our government has been up to in the past decade include: mass torture, detention without trial, assassinating citizens with remote-control robots, and mass surveillance of every American's phone calls and Internet use. Not spooky at all, nope.Pretty often I find myself wondering: Do the president and military just get to do whatever the hell they want? We're supposed to be a nation governed by laws, but in practice so many of the most important laws have been declared secret that nobody seems to know what's allowed and what's not anymore.RadioLab and BuzzFeed produced this amazing radio piece. They traced our past decade of unaccountable military mayhem back to a 2001 law called the Authorization for Use of Military Force. This is that law's story.It's a whole hour long, so get somewhere comfortable before hitting play. It's worth it though.