the Veterans of Foreign Wars also demanded an apology, as did the Anti-Defamation League. Durbin initially did not apologize, but on June 21, 2005, he went before the Senate, saying, "More than most people, a senator lives by his words ... occasionally words fail us, occasionally we will fail words." Former The New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan praised Durbin for raising serious moral issues about U.S. policy. Other commentators, including commentator Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos, condemned Durbin for apologizing to his critics, arguing he made a mistake in making himself, rather than detention and torture concerns at Guantanamo Bay, the focus of media coverage. 2001 invasion of Afghanistan Durbin voted to approve the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. This act granted the executive broad military powers and was used to justify the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and later military interventions. Iraq War On September 9, 2002, Durbin was the first of four Democratic senators (the others being Bob Graham, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin) on the Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), responding to the Bush administration's request for a joint resolution authorizing a preemptive war on Iraq without having prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), to ask Central Intelligence Director George Tenet to prepare an NIE on the status of Iraq's Weapon of mass destruction programs. Durbin was also one of few senators who read the resulting October 1, 2002, NIE, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. On September 29, 2002, Durbin held a news conference in Chicago to announce that "absent dramatic changes" in the resolution, he would vote against the resolution authorizing war on Iraq. On October 2, at the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally in Federal Plaza, he repeated his promise to oppose the resolution in a letter read during the rally. On October 10, the U.S. Senate failed to pass Durbin's amendment to the resolution to strike "the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and insert "an imminent threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction", by a 30–70 vote, with most Democratic senators voting for the amendment and 21 joining all 49 Republican senators voting against it. On October 11, Durbin was one of 23 senators to vote against the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War. On April 25, 2007, Durbin said that as an intelligence committee member he knew in 2002 from classified information that the