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<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font color="#280099"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="4"><b>Perpetual War – and Obama’s
Perpetual Con Game</b></font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><b>by BAR executive editor Glen Ford<br>
</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/perpetual-war-%E2%80%93-and-obama%E2%80%99s-perpetual-con-game">http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/perpetual-war-%E2%80%93-and-obama%E2%80%99s-perpetual-con-game</a></small></small><b><br>
</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="CENTER"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>He admits to having
done no wrong.”</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Barack Obama is a master
trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has
arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe,
accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified
legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington’s
“perpetual war” must one day end – sometime in the misty future after
he is long gone from office. He </font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/23/obama-drones-guantanamo-speech-text"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">informed</font></font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"> his global audience of
potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?)
that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose “a continuing,
imminent threat to Americans” and cannot be captured – a policy that
his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He
promises to be more merciful than before, “haunted” as he is by all the
nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">He is a man of boundless
introspection, inviting us to ride with him on his wildly spinning
moral compass. But, most of all, he is not George Bush – of that we can
be certain, if only because he is younger and oratorically gifted and
Black. </font></font><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">“Beyond
Afghanistan,” he said, “we must define our effort not as a boundless
‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted
efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that
threaten America.” Thus, magically, he redefined the U.S. war on terror
out of existence (in perpetuity) by breaking the conflict down to its
daily, constituent parts, while simultaneously affirming that America
will soon travel “beyond Afghanistan” despite the fact that many
thousands of Special Operations troops will continue their round the
clock raids in the countryside while drones rain death from the skies
for the foreseeable future. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Such conflicts, we must
understand, are necessitated by the “imminence” of threats posed to
U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is
the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be
detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for
“association” with “terrorists” as defined by himself. He has no
apologies for that.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="CENTER"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>His Eminence is the
sole judge of imminence.”</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">America must turn the page on
the previous era, because “the threat has shifted and evolved from the
one that came to our shores on 9/11.” A reevaluation is in order, since
“we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles
the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.” In that case, why not call
for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have
accumulated over the last 12 years, including Obama's own NDAA
preventive detention bill? Or, he could simply renounce these measures
and refuse to employ them as a matter of policy. Instead, the president
defended his own maximalist interpretation of the law, and claimed that
the legal basis for his kill-at-will authority is firmly rooted in the
Congress’s 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AMUF). Although he
made vague reference to changes that Congress might make in the AMUF,
there was no substantive indication that he sought to impose
restrictions on his own or any other president's authority to wage war
precisely as he has for the last four years.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Obama’s blanket interpretation
of AMUF – the legal logic - had previously been considered a state
secret. It was news to much of the U.S. Senate, too, until assistant
secretary of defense Michael Sheehan, in charge of special operations
(death squads) at the Pentagon, </font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/16/war-powers-obama-administration_n_3288420.html?view=print&comm_ref=false"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">told lawmakers</font></font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"> earlier this month that the
AMUF allows Obama to put “boots on the ground” anywhere he chooses,
including “Yemen or the Congo,” if his classified logic compelled him
to do so. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The senators were stunned –
although it is no secret that Obama has already put U.S. Special Forces
boots on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the
Central African Republic, and South Sudan, and has sent a combat
brigade on permanent posting on the continent. Central Africa is one
part of the world in which al Qaida has found little traction. The
purported “bad guy” hiding in the bush, Joseph Kony, is the Christian
leader of the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Obama authorized
the deployment under the doctrine of Humanitarian Military
Intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a war-making notion
that is, at best, ill-defined under international law and non-existent
in U.S. statutes. However, if Obama is sincere (!) in wanting to phase
out AMUF, as he averred last week, he’s always got R2P as a backup. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="CENTER"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>W</i></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="3"><i>hy not call for repeal of
the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the
last 12 years?”</i></font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Death squad honcho Sheehan is
a believer in the perpetual lifespan of AMUF, which he considers
operative until al Qaida has been consigned to the “ash heap of
history” – an eventuality that is “at least 10 to 20 years” away. Since
this is the guy who carries out Obama’s kill orders (the identity of
his counterpart in the CIA is, of course, a secret), one would think
that Sheehan and Obama would be on the same page when it comes to al
Qaida and AMUF. But then, we are told that page has turned.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Obama is very good at flipping
pages, changing subjects, hiding the pea in his hand while we try to
figure out which bowl it’s under. His call for Congress to come up with
a substitute for AMUF – without yet offering his own version – is a
ploy to more explicitly codify those powers assumed by Bush and
expanded upon by the Obama administration. Or, the Congress can do
nothing – a very likely outcome – and Obama can pretend to be the
reluctant, self-restrained global assassin, preventive detainer and
regime changer for the rest of his term. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Not a damn thing has changed.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font color="#280099"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>BAR executive editor Glen
Ford can be contacted at </i></font></font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
href="mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com"><font color="#280099"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com</i></font></font></font></a></u></font><font
color="#280099"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>.</i></font></font></font></p>
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