[Peace-discuss] Obama's filthy inauguration

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/22/on-obamas-second-inauguration/

...At a time when the US killing machine is still going full speed in Afghanistan, and when he himself is cranking up the use of armed attack drones in countries around the globe, the president, departing from his prepared text, said that the US was “ending ten years of war.” There was particularly loud applause at that line, but it is simply not true. Not only is the US negotiating to keep over 10,000 US troops indefinitely in Afghanistan, but it is expanding its drone and Special Forces attacks in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and elsewhere around the globe, while continuing to threaten Iran with an attack.

He also said, in his prepared remarks, “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” Yet he made no announcement of a plan to end Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which over the past 12 years has turned the US into a police state, leading the federal courts to approve all manner of violations of the Bill of Rights and to grant the executive branch exceptional powers on the argument that the US is legally in a state of war and that the 50 states themselves are part of the battlefield.

The president seems content with this situation, which is by definition a “state of perpetual war”...