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Obama’s NDU Speech on Terrorism: An Effort at Damage Control
25 May 2013
(LPAC)—In a lengthy speech Thursday at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., President Obama delivered a carefully worded defense of his Administration’s policy of targeted drone assassinations, including against at least four confirmed American citizens. The speech was accompanied by the release of a two-page Fact Sheet spelling out Obama’s claims of legal authority for conducting drone assassinations and other actions under the original 2001 Congressional Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Obama also signed a classified guidance for the global war on terrorism, moving forward. Obama framed the entire speech around the claim that, after ten long years of war, the original Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda had been smashed, and that the splinter groups and new incarnations of al-Qaeda were incapable of mounting a serious attack on the U.S. homeland on the scale of the original 9/11. He claimed that the threat of terrorism had been reduced to a "pre-9/11" level. Unlike his triumphalist campaign rhetoric, however, Obama did not claim personal responsibility for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, knowing that the entire special forces community was furious at him (and is demanding a select committee to get to the bottom of the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi) for grandstanding and taking credit for the Bin Laden kill. According to a senior U.S. intelligence source, the speech and the documents were driven by the fact that Obama has lost an enormous amount of support from Democrats and civil libertarians who have been horrified at the unconstitutional kill lists and other atrocities committed by this Administration, in the name of the Global War on Terrorism. Obama is under the gun in a growing number of scandals—from Benghazigate to the IRS to the spying on AP and Fox reporters—any one of which could bring down his Presidency. The speech, the source emphasized, was both a damage control effort, to repair some of the severe backlash against his mass-kill policies, and an effort to divert attention away from the mounting scandals. |