Parsing Obama’s terrorism speech

Glenn Greenwald characterizes Barack Obama's recent terrorism speech as a Rorschach test--something for everyone:

The highly touted speech Obama delivered last week on US terrorism policy was a master class in that technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror" is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal. But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do.

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Democracy in action–American style–in Afghanistan

"Democracy" in action in Afghanistan is described in the NYT:

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
How has this cash benefited anyone?
[T]here is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Yes, this is democracy in action, American Style, complete with large amount of secret cash being transferred. And this is in addition to the two billion dollars per week that we have been wasting in Afghanistan for a decade. All of this occurring at a time when American politicians claim that they don't have enough money to provide the basics for Americans.

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U.S. warmongering continues to drain the budget

At Huffpo, Jeff Cohen writes:

Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don't. It's arguably our country's biggest problem -- a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" -- and said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." . . . What our mainstream media so obediently call the "War on Terror" is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war of terror -- kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians -- that creates new enemies for our country.

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The mainstream media attack on Martin Luther King for his criticism of warmongering

Here is a basic rule of American journalism: Don't speak the truth during times of war. Martin Luther King received received harsh treatment by the mainstream media when he dared to speak out about the Vietnam War, even after his many successes in the area of civil rights. The occasion was King's somber Riverside Church speech. Part II of King's speech is here.   King's speech is accurately described as follows at this Youtube page:

By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.
At the recently concluded National Conference for Media Reform, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now commented on the propensity of the media to become obeisant to warmongering American politicians, and the equal propensity of the media to criticize those who criticize warmongering. To hear Goodman's excellent speech, go to minute 28:00 of the composite video.

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