Obama Aide Declares End to War on Terrorism:

[Ian Livingston]

Haleluia! That sounds very much like sound reasoning actually
permitted airtime in our nation's capital.  May these wonders continue
to gain impetus!

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Considering the deeply symbolic importance of this day and noting some of
> Pynchon's larger geo-political considerations in Gravity's Rainbow [and
> other books], this seems quite relevant:
>
> Obama Aide Declares End to War on Terrorism
> New Approach to Focus on Root Economic and Social Causes
>
> By SPENCER ACKERMAN 8/6/09 4:10 PM
>
> John Brennan picked a deeply symbolic day to end the “war on terrorism.”
> On August 6, 2001, Brennan, then a senior CIA official and now President
> Obama’s assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, “read warnings
> that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S., but our
> government was unable to prevent the worst terrorist attack in American
> history,” he recalled to an audience Thursday at the Center for Strategic
> and International Studies, a Washington think tank. It was a reference to a
> CIA analysis, called a President’s Daily Brief, that the 9/11 Commission
> uncovered as a key warning that an attack by al-Qaeda was likely.
>
> Eight years later, in his first speech since joining the Obama
> administration, Brennan annulled several key aspects of the so-called war on
> terrorism — starting with both the name and the idea that the U.S. was
> involved in any sort of “global war.” Brennan said Obama will subordinate
> counterterrorism to “its right and proper place” as a “vital part” of the
> administration’s national security and foreign policies, but not the lion’s
> share of them. Saying he was careful not to elevate al-Qaeda to a greater
> position of importance than it deserved, Brennan linked the rise in support
> for extremists to problems of global governance, economic crisis and social
> stratification and said the administration would make a concerted effort to
> address what he considers those extremist root causes.
>
> Above all, Brennan emphasized that the U.S. was not locked in a struggle
> with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self-presentation as
> a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations
> with a global caliphate,” and said that the administration would abandon the
> use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries
> “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers…
> desperately seek but in no way deserve.” David Kilcullen, a
> counterinsurgency expert and former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the
> commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, has recently
> argued in an influential book that the U.S. has insufficiently distinguished
> between implacable enemies and those who fight out of opportunism,
> desperation or other, non-eschatological reasons. . .
>
> http://washingtonindependent.com/54152/obama-aide-declares-end-to-war-on-terrorism
>