As illustrated by the remarks of Senator Angus King of Maine, this is a liberal take (in the common American sense) on the ruling class's assertion of executive branch authority to deploy the Armed Forces of the US anywhere in the world, from Boston to Yemen, to wage war against "terrorism" for the indefinite future. Liberals also want the executive branch to have this authority, but they merely want to have Congress pass specific authorization for this power to prosecute the "war on terrorism" anywhere at anytime. This would maintain the myth that the US is governed by laws based on legitimate democratic principles.
However, if you understand that 9/11 and all the other contrived "terrorist" attacks as well as real ones have been used by the ruling class precisely to eliminate most of the hassles of constitutional procedures, then you can understand why Pentagon figures can with confidence make such statements as in this video.
Notice also in King's statements their nature: appealing , beseeching, almost begging. If the Congress had any real independent power left, they would hold these generals in contempt of Congress and punish them accordingly.
Jeremy Scahill does little better in this piece by attributing this Pentagon coup to the Obama administration. However, he did do better in an earlier interview on Democracy Now when he reviewed the history after 9/11 to include the Bush administration and earlier administrations in this development. Scahill and his employer The Nation, Democracy Now, and other sources in liberal-left US media are constrained by their funding sources to limit such attributions to presidential administrations rather than from anything resembling a shadow government which I believe considerable evidence points to.
In a 2011 article Dr. Stuart Bramhall has confirmed my long held suspicions about these sources. She has uncovered well documented evidence that much of what passes for left media coverage, including "Democracy Now!", in the US is funded, at least in substantial part, by right-wing non-profit institutions such as the Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, other CIA front organizations, and various liberal foundations. Such funding acts as a constraint on how far they will go to reveal the dirtiest secrets of our ruling class.
A more radical and accurate interpretation of this development can be had from the World Socialist Web Site that ran an editorial with this key statement:
The Pentagon’s assertion of the power for the indefinite future to unilaterally deploy the US killing machine wherever the president sees fit—including within the US and without any oversight or “checks and balances”—amounts to an announcement of a semi-dictatorship in the US.And, even more importantly, the editorial provides real insights on this development by offering a class based analysis--instead of framing it as a product of the Obama administration.
However, I would take issue with what appears to me in this editorial to be an implication that "American democracy" was ever much of a genuine democracy. The realities of our system are now being revealed for what it always was--a system supervised by a class of major owners of productive property and banks with some superficial, and managed, system of laws, courts, and legislative bodies. The difference now from previous periods is that our masters have acquired so much power that they no longer fear us very much. Thus, they feel that they can dispense with many of the niceties of legal processes, and rely more on their overwhelming control of media, education, and the Hollywood film industry to shape how we think and what we think. And, if that doesn't work, then they will deploy the troops to take over our cities.