On 23 May, President Obama set out what he claimed what was a new US approach to threats abroad: "We must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America."

So what is this not-quite-War-on-Terror? Your 4-point animated guide....

1. A War By Any Other Name is Just as Deadly
2. We Are Killing Them To Bring Your Boys Home and To Prevent Attacks on You
3. The Fear Will Never Stop
4. Where Did Our Values Go?

Mark Townsend writes for The Guardian:

Shaker Aamer remembers the frantic knocking on the door, the voices screaming for him to get out. Outside, in the dark streets of Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers stripped him of his belongings at gunpoint and marched away their latest prisoner.

It was November 2001 and Afghanistan was the focus of the furious US response to 9/11. The country that Aamer and his family had arrived in from London five months earlier had descended into chaos. The first US bombing waves had flattened the Kabul school where Aamer had taught English to the children of Arabic-speaking expatriates. Terrified, the Aamers fled east towards Pakistan.

Aamer had more reason than many to escape. Even when he was travelling with his pregnant wife and three children, Afghan rebels belonging to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, suspicious of all Arabs in the country, were likely to consider him a natural enemy.

He recounts how, after he had finally been caught and his family were allowed to go, he was driven into the countryside at night, expecting to be executed. Instead, he recalls the throb of a helicopter and friendly accents. He remembers exhaling with relief. "Americans!" he thought. "I am saved!"

More than 11 years later, Shaker Aamer has yet to meet his youngest son, Faris, who was born three months after his capture. On the day Faris was born, 14 February 2002, Aamer was airlifted to Guantánamo Bay, the soon to be notorious US detention camp. The subsequent years have been spent inside what has been condemned as the "gulag of our times". They have included more than 1,000 nights in a windowless isolation cell.

His daughter, Johina, 15, who lives in Battersea, south London, told the Observer: "Try imagining being treated like a circus animal in a cage and being taken away from your home and everything you love. It's painful, isn't it? Well, my dad is going through this."

The US forces who picked Johina's father up in Afghanistan appear to have had no intention of allowing him to go free, transferring him to the notorious Bagram jail at the end of December 2001. There, Aamer says, he was starved, kept awake for nine days straight and chained in positions that made the slightest movement unbearable. He became emaciated. Delirious and desperate to cease his torture, Aamer says he confessed to whatever the Americans wanted.

Those confessions form part of leaked detainee assessment briefs compiled by the joint task force that runs Guantánamo Bay. Marked secret, the documents claim that while in London Aamer had been "assessed to be a key member of the UK-based al-Qaida network with multiple associations to senior al-Qaida members". These allegedly include Osama bin Laden himself, whom Aamer is alleged to have met within the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora. It is also alleged that his family in London received a "monthly stipend" from al-Qaida. For good measure, Aamer is described as having admitted frequenting the once notorious Finsbury Park mosque and the Four Feathers mosque, described as "the home of radical imam Abu Qatada".

These allegations, which Aamer vehemently denies and which no one has ever been able to prove, help to explain why Aamer has spent thousands of days in detention, a stretch of incarceration that has led him, in despair, to embark on a life-threatening hunger strike. So far detainee US9SA-000239DP has endured 68 days without food, far beyond what is accepted as safe. Clive Stafford Smith, his British lawyer, concedes that for the first time Aamer, widely regarded as a robust and resourceful character, has started to raise the possibility that he might die inside Guantánamo Bay. He recently told Stafford Smith, who is director of the legal charity Reprieve, to brief his wife that he might not make it out alive after all.

Shaker Aamer was born on 12 December 1966 in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina. His parents divorced when he was a child, and Aamer never got on with his stepmother. Aged 17, he headed to America to live with family friends. The next few years were spent travelling throughout Europe, the Middle East and finally London. There he met and fell in love with Londoner Zin Siddique, whom he married in 1997. Also that year, their first child Johina was born, followed by Michael in 1999 and Saif the following year. Family photographs from this period show a proud father framed by smiling children. Zin recalls them being very happy, describing their time together as a "dream". Aamer is described as a hands-on father, helping out with domestic chores and changing nappies.

It is the child who has never met his father who is understood to have struggled most. Faris, 11, is reported to play obsessively with the presents bought years ago by his father in the search for a connection. "He loves playing with the toys that Shaker bought for my other children. They are very special for him," said Zin, who returned to Battersea after her husband was taken.

In London, Aamer had forged a career as an Arabic translator for new arrivals. His work with refugees would, in June 2001, prompt Aamer's ill-fated decision to take his family to Afghanistan to do voluntary work for an Islamic charity. "Shaker was there to help the poor in Afghanistan, but himself became the victim of injustice," said Zin.

Aamer's continuing incarceration is all the more mysterious, given that the Americans ruled almost six years ago that he could be freed from Guantánamo. In June 2007, he was officially cleared for release. A security assessment by the US government acknowledged it had no concrete evidence against him. Two years later, the Obama administration reiterated the lack of a case against him, underlining the fact that he could be released.

So why is Aamer the only one among the 16 detainees who possessed British citizenship and residency who is still being held in Guantánamo?

Read full article....

On Wednesday, two days after the double bombing at the Boston Marathon, I tried to summarise my thoughts about the event and the response to it.

My fear is that speculation will feed a long-standing American "culture of fear" in which suspicion and retribution will dominate.

My hope is that confidence, community, and compassion --- which the bombers tried to destroy on Monday --- will prevail.

One of the disturbing ripples in the early coverage of Tuesday's double bombing at the Boston Marathon was the claim by the New York Post and Fox News --- both owned by Rupert Murdoch --- that authorities were questioning a "Saudi national" in a local hospital.

The implication in headline and lead paragraph was clear: an Arab/Muslim man had carried out the atrocity, in which the Post and Fox News were reporting --- incorrectly --- that 12 people had been killed.

I found the allegation, based on "law enforcement sources", troubling as well as shaky. To be fair to the US media, other journalists were also sceptical and careful in their handling of the claim. It soon dissipated, although the Post never retracted its headline.

Now Amy Davidson of The New Yorker tells the real, troubling story behind the suspicion and sensationalism:

A 20-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction — so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then tackled him, bringing him down. The bystander thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The bystander handed the man to the police, who reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb — as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead — a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

What happened next didn’t take long. “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi Arabian national—in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, The Post has learned.” That’s the New York Post, which went on to cite Fox News. The “Saudi suspect” — still faceless — suddenly gave anxieties a form. He was said to be in custody; or maybe his hospital bed was being guarded. The Boston police, who weren’t saying much of anything, disputed the report — sort of. “Honestly, I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it didn’t come from us,” a police spokesman said. But were they talking to someone? Maybe. “Person of interest” became a phrase of both avoidance and insinuation. On the Atlas Shrugs Web site, there was a note that his name in Arabic meant “sword.” At an evening press conference, Ed Davis, the police commissioner, said that no suspect was in custody. But that was about when the dogs were in the apartment building in Revere—an inquiry that was seized on by some as, if not an indictment, at least a vindication of their suspicions.

“There must be enough evidence to keep him there,” Andrew Napolitano said on “Fox and Friends” — “there” being the hospital. “They must be learning information which is of a suspicious nature,” Steve Doocy interjected. “If he was clearly innocent, would they have been able to search his house?” Napolitano thought that a judge would take any reason at a moment like this, but there had to be “something”—maybe he appeared “deceitful.” As Mediaite pointed out, Megyn Kelly put a slight break on it (as she has been known to do) by asking if there might have been some “racial profiling,” but then, after a round of speculation about his visa (Napolitano: “Was he a real student, or was that a front?”), she asked, “What’s the story on his ability to lawyer up?”

By Tuesday afternoon, the fever had broken. Report after report said that he was a witness, not a suspect. “He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” a “U.S. official” told CNN. (So were a lot of people at the marathon.) Even Fox News reported that he’d been “ruled out.” At a press conference, Governor Deval Patrick spoke, not so obliquely, about being careful not to treat “categories of people in uncharitable ways.”

We don’t know yet who did this. “The range of suspects and motives remains wide open,” Richard Deslauriers of the F.B.I. said early Tuesday evening. In a minute, with a claim of responsibility, our expectations could be scrambled. The bombing could, for all we know, be the work of a Saudi man—or an American or an Icelandic or a person from any nation you can think of. It still won’t mean that this Saudi man can be treated the way he was, or that people who love him might have had to find out that a bomb had hit him when his name popped up on the Web as a suspect in custody. It is at these moments that we need to be most careful, not least.

It might be comforting to think of this as a blip, an aberration, something that will be forgotten tomorrow—if not by this young man. There are people at Guanátanmo who have also been cleared by our own government, and are still there. A new report on the legacy of torture after 9/11, released Tuesday, is a well-timed admonition. The F.B.I. said that they would “go to the ends of the earth” to get the Boston perpetrators. One wants them to be able to go with their heads held high.

“If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid,” President Obama said. That was mostly true on Monday; a terrible day, when an eight-year-old boy was killed, his sister maimed, two others dead, and many more in critical condition. And yet, when there was so much to fear that we were so brave about, there was panic about a wounded man barely out of his teens who needed help. We get so close to all that Obama described. What’s missing? Is it humility?

BBC Radio 5 Live: The interview begins at 2:43.25
BBC West Midlands: The discussion starts at 2:12.16
BBC London: The interview starts at 7:19
BBC Three Counties: The discussion starts at 1:16.50
BBC Scotland: The interview begins at 1:10.20.
BBC Coventry and Warwickshire: The chat starts at 2:07.38

I found some of the discussion to be the most personal I have had with media outlets. After dealing with questions about how the authorities are responding to the crisis and after criticising unfounded --- and thus dangerous --- speculation about who carried out the double bombing, I faced questions about the significance of the attacks coming on Patriots' Day and what has it meant for people in Boston, where I lived for two years.

See also US Opinion: The Bombs at the Marathon --- What Patriots' Day Means to a Bostonian

My answer was that I hoped that the response of Bostonians --- and others --- would be a firm reply to terrorism, not by a call for retribution without knowing exactly who attacked, but through the community recovering and showing that it would not intimidated by violence.

I had to fight a bit to get that message out. While Radio 5 Live was admirable in how it handled the interview, BBC London's host was trying to insist that the Boston attacks would intimidate those in the British capital from attending this Sunday's Marathon. My interview on BBC Three Counties followed a "counter-terrorism expert" who wanted to declare that Al Qa'eda was clearly responsible for Monday's bombs. And BBC Scotland kept pressing the case that America should be "more hawkish".

Still, I hope at least an element of my thoughts came across.

Listen to the discussion from the 2:19.54 mark.

What's going on? "There's this perpetual 'culture of fear' --- even when America thinks it has won, from the end of the Cold War to the killing of Osama bin Laden."

And, for what's it worth, Team America did this almost a decade ago and did it far better.

Last week an investigation by McClatchy Newspapers revealed that many low-level operatives and people only thought to be "associated with armed groups have been killed in the US drone attacks in Pakistan.

In the first independent analysis of the Obama Administration's internal accounting of the strikes, McClathcy found that of about 482 people killed between September 2010 and September 2011, at least 265 were not senior Al Qa'eda leaders. More than 40 of the 95 drone strikes in the same period hit groups other than Al Qa'eda.

The reports also estimated that there was one civilian casualty during that time.

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy joins Al Jazeera English's Inside Story Americas to discuss the report.

Before that item, the programme considers the disapperance of tousands of legal documents, concerning detainees at Guantanamo Bay, from secure Department of Defense servers.

The incident has delayed military tribunals for the detainees, some of whom have been held since 2002.

Listen to discussion from 37:04 mark

The take-away on the surface is that a lot of the relationship was symbolic, with Thatcher's exploitation of it --- given her challenge to notions of "society" in Britain --- even greater than Reagan's effect in the US.

The shrewd listener, however, will be able to detect further thoughts behind carefully-chosen words.

See also Syria Feature: Remembering A Voice For the Syrian Revolution
Iraq (and Beyond) Coverage: At Least 10 Killed in Basra Bomb

1544 GMT: Insurgent Advance Near Golan Heights. Insurgents commanders said they have seized a Syrian military intelligence compound in the southern Hauran Plain near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The compound near the Yarmouk River in the town of Shagara, 8 kilomtetres (5 miles) from a cease-fire line with Israel, fell after a five-day siege, opposition sources said.

"We have completely taken over this security compound this morning. It's a command centre for the shabiha [pro-Assad militia]," said Abu Iyas al-Haurani, a member of the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade. "Anyone who was arrested in the Yarmouk Valley was sent to this military intelligence headquarters to be tortured and it has a strategic importance. With its fall we have completed our liberation of the town of Shagara."

1238 GMT: Insurgents Take Arms Depots. A military source has said, "Opposition fighters gained control over weapons and ammunition stores in the village of Khan Toman in southern Aleppo Province on Saturday after fierce fighting that went on for more than three days."

He said the stores contained "a small number of ammunition boxes remaining after the main stock was transferred over a period of more than four months".

Activists claimed the opposition had taken control of "huge reserves", with video showing fighters examining dozens of crates containing weapons and ammunition inside one warehouse.

"Rockets, film these rockets," they say. "These are 107-mm calibre, made in Iran," men on the video said. "These are the rockets that Bashar al-Assad was hitting us with."

The video claimed the capture of the depots was led by the Martyrs of Syria and the Hittin Brigades of the Free Syrian Army.

0928 GMT: Al-Raqqa. Elizabeth O'Bagy and Joseph Holliday of the Institute for the Study of War assess this month's fall of al-Raqqa, Syria's sixth-largest city, to the insurgents. They conclude:

Until the fall of al-Raqqa, Assad had successfully prevented a rebel takeover in all of Syria’s major cities. Given the size of al-Raqqa’s population, this [capture by the insurgents] is a significant milestone for Syria’s opposition.

Even so, the rebel capture of al-Raqqa is largely due to the shifting loyalty of tribal leaders and minimal Syrian military presence, rather than a rebel military victory per se. Al-Raqqah will test the efficacy of Assad’s strategy of displacing populations and denying rebel governance through air power alone. It will also test the rebels’ ability to govern. Their treatment of loyalist and minority populations will have significant implications for the prospect of limited ceasefires and political settlements in the future.

0905 GMT: Lebanon. Lebanese President Michel Suleiman has said fighters must be prevented from crossing into Syria, after Damascus threatened to respond to cross-border infiltrations and started deploying troops on the Lebanese border.

Lebanon's stability depends "on all of us...not sending militants to Syria and not receiving them," Suleiman said. "We must commit ourselves to neutrality."

The President said he had tasked Lebanon's army with "the arrest of any militants intending to fight [in Syria], whether for the opposition or not".

Syria warned on Thursday that its forces would fire into Lebanon if "terrorist gangs" continued to infiltrate the country.

A Lebanese Government source said Beirut took the warning "very seriously": "Intensive consultations are underway to find the best way to control the border."

Meanwhile, the body of a Hezbollah member killed in fighting in Syria has been buried in southern Lebanon.

"The funeral of Hassan Nimr Shartuni, 25, was this morning in Mays al-Jabal after the arrival of his body from Syria where he was killed in fighting yesterday," one resident told AFP.

Two other residents, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the details of Shartuni's burial.

0720 GMT: In Praise of Assad. The Syria Times, affiliated to the regime, posts 16 reasons to support the continued leadership of President Assad, beginning with this:

He is being targeted by America and the West. The access of evil [sic] does not want a president that maintains the sovereignty and independence of his country away from interfering in its internal affairs and its strategic and foreign policy.

Perhaps more significantly, the article points to the significance of the relationship with Tehran:

He established military ties with his ally Iran, has signed a joint defense agreement with it, and established economic relations with it, for it is superior in arms, and in space and nuclear technology, on the basis of transferring expertise.

0640 GMT: Casualties. The Local Coordination Committees claim 144 people were killed on Saturday, including 16 women and 13 children.

Forty-one of the deaths in Damascus and its suburbs; 26 in Aleppo Province, and 20 in Daraa Province.

The Violations Documentation Center records 52,722 deaths since the start of the conflict in March 2011, an increase of 112 from Saturday. Of the dead, 42.427 were civilians, an increase of 70 from yesterday.

0625 GMT: Damascus and its Suburbs. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ezz al-Din Khalouf announced his defection from the Assad regime in a video aired Saturday on Al Arabiya TV.

Khalouf, the head of the army branch that deals with supplies and fuel. said that many of those with Assad's regime have lost faith in it, yet continue to do their jobs, allowing Assad to demonstrate broad support.

"It's not an issue of belief or practicing one's role," he said. "It's for appearance's sake, for the regime to present an image to the international community that it pulls together all parts of Syrian society under this regime."

The general said fighters from the Lebanese military group Hezbollah were fighting in Syria in "more than one place", but did not give further details.

Activist Seif al-Hourani said that Khalouf's son, who is an army captain and also appeared in Saturday's defection video, made contact with insurgents about six months ago and leaked information to them before he asked for help getting the family out of Syria.

Six days ago, insurgents smuggled Khalouf, his wife, and three of their children out of Damascus to the southern province of Sweida. Two days later, they moved them to Daraa. They waited there until late Friday when it was safe enough to drive them to the border and hand them to Jordanian authorities, al-Hourani said.

0605 GMT: Damascus and its Suburbs. Insurgents have reportedly advanced near the capital, extending their hold over the suburb of East Ghouta.

Clashes were reported in several areas, such as the Yarmouk camp, Jobar, Barzeh, and Qaboon. The Syrian Revolution General Commission reporting regime troop reinforcements being deployed in the southern suburb of Darayya. Fighting has also effectively shut down Damascus International Airport, south of the city, to all non-military flights.

Fighting was also reported in Aleppo, Syria's largest city, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights cliaming at least 12 insrugent were slain near the international airport. The SOHR also said there was heavy fighting in the Huweika district of Deir Ez Zor in eastern Syria, with a car bomb exploding near a building housing regime forces.

In a pre-trial hearing on 28 February in military court, Private Bradley Manning --- detained since May 2010 --- explains why he passed videos and hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks.

At the hearing, Manning pled guilty to 10 reduced charges;h however, the Government said it will pursue all 22 original counts, including aiding the enemy --- which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison --- and espionage. The trial begina in June.

The unofficial transcript of the remarks has also been posted.

An extract from the testimony, in which Manning describes one of the leaked videos, showing US military fire killing civilians and journalists in Iraq in 2007:

Five minutes --- prompted by a Washington Post article, fed by the Obama Administration, which received far too little attention --- on how the Obama Administration is expanding the authorisation for the use of deadly force to "associates of associates of Al Qa'eda":

So President Obama, his military, his CIA --- they don't have to go out anymore and say, "Will the real Al Qa'eda please stand up?" They just have to say, "Whether you're standing up of sitting down, you're a target."

Abdulrahman al-AwlakiMark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane write for The New York Times:

One morning in late September 2011, a group of American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia. The drones crossed the border into Yemen, and were soon hovering over a group of trucks clustered in a desert patch of Jawf Province, a region of the impoverished country once renowned for breeding Arabian horses.

A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Another was Samir Khan, another American citizen who had moved to Yemen from North Carolina and was the creative force behind Inspire, the militant group’s English-language Internet magazine.

Two of the Predator drones pointed lasers on the trucks to pinpoint the targets, while the larger Reapers took aim. The Reaper pilots, operating their planes from thousands of miles away, readied for the missile shots, and fired.

It was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, intense deliberation by lawyers working for President Obama and turf fights between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., whose parallel drone wars converged on the killing grounds of Yemen. For what was apparently the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial.

Eighteen months later, despite the Obama administration’s effort to keep it cloaked in secrecy, the decision to hunt and kill Mr. Awlaki has become the subject of new public scrutiny and debate, touched off by the nomination of John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, to be head of the C.I.A.

The leak last month of an unclassified Justice Department “white paper” summarizing the administration’s abstract legal arguments — prepared months after the Awlaki and Khan killings amid an internal debate over how much to disclose — has ignited demands for even greater transparency, culminating last week in a 13-hour Senate filibuster that temporarily delayed Mr. Brennan’s confirmation. Some wondered aloud: If the president can order the assassination of Americans overseas, based on secret intelligence, what are the limits to his power?

This account of what led to the Awlaki strike, based on interviews with three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials and outside experts, fills in new details of the legal, intelligence and military challenges faced by the Obama administration in what proved to be a landmark episode in American history and law. It highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil, relying on missile strikes rarely acknowledged by the American government and complex legal justifications drafted for only a small group of officials to read.

The missile strike on Sept. 30, 2011, that killed Mr. Awlaki — a terrorist leader whose death lawyers in the Obama administration believed to be justifiable — also killed Mr. Khan, though officials had judged he was not a significant enough threat to warrant being specifically targeted. The next month, another drone strike mistakenly killed Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who had set off into the Yemeni desert in search of his father. Within just two weeks, the American government had killed three of its own citizens in Yemen. Only one had been killed on purpose.

Read full article....

Six minutes taking apart Wednesday night's drama of Senator Rand Paul, nominally opposing the nomination of John Brennan as CIA Director, speaking for 13 hours --- the ninth-longest filibuster in history --- about the Obama Administration's use of drone warfare....

Was it really significant?

"Here's what the media didn't recognise. Rand Paul's statements, his show, his declarations, his posturing didn't do a damn thing....This wasn't Mr Smith Goes to Washington. This was Mr Macbeth: a 13-hour speech full of sound and fury, but signifying nothng."

Listen to interview from 7:55 on The Briefing's homepage or in a pop-out window.

Why a "false drama"? For all the sudden media attention because of Paul's speech --- the ninth-longest in Senate history --- his criticism was, in the end, superficial.

The only substantive demand that Paul made was an assurance that Americans could not be killed on American soil by drones. The White House offered that "concession" on Thursday.

Brennan was subsequently confirmed as CIA Director by the Senate.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration retains the freedom to develop its new strategy of drone warfare --- including the target killing of American citizens, as well as the "collateral damage" of slain civilians --- in any country except the US.