The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

Just as lawyers for President Bush had redefined torture to permit extreme interrogations by the CIA and the military, so had lawyers for President Obama given America’s secret agencies latitude to carry out extensive killing operations. One of them was Harold Koh, who had come to Washington from Yale Law School, where he had been the school’s dean. He had been a fierce critic from the left of the Bush administration’s war on terror and had decried the CIA’s interrogation methods—including waterboarding—as illegal torture. But when he joined the government as the State Department’s top lawyer, he found himself spending hours poring over volumes of secret intelligence in order to pass judgment over whether men should live or die. In speeches, he offered a muscular defense of the Obama administration’s targeted-killing operations, saying that in a time of war the American government was under no obligation to give suspects normal due process before putting them on a kill list. Still, in moments of public reflection, he spoke of the psychological burdens of spending so much time reading the biographies of the young men the United States was debating whether or not to kill. “As the dean of Yale Law School I spent many, many hours looking at the résumés of young twenty-year-olds, students in their twenties, trying to figure out which ones should be admitted,” he said during one speech. “I now spend a comparable amount of time studying the résumés of terrorists, same age. Readin...