The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

The ill-conceived Blackwater phase of the killing program remains—like the earlier iteration of the program—a closely guarded government secret. Even in retirement, former Counterterrorist Center officer Hank Crumpton is prohibited by the CIA from giving details about the time that he worked on the first phase of the program. But in an interview, he said he found it puzzling that the United States still seemed to make a distinction between killing people from a distance using an armed drone and training humans to do the killing themselves. If the country is going to allow the CIA to do one, he said, should it really be queasy about allowing the other? “How we apply lethal force, and where we apply lethal force—that’s a huge debate that we really haven’t had,” he said. “There seems to be no problem with a Hellfire shot against a designated enemy in a place like Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.” In those places, he said, it seems like just another part of war. But, he asked, what if a suspected terrorist is in a place like Paris, or Hamburg, or somewhere else where drones can’t fly, “and you use a CIA or [military] operative on the ground to shoot him in the back of the head? “Then,” he said, “it’s viewed as an assassination.”

this remains an interesting debate to say the least, and not nearly as cut and dry as many people on either side might think