He let loose with all kinds of eye-opening intelligence about the process of affiliating with al-Qaeda, meetings with high-level al-Qaeda leadership, how he got there, and other Westerners he met along the way. From that we were able to take a closer look at people whom Vinas met and the people they knew. It was a giant leap in the evolution of the targeting process, much more efficient and less legally dubious than some of the earlier ideas that hypothetically might have made it onto the counterterrorism-division whiteboard—looking at every twenty-year-old who traveled to Pakistan last year,
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