Robert Gates recalled going to a secure Hill hearing room for one such session, “and we got to the question of when you could kill a terrorist, and we had this almost theological argument. ‘Well, if the guy is driving toward the barracks with a truck full of explosives, can you kill him?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, what if he’s in his apartment putting the explosives together?’ ‘ Well, I don’t know.’ ”26 It was a debate that would continue, more or less in that form and largely unresolved, for the next fifteen years, until the morning of September 11, 2001.
