By Jack Detsch
The CIA’s targeted killing program might be in jeopardy.
When a CIA-led drone strike on an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan took the lives of two western hostages last month, including an American aid worker, Warren Weinstein, who had been kidnapped by the group, dozens of skeptics came out of the woodwork. Now, according to Defense News, a cadre of heavy hitters in Congress are stepping up, calling for the program, run under the discrete auspices of the CIA and the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command, to be placed under direct Pentagon authority.
“I can understand when it was a very small operation, why it would be done by the intelligence agencies, such as U-2 and other reconnaissance aircraft for many years,” Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which marks up the Pentagon’s budget every year, told CNN, saying that the targeted-killing program “has reached the point where it’s an integral part of the conflict and a very essential one.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat