From “Remote Control,” Steve Coll’s provocative New Yorker book-review piece about warfare that seems less awful, that resembles a video game, that still kills:

“During the nineteen-seventies, it seemed as though this era of covert action were coming to an end. After a congressional investigation exposed the extent of C.I.A. plots, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations. Successive Presidents strengthened the ban with executive orders of their own, codifying a growing bipartisan consensus that assassinations undercut America’s avowed commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

But after September 11, 2001, as lower Manhattan and the Pentagon smoldered, C.I.A. leaders advocated for the right to kill members of Al Qaeda anywhere in the world. George W. Bush eagerly assented. On September 17th, the President signed a still classified directive delegating lethal authority to the agency. ‘The gloves come off,’ J. Cofer Black, the director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, told Congress early in 2002.

Since then, America’s targeted-killing program has grown into a campaign without borders, in which the White House, the C.I.A., and the Pentagon all play a part. The role of armed drones in this war is well known, but for years neither President Obama nor his advisers officially acknowledged their existence. Some three thousand people, including an unknown number of civilians, are believed to have died in targeted strikes since 2001. If the death tolls from strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan were included, the figure would be much higher.

An assassination campaign against suspected terrorists is not the same as one that occasionally rubs out unfriendly political leaders of nation-states, but it raises similar questions. Is a program of targeted killing, conducted without judicial oversight or public scrutiny, consistent with American interests and values?”