The Economist. John Brennan. The Debate over Drones!

It was so much simpler when George W Bush was president. Outlining America's plans for Osama bin Laden, a few days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, Mr Bush declared: "there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, "Wanted: Dead or Alive." For all those at home and abroad made uncomfortable by sweeping assertions of American power, it was a moment of predictable provocation. Without surprise, they heard a swaggering Republican president vowing to make his country's attackers pay, and seeming to pay no more heed to legal niceties, than a cowboy bent on a lynching. Yet 12 and a half years later, the cautious, "lawyerly" Barack Obama, a Democratic president with nothing of the cowboy about him, finds himself still locked in combat with Islamic extremists, bent on attacking America, and wrestling with the same fundamental questions of international and domestic law as his predecessor. Confounding the political, journalistic and academic elites, who trusted Mr Obama to be the anti Bush, the current president has greatly expanded the use of unmanned drones to track and kill terror suspects and militants, and the occasional hapless bystander in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. He has shelved his promise to close the detention camp at Guantanemo Bay, and, until this week, fought to keep secret legal memos asserting the right of administration officials, so long as they are high ranking and "informed" to kill American citizens overseas, who are deemedto be leaders of al Qaeda or an affiliate, and involved in active plots to attack American targets. Behind all these missions, lie two hard questions left unanswered by Mr Bush's battle cry of 2001: Whether America can lay claim to the legal powers of a nation waging war, and whether it is wiser, more just and more useful to kill or capture militants and terrorists bent on causing the country harm. Both those questions were on stark display on January 7th at the Senate Intelligence Committee's confirmation hearing for John Brennan, Mr Obama's pick to the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr Brennan, being a 25 year CIA veteran who has wielded vast influence, while serving as the president's defense of current policies, with their blend of killing missiles from the sky, and painstaking attempts to detain and interrogate living suspects, while hewing to the rule of law.