He advocates targeted assassination as a last resort if it is the only way to prevent suicide bombings.
This action was not terrorism in the current sense of that term but, rather, what we would call "targeted assassination".
It is not just that international law, which surely applies in this case, is less generous towards targeted assassination.
On Christmas Day, Israel carried out its first "targeted" assassination in two months, killing two Islamic Jihad men and three civilians in Gaza.
Why, for instance, is targeted assassination by dropping a one-ton bomb from a plane on to the house of a suspected enemy not cruel, whereas a suicide bomber who immolates himself as well as his victims is?
Those defending the Obama administration's drone-missile targeted assassination campaigns should keep that in mind, too.
Are we willing to consider that targeted assassination is preferable to outright war?
At the time of Bergdahl's kidnapping, a covert war was just gaining momentum: the use of a rotating covey of unmanned aircraft to maintain persistent surveillance on targets who had been legally cleared by the CIA for targeted assassination.
Is any targeted assassination?
We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it.
Stevens was a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, and the mission, essentially a targeted assassination, troubled him.
