'Drones' changing hands

What it means for oversight and accountability

The Obama administration seems poised to order that all kinetic attacks on al Qaeda or affiliated bad guys be conducted by elements of the United States military, knee-capping the Central Intelligence Agency's paramilitary capability and effectively ending its drone program in Pakistan.

Obama and his aides want to reorder a national security architecture developed on the fly after 9/11, one that made sense back then and which makes less and less sense today. They want to create a more sustainable framework for future administrations engaged in counter-terrorism activities outside warzones. And they're interested in fostering accountability, which will, in theory, reduce the number of innocents killed in these types of strikes.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.