Obama's Kill List

OBAMA KILL LIST

Duration 01:15:31 · Language spanish · Created 2026-09-24

Dear brothers and sisters, السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته. الحمد لله رب العالمين.

In 2008, an American-born cleric named Anwar al-Awaki addressed an audience by phone from Yemen, where he had only recently been released from prison.

The U.S. is trying to change Islam itself, without even hiding it.

The lecture was titled "The Battle of the Hearts and Minds," but for al-Awaki, the battle wasn't a metaphor; it was a war.

Now, in war, there are people who are going to be killed, and some of them are innocent.

That is the nature of war.

By this point, al-Awaki had changed. He had once been known as a relatively moderate preacher who could speak to Muslim American audiences in a language that they recognized, but after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the policies of the Bush-Cheney era, something hardened.

The same events many Americans saw as a response to terrorism, al-Awaki increasingly saw as an assault on the Muslim world.

It is the U.S. now who is killing innocents in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia.

And because he'd been born in the United States, because he understood American culture and American politics, al-Awaki was a uniquely effective communicator who could translate that anger into something that could inspire others.

Around that same moment in 2008, another American was speaking to a very different audience.

You know, I taught constitutional law for 10 years. I take the Constitution very seriously.

Barack Obama was running for president at a moment when the country was exhausted by war, shaken by financial crisis, and deeply distrustful of George W. Bush's presidency.

And Obama, a political unknown just a few years earlier, he was offering a very different perspective of American power.

The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all.

And that's what I intend to reverse.

Obama was running not just against a war or a party, but also against the Cheney-style unitary executive theory of power: against torture, against secret legal memos, against a presidency that, in his view, had drifted too far from the Constitution's checks and balances.

On the campaign trail, Obama paired that argument with a populist critique of an economy that seemed tilted toward Wall Street, lobbyists, and the wealthy.

When Countrywide Financial engineered a sale of its company, the two CEOs got $19 million bonuses. Now, what's wrong with this picture?

To his supporters, Obama represented the possibility of a giant course correction, a hope that the system, if steered back in the right direction, could still work.

So in 2008, these two men, both American, both shaped by the same post-9/11 world, they were moving in opposite directions.

For Anwar al-Awaki, the excesses of that era helped radicalize him into an enemy of the United States and the democratic system it claimed to represent.

For Barack Obama, those same excesses deepened his belief in that system and his determination to restore its limits.

The two had never met.

They would never meet.

But within a few years, their paths would collide in a way that would test the very principles that Obama had campaigned on, because the question that would eventually link them went to the core of the American system, and it had never been fully answered before: could the President of the United States order the killing of one of America's own citizens?

This is the story of how Barack Obama answered that question, and what that answer meant in the process of turning the presidency into a monarchy.

I'm David Sirota, and this is Master Plan.

Power, power, power, power, power.

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Do you know about these stories?

In 1933, Huey Long invented a holiday to prevent a bank from collapsing.

In 1960, years before he was assassinated, someone tried to kill JFK with a car bomb.

And in 2014, remember this, there was a whole news cycle about President Obama's tan suit.

On the podcast This Day in Esoteric Political History, we talk about the forgotten stories that may teach us a lot about the very strange moment we're living in right now.

Check it out. This Day in Esoteric Political History from Radiotopia.

With the midterm elections coming up, you're already hearing a lot about enormous campaign spending, billionaire donors, dark money, and political corruption.

And if you want to understand how America actually got to this place, we made something for you.

This is Jared. I'm a producer of the Master Plan podcast.

I'm also the co-author, along with David Sirota, of the book Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

The book is adapted from the first season of the Master Plan podcast, but the book goes much deeper, with new reporting, secret documents, never-before-seen photos, and archival material we couldn't fit into the show.

You can get the Master Plan book in paperback or e-book at levernews.com/book.

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And CNN can now project that Barack Obama, 47 years old, will become the President-elect of the United States.

I have complicated feelings about the Obama presidency.

This little-known U.S. senator only a few years ago, and now he will be the first African-American President of the United States.

It's hard to overstate just how much Barack Obama's election in 2008 felt like a catharsis, especially when it came to national security.

After nearly a decade of the post-9/11 buildup, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture program, the warrantless wiretapping, all foisted on the country by a bunch of crusty old neocons who'd been inside the Washington swamp for 40 years.

Seemingly out of nowhere came Barack Obama, someone who looked and sounded like the opposite.

As a senator, Obama had spoken out against the Patriot Act.

This is legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law.

Obama opposed the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

He believes in the overarching power of the President to engage in whatever policies the President deems to be appropriate.

And Obama categorically rejected the Cheney-style, dark-side approach to national security.

When I am President, America will reject torture without exception.

And you could hear that entire worldview in his inaugural address.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

For a moment, it genuinely felt like the entire posture of the federal government, especially when it came to executive power, was about to be reset.

And in some ways, at least early on, that shift did seem real.

Democrats controlled Congress, and Obama was mostly governing by passing legislation. President Barack Obama signing into law the most sweeping economic package in decades.

The first major overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression.

But at the very same moment, many of the same conservatives who'd spent years defending the expansion of executive power under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, they were suddenly describing Obama as an authoritarian power grabber.

It's corrupt. It's a big power grab.

It's abhorrent to our founding principles.

I feel like I'm watching The Sopranos, you know, when I look at the Obama administration.

This is the actual work, if you will, of a dictator.

So depending on who you listen to, Barack Obama represented either the great hope of American democracy or the end of it.

Obama himself once described this dynamic perfectly. In his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, he wrote.

They serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

The truth is, if you really want to understand how Barack Obama thought about executive power, where he resisted it, where he feared it, and where he ultimately embraced it, you don't start with Wall Street. You start with drones.

On his first full day in office, January 21, 2009, Barack Obama promised something Washington had not heard in a very long time: transparency.

For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city.

That era is now over.

For a lot of people watching, that moment felt like a clean break from the Bush years.

ACLU attorney Brett Max Kaufman remembers it well.

That was a huge part of forming, you know, the central issues that I cared about.

At the time, Kaufman was a young law student, part of a generation whose political identity had been shaped by the post-9/11 era.

Like a lot of students his age, Kaufman had protested the Iraq War.

But as more and more details came out—about torture, surveillance, and abuses that didn't seem to have any real checks.

Honestly, the revelations got even worse and worse over time.

That's really what motivated me to go to law school in the first place.

Like many in his generation, Kaufman saw Obama as a direct response to that era.

He really benefited from this perception that he was somebody who cared about the rule of law, that strongly disagreed with the ways that the Bush administration was using executive power.

Obama felt like the schoolhouse rock presidency: a literal constitutional law professor who seemed to know America's democratic rules intimately and actually believed in following them.

And for people like Brett Kaufman, there was a real expectation that Obama would dismantle the Bush-era national security apparatus.

And in those first months in office, it looked like Obama might actually do it.

He ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay Prison and banned harsh interrogation tactics.

A review of military trials for terror suspects.

He gave the Pentagon marching orders on drawing down troops in Iraq.

The message was clear: the era of lawless executive power was over.

And Obama's personnel choices reinforced that message.

At the State Department, he installed Harold Koh, a leading legal scholar and outspoken critic of Bush-era legal theories.

He brought in Eric Holder as attorney general, who was tasked with resetting the Justice Department.

Then, over the coming months, the Justice Department did something that would have been almost unthinkable a year earlier: it released those secret John U. memos from the Bush-Cheney era, the ones that had justified torture and so-called enhanced interrogation.

Documents that spelled out, line by line, CIA interrogation techniques.

Keeping them from sleeping for up to 11 days.

Aspect is laid on his back, blindfolded, and then water is poured in his mouth and nose.

Forced nudity in front of both male and female interrogators.

These were some of the most shocking legal documents I've ever seen. Really.

Eric Holder also tried to rein in one of the Bush administration's favorite legal weapons: the so-called state secrets privilege.

During the Bush years, the government would basically wave the words "state secrets" around and shut down lawsuits or refuse to turn over information.

Under Holder's new rules, agencies had to first convince Justice Department lawyers that disclosure would genuinely threaten national security.

Only when necessary and in the narrowest way possible.

But critics wasted no time slamming Obama, a one-term U.S. senator with limited national security experience.

They cast him as naive on what they insisted was the defining issue of the age: terrorism.

Do you believe the President of the United States has made Americans less safe? I do.

And leading that charge was Darth Cheney himself.

We put in place some very good policies, and they worked.

Now we have an administration that's come to power that's been critical of the programs.

Despite leaving office deeply unpopular, Cheney clearly saw it as his mission to emerge from the dark side like some undead Sith Lord and warn the country that Obama was dangerously oblivious.

He's making some choices that, in my mind, will in fact raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

If Dick Cheney's worldview belonged in Star Wars, Obama's belonged in the other great sci-fi franchises.

Space, the final frontier.

Obama was famously a Star Trek fan as a kid, and not just because he liked spaceships.

In a 2016 interview, he explained what exactly he loved about the show.

I think Star Trek says that we're all complicated, and we all got a little bit of Spock and a little bit of Kirk and a little bit of Scotty.

And part of figuring it out is being able to work across barriers or differences.

Now, that's not to say the crew of the Enterprise were pacifists.

They weren't opposed to using force. Fire. Fire.

Four months into his presidency, Obama delivered a major national security speech at the National Archives.

It was a Star Trek-ish rebuttal to Cheney's Death Star worldview.

We are indeed at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process, in checks and balances and accountability.

Obama laid out a new plan for the more than 250 detainees still being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Some would be transferred, some would face civilian trials, others could still be prosecuted at military commissions.

We are declassifying more information, and we're narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege.

And this wasn't just rhetoric. Inside the Office of Legal Counsel, the nerve center for presidential power, Obama had installed David Barron and Marty Leaderman, two lawyers who'd spent years criticizing the legal theories of the Bush administration.

Their job was to build a whole new legal framework for the war on terror.

And at the center of that effort was a simple idea: stop relying on vague claims of inherent presidential authority and instead ground national security policy in powers that Congress had actually authorized.

So Obama looks at Bush's problem as being one of claiming too much inherent authority.

That's Andrew Ruda-Levage, a professor of government at Bowdoin College.

Bush and Cheney, they see these inherent authorities in the presidency, especially during wartime, and those cannot be infringed upon by the law.

Think back to the last episode, when President George W. Bush attached a signing statement to the anti-torture law, basically saying, "Thanks, Congress, but, uh, also, screw you."

Obama does not say that.

He is making a different claim.

He's saying, "As the President, I can do whatever the law and the Constitution allow me to do."

So Barron and Leaderman began by rejecting the Bush-era emphasis on inherent commander-in-chief powers and searching instead for justifications within things like the 2001 authorization for use of military force, that law that Congress had passed after 9/11.

You could call it the Obamacarian executive theory: a presidency that could still act forcefully when it had to, but would operate inside a matrix of legal rules and procedures.

And Obama assembled something of an Enterprise crew around him: Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Leon Panetta at the CIA, and other experienced hands from the Democratic foreign policy establishment who could help compensate for his relatively thin national security resume.

And for a while, it genuinely seemed like Obama was trying to turn the page on the Bush era.

In June 2009, Obama traveled to Cairo and delivered a major address aimed at resetting America's whole relationship with the Muslim world.

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning.

And then in October, barely nine months into his first term, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee.

The Nobel Peace Prize would later turn out to be just a little premature.

Politically, in that first year of his presidency, Obama was riding high.

And by the time the holidays rolled around, the atmosphere in Washington felt almost surreal.

It's time for you and me, but someday at Christmas time.

A 15-year-old Justin Bieber was in Washington serenading the Obamas with Christmas songs as the President prepared to fly to Honolulu for a long-awaited break with his family.

And then everything changed.

We're cutting into Christmas programming to bring you news of what the White House is calling an attempted terrorist attack here in the United States.

On Christmas morning 2009, aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, passengers were preparing for landing when they heard a strange popping sound.

Then someone noticed a young man in a window seat. His pants were on fire.

The man was a 23-year-old Nigerian named Omar Farouk Abdul-Muttalib.

Hidden beneath his clothes was a specially designed undergarment packed with explosive chemicals, which he'd just tried to ignite using a liquid accelerant.

If this incident is remembered today at all, it's often as a punchline, because the only person seriously injured was the failed martyr himself.

The media quickly gave him a nickname. Alleged underwear bomber.

The underwear bomber.

Underwear bomber.

But in that moment, the stakes were anything but trivial.

If the device had worked, it could have been the deadliest attack over U.S. soil since 9/11.

And in the days that followed, investigators began to uncover something even more troubling.

Preliminary information that has surfaced in the last 24 hours raises some serious concerns.

Speaking from a Marine base in Hawaii, President Obama addressed what the government was now learning: the warning signs had been there.

Pieces of intelligence that, in hindsight, should have raised alarms, but those pieces had never been connected.

Almost immediately, critics seized on another detail: after his arrest, Abdul-Muttalib, a Nigerian, had been read his Miranda rights.

Republicans have harshly criticized the White House.

Among them, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said. Quote, "We are at war, and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe."

I think that they have to get away from looking upon this as a criminal justice issue and look upon it much more as a war, which is what it is.

Obama's honeymoon on national security was officially over.

We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.

So let's take stock for a second.

If you're on the right, Obama at this particular moment, at the end of 2009, looks like a naive liberal academic weakening America and treating terrorism like a law school seminar.

By contrast, if you're one of Obama's liberal supporters, you think the President is doing a 180-degree reversal from the Bush-Cheney era of secrecy and unchecked executive power.

But here's the thing: there was another side of Obama that most people could not fully see yet at this particular moment, because it was operating largely in secret: the drone-loving Obama.

And the first real clues had actually surfaced before Obama even took office.

Let's go back to one year earlier.

For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city.

It was December 2008, and President-elect Obama was in Chicago for a classified briefing with outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden.

You met Michael Hayden in the last episode. After helping President Bush and Vice President Cheney build the post-9/11 surveillance state, Hayden had become one of the architects of the CIA's expanding drone warfare program.

According to Hayden, Obama's reaction depended entirely on which Bush-era program they were discussing.

When Hayden described the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation programs, the stuff tied to torture and black sites, Obama was cold and dismissive, signaling pretty clearly that he intended to shut it all down.

But then Hayden shifted to the CIA's drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, and suddenly Obama perked up.

He started asking detailed, practical questions: how were the targets identified? How did they measure the success of strikes? What was being done to minimize civilian casualties?

It caught Hayden off guard.

I was surprised, because he talked about a lot of things, and I didn't think it would be drone operations.

Here, at least, was one part of the post-9/11 national security apparatus that Obama did not seem eager to dismantle.

He liked the idea.

By the end of that 2008 briefing, Hayden explained that the drone campaign would continue unless the incoming President ordered otherwise, and Barack Obama didn't.

According to Hayden, when it came to drones.

Obama did some things that even Bush wouldn't do, and so that's very interesting.

Most people did not realize how interested Obama already was in drones.

He had been intrigued by the drone as an emerging military technology, even when he was serving in the Senate.

That's Scott Shane, a veteran New York Times national security reporter who was covering the rise of the drone program at the time.

So he was a guy who saw technology as a way of solving problems, and the drone seemed custom-made for the problem of terrorism.

And during one presidential debate in 2008, Obama surprised a lot of people by sounding even more hawkish than his Republican opponent John McCain.

He said that he would launch military strikes into Pakistan.

Now, you don't do that.

You don't say that out loud.

If the United States has al-Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sites, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out.

To Obama, drones offered something the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had not: the promise of precision, a way to target suspected terrorists without invading entire countries or sending in ground forces.

Here's Scott Shane again.

You're talking about countries where, you know, one in a thousand people maybe wants to kill Americans.

So why do you go after a thousand and why not go after the one?

And this is where we start to see the other side of Barack Obama, the side you didn't hear much about.

Remember how we mentioned that Obama was a Trekkie at heart?

Well, it turns out he identified most with one character in particular.

I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans.

I find their illogic and foolish emotions constantly irritant.

When Leonard Nimoy died in 2015, Obama issued an official presidential statement that declared, "I loved Spock."

And it's not hard to see why.

The pointy-eared Spock was known for his cool, hyper-rational approach to decision-making.

Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

While Obama's supporters and critics were obsessing over all the ways he was supposedly breaking from the Bush-Cheney years, far fewer people noticed what his team of liberal technocrats, many of them veterans of the Clinton years, were quietly keeping in place.

For example, the Obama administration preserved parts of Bush's surveillance architecture, including certain warrantless NSA data collection programs.

Insufficient facts always invite danger, Captain.

And perhaps most importantly, Obama elevated John Brennan, a longtime CIA veteran and counterterrorism official who'd lived through the Bush years and come to believe that targeted drone strikes could become the centerpiece of a new kind of warfare.

In fact, after his inauguration, Obama's very first military action was to authorize a CIA drone strike in Pakistan's North Waziristan region.

Pakistan learned some things don't change.

The strike killed several people, including reports of as many as 20 civilians.

President Obama is continuing the Bush administration's policy of an expanded use of drones in Pakistan's tribal areas.

And just to be clear, these weren't the little buzzy drones that you might see used by a real estate agent.

These drones were basically remote-controlled warplanes.

The drones are also known as UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, no pilots inside.

It can fly as high as 50,000 feet, sit over a target for 15 hours straight, and is as dangerous as a fighter jet.

John Brennan pushed hard to expand the power to carry out covert strikes in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and Obama was receptive to the idea almost immediately.

As Obama urged his staff and the gargantuan American counterterrorism machinery that had built up since 9/11 to focus on this problem, Brennan naturally emerged as a very important player, closely advising Obama over the whole program.

If you think about it from the perspective of a brutally objective rationalist like President Spock, drones solved a lot of problems at once.

They didn't require the giant military occupations that Obama wanted to unwind.

And the pitfall with capturing fighters on the battlefield: you've got to figure out what to do with them.

Then you're back in all the same legal and political dilemmas over indefinite detention, black sites, Guantanamo, the very things that Obama's team was actively trying to reverse.

But if a drone missile strike kills the enemy instead, well.

There is a certain scientific logic about it.

And because much of the intelligence for the drone program operated mostly inside the opaque machinery of the CIA, all the decisions could happen deep within the executive branch, largely shielded from public scrutiny and normal wartime oversight.

Missile attacks by U.S. drone aircraft killed at least 17 people today.

The U.S. has carried out more than 40 drone attacks this year inside Pakistan.

So all of this was already underway before the underwear bomber in late 2009, quietly happening beneath the drumbeat of headlines and Obama pronouncements that seemed to be de-escalating Darth Cheney's war on terror.

But after the underwear bomber.

Battle stations, all hands, battle stations.

On January 5, 2010, President Obama convened his national security team in the White House Situation Room to confront what had just happened.

This wasn't some abstract debate about executive power anymore.

It was a near-catastrophe that could have killed hundreds of Americans.

That really focused their attention on the necessity to be very serious about eliminating the threat before it essentially eliminated his administration.

Obama made it clear there would be no more mistakes.

And before long, Obama's White House and his national security machine became fixated on one man they believed represented that threat more than anyone else: an American hiding out in Yemen.

Anwar al-Alaqi's story is next, after the break. Do you know about these stories?

In 1933, Huey Long invented a holiday to prevent a bank from collapsing.

In 1960, years before he was assassinated, someone tried to kill JFK with a car bomb.

And in 2014, remember this, there was a whole news cycle about President Obama's tan suit.

On the podcast This Day in Esoteric Political History, we talk about the forgotten stories that may teach us a lot about the very strange moment we're living in right now.

Check it out, This Day in Esoteric Political History from Radiotopia.

With the midterm elections coming up, you're already hearing a lot about enormous campaign spending, billionaire donors, dark money, and political corruption.

And if you want to understand how America actually got to this place, we made something for you.

This is Jared. I'm a producer of the Master Plan podcast. I'm also the co-author, along with David Sirota, of the book Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. The book is adapted from the first season of the Master Plan podcast, but the book goes much deeper, with new reporting, secret documents, never-before-seen photos, and archival material we couldn't fit into the show. You can get the Master Plan book in paperback or e-book at levernews.com/book. Paid subscribers save 20%, so if you're not a Lever subscriber yet, go become one now.

Or, if you upgrade your membership to become a Lever leader, we'll personally send you a signed copy of the book for free while supplies last. So get the book, read the book, support our work. Go to levernews.com/book or follow the link in the episode description. This is the call to prayer. In late 2001, as Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were launching the war on terror, a young Muslim cleric appeared in a short video profile produced by the Washington Post. We will offer our prayer, which is the fourth prayer of the day. His name was Anwar al-Alaqi. And in those fearful weeks after 9/11, he was trying to calm people down. I think that in general, Islam is presented in a negative way. I mean, there's always this association between Islam and terrorism. In the footage, al-Alaqi drives through the suburbs of Washington, D.C., with a reporter, speaking in a calm, measured tone, soft-spoken, almost professorial.

When that is not true at all. I mean, Islam is a religion of peace. At the time, al-Alaqi looked like the kind of moderate Muslim American leader that many in the United States were hoping to see after 9/11. Like Barack Obama, al-Alaqi seemed to embody an American story of education, tolerance, and upward mobility. al-Alaqi had been born in New Mexico in 1971, while his Yemeni father was studying in the United States. After spending part of his childhood in Yemen, he returned to America as a teenager and stayed for college, studying engineering at Colorado State University, before moving into Islamic scholarship and preaching. Over the next several years, his charisma and ability to communicate helped him build a following as an imam in Denver, San Diego, and later Falls Church, Virginia, attracting audiences both in mosques and online. But then came those years that you heard about in the last episode: the expanding war on terror, the occupations, the preemptive wars.

And over time, al-Alaqi's views began to change. With the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims, I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim. He left the United States, eventually returning to Yemen, and his lectures began gaining a following among Islamic hardliners. By the end of the decade, U.S. officials found evidence tying al-Alaqi directly to al-Qaeda operations in Yemen. Investigators discovered that the gunman behind the 2009 Ford Hood shooting, the deadliest non-military attack ever on a U.S. base, had exchanged emails with al-Alaqi in the year leading up to the attack. Then, after that attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner, intelligence officials learned that this would-be underwear bomber had traveled to Yemen. In January 2010, just days after that failed attack, Obama publicly signaled a widening counterterrorism campaign in Yemen.

We intend to target al-Qaeda wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary, as we are doing currently with the government in Yemen. Days later, Obama's top counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, was asked publicly about al-Alaqi and his possible connection to the attempted Christmas Day bombing. On the issue of Mr. al-Alaqi, yes, we were very concerned. As FBI agents interrogated the underwear bomber, they learned that he had traveled to Yemen specifically to seek out al-Alaqi, someone he already knew from online sermons. And according to the underwear bomber, al-Alaqi had not just inspired him to attempt to blow up the plane. Here's journalist Scott Shane again, who wrote a book about al-Alaqi called Objective Troy. They interrogate Umar Farooq Abdul-Muttalib, the underwear bomber, and he tells them that he had gone to Yemen seeking al-Alaqi because he knew him from the web, and that Anwar had introduced him to the al-Qaeda bombmaker who fitted him out with this underwear bomb.

Inside the U.S. intelligence community, that confession marked a turning point. It convinced analysts that al-Alaqi had crossed a line from radical preacher to operational figure actively involved in attacks against the United States. But what made the Obama administration's response different from the Bush years was not just the expansion of targeting suspected terrorists like al-Alaqi with drones. It was the whole system and the legal architecture that Obama began building. Obama was quite adamant about taking responsibility for this program. He didn't want to be in a situation where they had a bad strike and he would fire someone and say, you know, why did you guys do this? So the Obama White House built a system designed to formalize drone targeting decisions. Inside secure meetings, intelligence officials assembled dossiers on suspected terrorists, photographs, biographies, sort of like baseball cards. Officials debated who could be captured and who could be killed.

And at the end of that process, the recommendations moved up the chain, all the way to the Oval Office, where Barack Obama personally reviewed the names. Inside the administration, the system handled by the National Counterterrorism Center became known as the Disposition Matrix. Outside the White House, people speculating on the existence of such a program called it something much simpler. On a kill list. The kill list. Will we ever really know whether there is indeed a CIA kill list? And unlike many presidents before him, Obama insisted on personally participating in every choice. As unusual or almost creepy as that can seem, he was quite clear-eyed about the risks involved, and he wanted to make decisions himself. Then on February 5, 2010, just weeks after the failed underwear bombing, Obama and his national security team met at the White House and approved adding Anwar al-Alaqi to the CIA's official kill-or-capture list.

An American citizen who was not formally charged with a crime was now being targeted for death by his own government, at the order of a president. Of course, there had already been rumors that al-Alaqi was on a U.S. target list, but the administration never confirmed it publicly. Behind the scenes, Obama's team was wrestling with a much bigger question about presidential power. I think Obama, of all people, he taught constitutional law, let's face it. You know, he understood that this was very tricky territory. You're going to kill someone who's an American citizen and who you're not executing him because he's been convicted after trial. You're executing him without even criminal charges. And look, if you've been listening to this series, you know that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were not exactly shy about expanding presidential power. But this, this was something different. Even Richard Nixon, at least as far as we know, never claimed the authority to secretly order the killing of an American citizen far from a conventional battlefield.

So how could a president legally justify these unprecedented powers? That question landed on the desks of David Barron and Marty Leaderman, which was more than a little ironic, because those two had spent years criticizing the Bush administration's post-9/11 theories of presidential power. If you have very serious questions about the rule of law and the confidence in the department, and the president simply disregards them, for no one to continue pushing would, I think, be a very serious loss for the country. That was David Barron in 2007. But now in 2010, David Barron and Marty Leaderman were running Obama's office of legal counsel, and they were given one of the most extraordinary assignments imaginable: create a legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen without criminal charge and without trial. Over the following months, the duo produced a set of legal memos, about 48 pages in total, laying out their case.

Let's imagine you're these two legal scholars working in the Obama administration. Before you ever put pen to paper on these official memos trying to justify extrajudicial assassination, you first get in front of a big whiteboard. Can I kill this guy? And underneath that, you start making your checklist. Capture? According to the memos, lethal force is only justified if capturing the target is infeasible. That could mean the country they're in won't cooperate, that the operation would be too risky for U.S. personnel, or, as in al-Alaqi's case, that they're hiding out in remote, unstable regions where there isn't really a functioning government in control. So capture is off the table. Next, imminent threat? We all know what that's supposed to mean: self-defense, a specific attack that's about to happen. But here's where things start to get flexible.

One memo signed by David Barron took the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, that law that Congress passed after 9/11, and extended its logic to groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, arguing that America was still engaged in the same armed conflict. And once you accept that premise, the definition of imminent starts to change. Because if someone is a senior operational figure in a group that is continuously plotting attacks, then the threat, by definition, is always there, even if you don't know when or where the next attack will happen. So imminent no longer really means about to happen. It starts to mean part of an ongoing threat. So imminent threat, check. And finally, the stickiest one of all on your whiteboard: due process. The U.S. Constitution says the government cannot deprive a person of life without due process of law. So naturally, you'd ask, well, where is that process?

Where's the judge, the courtroom, the trial? And David Barron's answer was, what if we just make up our own? According to the memos, due process could be satisfied entirely inside the executive branch, through the Disposition Matrix system they designed themselves, secretly. So due process, check. No courtroom, no jury, no congressional oversight, no checks and balances from another coequal branch of government, just the executive branch reviewing its own evidence and then acting on its own. Once they took their whiteboarded ideas and put them on paper, Barron and Leaderman's legal framework looked very different from the Bush-era theories they'd spent years criticizing. There were no sweeping claims about an all-powerful unitary executive, no blunt declaration that the president could simply ignore statutes or override the law in the name of national security. Instead, the memos took a narrower, more lawyerly, almost spock-like path.

But in practice, the executive branch was deciding, largely on its own, what the law allowed it to do. Administration lawyers were defining the legal boundaries in secret, and then using those internal conclusions to authorize lethal action, which, if you follow the logic, started sounding a little familiar. When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. Or maybe this more recent version. My own morality, my own mind. I don't need international law. At the very same moment the drone program was expanding, the Obama administration was tightening its grip on secrecy. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the White House briefing room. Reporters started pressing Obama's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, about the legal process behind the drone program. U.S. citizens are entitled to a certain judicial process when it comes to sentencing to death. And is there a process in place that we don't know about? There's a process in place that I'm not at liberty to discuss.

It became a familiar pattern. Reporters would ask, Gibbs would refuse to confirm or deny. Can you tell us if that's true? I'm not going to get into it. Years later, Robert Gibbs would explain why he'd been so evasive. When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the things, one of the first things they told me was, you're not even to acknowledge the drone program. You're not even to discuss that it exists. Now remember, Obama had entered office promising the exact opposite. The way to make government accountable is to make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made. The only time Obama did publicly acknowledge drones in those early years, he did not do it as a constitutional lawyer or with a logical explanation like Mr. Spock. He did it at the White House correspondents' dinner as a punchline of a joke. The Jonas brothers are here.

Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys don't get any ideas. I have two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. In the meantime, the drone war was dramatically expanding behind the scenes. By early 2011, Obama's covert drone campaign had already become the most expansive targeted killing program in American history. By some counts, Obama's first year surpassed Bush's entire drone record. Pakistan alone saw roughly 128 drone strikes in 2010, and the campaign was spreading beyond Pakistan into Yemen and Somalia. What had once been justified as a narrow counterterrorism tactic was becoming something much larger: a standing instrument of presidential power operating across multiple countries with minimal public scrutiny and almost no meaningful outside oversight.

And this was when the pace of the drone war really accelerated. In Pakistan's tribal belt, drone strikes have become a daily occurrence. Drone strikes in Pakistan have killed at least 19 people in just the last 24 hours. One strike in Pakistan's tribal regions killed more than 40 people, including tribal elders gathered for a meeting. Leaders in Pakistan's tribal regions have expressed outrage. We were in our houses when the attack took place. We didn't see anything coming.

Then in May 2011 came the biggest target of all. Osama bin Laden killed by Navy SEALs Sunday morning in a mansion in northern Pakistan. Obama's team decided this mission was too important to leave to drones. He was reportedly shot in the head in the ensuing firefight, and his body has now been buried at sea. The raid became a defining moment of Obama's presidency, proof to supporters that this aggressive, more targeted approach to counterterrorism could deliver results. Outside the White House, there were chants of four more years for Obama. And then, just a few months later, the drone war came full circle. People engage. Let's go. Roll it in. Hey. Ready. On September 30, 2011, a drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Alaqi. A U.S. drone fires its missile, and one of America's top terror targets is dead. News reports reveal details of the operation, weeks of surveillance, backup aircraft, special forces standing by, and finally, a missile strike on a vehicle believed to be carrying al-Alaqi.

We now have a name for it: Operation Troy. He was an American citizen, but the administration insists its actions were lawful. The death of al-Alaqi is a major blow to al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. In much of Washington, the reaction was immediate and bipartisan. Yes, he was a citizen, but if you're a terrorist, you're a terrorist. Al-Alaqi was a terrorist. The United States was at war. The president has the authority, end of story. But some others seemed uneasy about where that logic might lead. I mean, can a president do that now? Can he just issue an order for anyone he deems dangerous in the United States? Well, see, that's where you start to get into gray areas. I mean, you know, I don't know where the outside limit of this is. Unsurprisingly, one person who seemed perfectly content with Obama's unilateral decision to kill al-Alaqi was Darth Cheney. I think the president ought to have that authority to order that kind of strike, even when it involves an American citizen.

For once, Obama and Cheney seemed to agree on something. But two weeks later, the questions became harder to dismiss. Another drone strike in Yemen killed Abdul Rahman al-Alaqi, Anwar al-Alaqi's 16-year-old American son. The son of U.S.-born militant cleric Anwar al-Alaqi was among those killed in a trio drone attacks Friday night in Yemen. There was no allegation that Anwar's son was involved with al-Qaeda, but reports suggested the boy had been searching for his father in the weeks after Anwar's death. And the killing of an American teenager suddenly intensified questions that reporters, civil liberties advocates, and even members of Congress had been asking for nearly two years. What exactly was the legal standard here? Who was making these decisions? And if the U.S. government could kill an American citizen without trial, who got to decide when due process had been satisfied? It wasn't until March 2012 that Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, publicly articulated what the administration's secret legal memos had been arguing all along.

Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. Holder insisted that the constitution's guarantee of due process remained intact, but he argued that when it came to foreign terrorist organizations, the executive branch itself, not a court, could determine when due process had been satisfied, even in the killing of an American citizen abroad. For many critics, the assertion that the president could be both the decision-maker and the arbiter of due process only raised more questions. And questions about the killing of 16-year-old Abdul Rahman al-Alaqi persisted. About a year later, reporters were still demanding answers about the teenager's death. That's an American citizen that's being targeted without due process of law, without trial, and he's underage. He's a minor. And Obama's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, did not argue that Abdul Rahman had been a terrorist. He didn't claim the boy posed an imminent threat. He didn't even describe the strike as a tragic mistake.

I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they're truly concerned about the well-being of their children. Gibbs just blamed the kid's father, and that was the answer.

It was the television show Homeland. I missed something once before. I won't. I can't let that happen again. That TV show about a bipolar CIA officer hopping around the globe trying to stop the next terrorist attack, it premiered in 2011, right as Obama's drone wars heated up.

Homeland illustrated the core tension of the Obama years.

This was a presidency that publicly questioned the excesses of the Bush era, while at the same time dramatically expanding a secret system of surveillance, targeted killing, and executive power.

And that's where the Obama administration's cool, rational, spotlight logic collided with the messy realities of war.

Drone strikes on militant targets in Yemen are on the rise.

But who has the final say on the makeup of the so-called kill list?

After years of pushing for answers, New York Times reporter Scott Chain was one of the first journalists to really pull back the curtain.

In May 2012, Chain co-authored a front-page investigation that revealed to the public the whole secret operation.

For the first time, America learned that the Obama administration was not just carrying out drone strikes.

It was operating a secret system for selecting human targets, a process that ultimately led all the way back to the president himself.

You know, this was all governed by secret memos written by lawyers at the Justice Department, sent over to the White House, and by decisions in the Oval Office.

A blistering exposé in Esquire magazine would dub it the lethal presidency of Barack Obama.

And then that controversy moved out of the headlines and into the courts.

In July 2012, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the families of three U.S. citizens killed by the administration's drone campaign: Anwar al-Alaqi, his 16-year-old son Abdul Rahman, and Samir Khan, the editor of an English-language jihadist magazine.

Here's Anwar's father, Nasser al-Alaqi.

What I am looking for is really justice from the U.S. system of justice, for accountability.

At the center of this lawsuit, al-Alaqi versus Panetta, was a straightforward but explosive constitutional argument.

The president was claiming unprecedented authority to secretly decide that an American citizen was a threat, and then have that person killed without charges, without trial, and without any court reviewing the evidence.

This is where Brett Max Kaufman, who you heard earlier in the episode, comes back in as a new lawyer working for the ACLU on the al-Alaqi case.

All the time, we see courts engage in analysis of whether law enforcement engaged in the use of excessive force.

And so our claim in the al-Alaqi case was, this is like those.

This is like a case where an officer shoots someone on the street, and you're allowed to have a court evaluate whether that was reasonable.

Did that officer act reasonably in the moment?

Did the government here act reasonably in killing al-Alaqi?

By this point, New York Times reporter Scott Chain had uncovered Obama's kill list and much of how the drone program operated.

He knew secret memos existed inside the Office of Legal Counsel, the ones written by David Barron and Marty Leaderman.

What Chain didn't know was what those opinions actually said.

Chain filed an open records request for the Justice Department's legal opinions.

The Obama administration rejected it.

You know, it was just a very unsatisfactory feeling that this stuff was all being governed by secret memos.

After waiting more than 18 months, the New York Times and the ACLU ultimately sued the Obama administration, seeking the release of the classified legal opinions that Barron and Leaderman had written to justify the targeted killing of American citizens abroad.

But more than a year after al-Alaqi's death, they still had nothing.

The Justice Department was aggressively fighting to keep the memos secret.

Chain put the issue pretty plainly.

Why do we as American citizens not have a right to know that our government has decided it can kill American citizens without charging them with a crime?

The judge overseeing those consolidated cases expressed frustration with what she saw as a glaring contradiction.

Obama administration officials were publicly defending the drone program in speeches and interviews, while simultaneously arguing in court that the legal reasoning behind it was too sensitive to disclose.

In January 2013, federal judge Colleen McMahon ultimately ruled that she would not force the Obama administration to release the memos.

But even as she sided with the government, she made clear she was deeply troubled by what the law now seemed to permit.

She described the situation as a catch-22, where the executive branch could declare its own actions lawful while keeping the legal reasoning secret from the public.

I don't know what that means.

Does he mean President Obama should have announced publicly, "Here's classified information. By the way, the source of this classified information is probably going to get killed"?

That's Douglas Letter.

He was a longtime Justice Department attorney who oversaw the Obama administration's defense in many of these lawsuits.

He spoke to us about the government's position at the time, and he rejects this kind of criticism.

It was ridiculous to just think that, you know, the president was saying, "Hey, I got an enemy's list. Let's go wipe out these people."

This was all done pursuant to a massive amount of legal consideration and intelligence gathering.

The New York Times appealed Judge McMahon's denial of the open records request to a higher court.

But then something unexpected happened. NBC News obtained and published a leaked Justice Department white paper summarizing the administration's legal rationale for targeted killings.

A leaked document today put the spotlight back on lethal strikes by the U.S. government on U.S. citizens abroad.

The white paper was not the full set of classified memos, but it was the first real glimpse the public had into how the government was justifying the power to kill American citizens without a trial.

That document was leaked and created a huge uproar because it was the only time anyone had really seen what their legal argument was about why these things were lawful.

And once that document was out in public, it became much harder for the Obama administration to keep refusing to confirm whether the memos even existed, let alone argue that the underlying legal analysis had to remain secret.

Meanwhile, as the fight over those memos continued, the Obama administration was also trying to shut down the other major drone case that we talked about earlier, al-Alaqi versus Panetta, that lawsuit brought on behalf of al-Alaqi's father and Sarah Khan, mother of Samir Khan.

Justice Department lawyers had moved to dismiss that case entirely.

One of the government's main arguments there relied on something called the political question doctrine.

Here's Obama Justice Department official Douglas Letter again.

The Supreme Court has decided that there are certain things that are for the political branches, meaning the executive branch and the legislative branch, for them to decide and to work out through the political process between the two of them and with the electorate.

And they're not for the courts to decide.

The Justice Department argued that even allowing a judge to examine the evidence against al-Alaqi would improperly interfere with the executive branch's ability to gather intelligence and make wartime decisions.

So once again, the Obama administration's position was essentially this. Trust me.

Their position was basically, the executive branch had reviewed the evidence, the executive branch had decided the killing was lawful, and the courts, they argued, should just stay out of it.

And then there was another warning buried in a footnote.

If the judge didn't dismiss the case on those grounds, the Obama administration said it was prepared to invoke the state secrets privilege to try to block the lawsuit from moving forward at all.

This was the exact kind of sweeping secrecy argument that Dick Cheney and David Addington had loved during the Bush years, the kind of carte blanche claim Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, had promised this administration would not rely on.

But now, faced with turning over its own secrets, the message from the Obama administration was pretty clear.

One way or another, the memos were going to stay hidden from the public.

And ultimately, that strategy worked.

In April 2014, federal judge Rosemary Collier dismissed the al-Alaqi case without ever holding a hearing to examine the evidence behind the targeted killings.

In her ruling, Collier acknowledged that the plaintiffs had raised a plausible claim that the government may have violated the victims' constitutional rights, but she concluded that the courts had only a, quote, "exceedingly limited role" in matters involving warmaking and national security.

But even as Judge Collier stepped aside, she sharply criticized the Obama administration's, quote, "truckulent opposition" and its refusal to turn over key evidence.

For the ACLU's Brett Kaufman, what stood out was not just the outcome of the case, but how closely the Obama administration's position resembled the one taken by George W. Bush's administration.

It might be a bit much to expect the executive branch to say, "Sure, we'll put our cards on the table and have a court decide whether we did it was lawful."

But I personally think that is what the executive branch should do in these kinds of situations.

Even as the courts declined to intervene, the controversy was beginning to spill into the political arena.

John Brennan, President Obama's choice to head the CIA in the second term, was grilled by both Democrats and Republicans.

When Obama nominated drone overseer John Brennan to become CIA director in 2013, the confirmation hearings were disrupted by protesters furious over Brennan's role in targeted killings.

Please remove this woman. We will recess.

A few months later, Obama himself was interrupted during a major speech defending his administration's approach to the war on terror.

The way we treat you is the measure of our own liberty.

When we went— Can you stop the signature strikes and killing people on the basis of suspicious activities? We're addressing that, ma'am. But the bigger controversy soon centered on another figure: David Barron, the Justice Department lawyer who had authored the secret memos justifying the killing of Anwar al-Alaqi.

In 2013, Obama nominated Barron to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

I just want to express my great thanks to you, Senator Lee, for chairing the hearing today, and to the president for nominating me.

Almost immediately, senators began asking about his secret memos.

You authored a memo authorizing targeted killings of U.S. citizens abroad without due process.

Because of the classification issues and the attorney-client privilege, and I don't want to be taken to be in any sense confirming the existence of the particular memo.

The backlash came from both the left and the right.

Civil liberties groups protested Barron's nomination.

Here's Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.

Professor Barron was instrumental in formulating the legal argument that this administration used to justify the targeted killing of American citizens by drones.

And here's Republican Senator Rand Paul threatening a filibuster.

I cannot and will not support a lifetime appointment for someone who believes it is okay to kill American citizens not involved in combat without a trial.

At the same time, the courts started pushing back on the Obama administration's claims of secrecy, and it came with a bit of a plot twist.

An appeals court ruled that the Obama administration could no longer keep the Barron memos entirely secret.

The judges essentially said, "You cannot spend years publicly defending the drone program while simultaneously claiming the legal reasoning behind it is too secret to discuss."

The DOJ is releasing a detailed white paper.

You can't have it both ways.

Either it's secret, or it's in the public sector and it can be discussed.

But even then, the Obama administration still resisted releasing the Barron memos to Congress.

A group of liberal and conservative senators say that they would fight the nomination unless that memo was made public. Facing mounting pressure ahead of Barron's Senate confirmation vote, the Obama Justice Department finally relented, sort of.

The department agreed to release a censored version of one document to help ease his confirmation.

But only after the Senate vote.

If the Obama administration was going to be fair, they would have released those memos today, before the vote on Professor Barron to become Judge Barron.

Senate Democrats ultimately voted him through.

Barron was confirmed by a narrow 53-45 vote.

And only then, the very next day, the Justice Department released a heavily redacted version of Barron's memo.

Documents that the U.S. government relies on to justify drone strikes on Americans overseas.

Human rights advocates say the memo shows the government's drone program distorts the law.

The administration is applying novel, controversial tests and largely setting aside the tests that exist under international law.

Still, for the first time, the public could finally see, in the government's own words, the legal reasoning used to justify the targeted killing of an American citizen.

Thanks, Obama. But by then, the killing had already happened. The program had already expanded.

The precedent had already hardened into policy.

And the guy who wrote it was now a federal judge.

The constitutional debate that was supposed to happen before the government claimed this unprecedented power was now happening years afterward.

I think that's a huge part of the story around this case.

Here's the ACLU's Brett Kaufman again.

The government internally was writing these OLC opinions and taking actions that really dramatically and aggressively expanded the internal view of what the executive was allowed to do all around the world, with lethal force, with surveillance, with torture and interrogation.

All of these things empowers that, over time, the government and the executive branch claimed for itself.

At the same time, the Obama administration was arguing in court that judges should not be allowed to meaningfully review any of it.

But over time, what was created was a system where the final say on every one of these matters is the president's lawyers and ultimately the president himself.

And there is no judicial review.

There is no need to explain any of this to the public.

There is no transparency requirement.

It is all up to executive grace.

And toward the end of Obama's second term, even some of his former supporters, like activist Cornell West, were lamenting that the reformer they elected had become something much different.

He ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national surveillance presidency.

Americans assassinated, no due process, no accountability.

You see, for me, that's movements toward a police state, toward a neofascist state.

In Chicago this summer, crowds gathered to celebrate the 2026 opening of the Obama Presidential Center and Library, a 225-foot monument to the hope and possibility that surrounded Obama's rise to the White House.

The story we tell in this building begins not with Michelle's origins or my origins, but with our nation's.

A belief in checks and balances in our government, and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust free press.

Honestly, I think part of what makes Obama's legacy on presidential power so difficult to pin down is that he genuinely seemed conflicted about power itself.

When it came to Wall Street, the financial crisis, or confronting powerful economic interests, Barack Obama often seemed deeply cautious about acting too aggressively on his own.

Throughout most of his presidency, Obama publicly rejected the idea that the president should or even could impose his will.

I'm not the emperor of the United States.

I am not a dictator.

I'm the president.

But behind the scenes on national security, Barack Obama was far more willing to take the overreaching wartime powers created after 9/11 and transform them into something more bureaucratic, more systematized, and ultimately more normalized for Democrats.

And the rest of the system largely allowed that to happen. Congress didn't hold its first major hearings on the drone program until late in Obama's presidency.

Courts repeatedly declined to intervene.

And for years, the administration successfully fought to keep even the legal rationale for the killings secret.

By Obama's second term, though, you could hear him beginning to wrestle more openly with the implications of all of this, and what it might mean for future presidents to have all the power that Obama himself had concentrated in the executive branch.

Here's Obama in 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected.

There have to be some guardrails.

And what we've had to do on things like drones was to build the guardrails internally, essentially set up a whole series of processes to guard against government overreach.

Obama's administration had eventually imposed internal rules, released civilian casualty estimates, and spoke more publicly about the legal framework behind targeted killings.

Years later, reflecting on the drone program with Stephen Colbert, Obama said something that really stuck with me.

The problem with the drone program was not that it caused an inordinate amount of civilian casualties.

The problem is that it starts giving you the illusion that it is not war.

It starts giving you the illusion that it's not war.

I think Obama was describing something bigger than just the mechanics of killing.

Because in the end, it was still about the executive branch defining the limits of its own power, the president and his advisors giving themselves the secret authority to decide who lived and who died.

Philosophically, it looked nothing like the Cheney years, but in practice, it kept making the presidency more king-like.

And that was part of the illusion.

What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.

Thanks, Dr. McCoy.

It also proves another saying.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?

Even Mr. Spock understood where all of this could lead. Yes.

Earthmen like Ramesses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler.

Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.

And that's really the story we've been telling this entire season of Master Plan.

Because each time a president uses these authorities, even cautiously, even reluctantly, they become more difficult to roll back.

So by the time Obama left office, the question was no longer whether these immense presidential powers existed.

You're not going to be a dictator, are you?

The question was what would happen when those powers were handed to someone far less conflicted about using them.

U.S. launching a deadly airstrike on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean off Central America.

Two survivors clung to the wreckage, then came the order, hit them again.

We have legal authority, right?

We're allowed to do that.

The administration has designated the cartels as terrorist organizations.

But before those powers could be expanded, a kingmaker had to first write the playbook.

That's next time on Master Plan.

Thinking of a master plan. Maybe we'd like a dictator.

For more on Obama's drone program, go to our website, where we've posted some of the original documents and memos that we talk about in this episode.

Just follow the link in the show notes.

Master Plan is a production of The Lever.

This episode was written and produced by Jared Jacquang Mayer, with additional writing and production by Laura Krantz and me, David Sirota.

Fact-checking of this episode by Emma Wilkie.

Original music is by Nick Byron Campbell.

Sound design and mixing by Amber Devereux.

Legal review by Mike Balchin.

Our director of podcast production is Ron Doyle.

Special thanks to Scott Shane for speaking with us about the al-Alaqi killing.

If you'd like to learn more, check out his book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone.

We also relied extensively on Charlie Savage's book, Power Wars.

You can listen and subscribe to Master Plan on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the most viral episodes of the @LeverNews podcast MASTER PLAN is about the Obama administration wildly expanding the president’s drone warfare powers — which Trump has been using.

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