The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”

Tenet began pushing aggressively to bulk up the CIA’s paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, and he sold the White House on a program to capture terrorists, hide them in secret jails, and subject them to an Orwellian regimen of brutal interrogation methods.

It has short-circuited the normal mechanisms for how the United States as a nation goes to war, and turned the American president into the final arbiter of whether specific people in far-off lands live or die.