SHOWING BOTH HOW LITTLE THREAT THEY POSE...:

President Barack Obama ordered a barrage of CIA drone strikes in Yemen in 2013 that killed the al-Qaida operatives behind the most serious plotting against American interests in years, a former CIA leader says in a new memoir that broadly defends the targeted killing of terrorists.

When the U.S. closed 20 diplomatic facilities across the Middle East and Africa in August of 2013, officials said it was in response to intercepted communications about an unspecified plot. They said little about how and why they later deemed the threat abated. But former CIA official Michael Morell says the reason was that that many of the key operatives involved in the plot were killed by U.S. air strikes. [...]

According to the New America Foundation, which tracks drone strikes, there were nine drone attacks in Yemen between July 27 and Aug. 10, which killed up to 38 militants and possibly two civilians. Morell calls the embassy plot the most serious terrorist threat to face the U.S. since another thwarted al-Qaida plan in 2006 to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. [...]

[M]orell, who was traveling with President George W. Bush on 9/11 and was involved in the intelligence behind the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, mounts a staunch defense of two controversial CIA programs: brutal interrogations of al Qaida prisoners and targeted killing with drones.

While Morell says he is personally troubled by the harshest technique the CIA used on detainees, water boarding, he makes a case that agency leaders had no choice but to use what many consider torture in the years after the 9/11 attacks. He said such techniques saved American lives.

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