President Obama delivered a wide ranging speech on Thursday, laying out his vision for countering terrorism in his second term, including announcements on the use of drones, the future closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the eventual end of the long war against al Qaeda.

Most importantly, Obama announced that he intends to work closely with Congress to “refine, and ultimately repeal” the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Passed in the aftermath of 9/11, the AUMF gave the president broad authority to carry out military action against “those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 2001 attack.

“Groups like [Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States,” Obama said. “Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

Congress recently began its first set of hearings into possible revisions of the AUMF, which is about to enter its twelfth year in force. Currently, there are competing proposals in the Senate and House to either repeal the authorization in its entirety or revise it to allow for the use of force beyond the perpetrators of 9/11. Obama, however, refused to go along with any broadening of the AUMF, saying he “will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.”

CAP expert Ken Gude hailed Obama’s commitment to repealing the AUMF as the “beginning of the end” of the war against al Qaeda. While remnants of al Qaeda and new groups remain threats, “the extraordinary military response that followed the attacks of 9/11 embodied in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force can now be wound down, the permanent war footing retired, and we can rebalance our efforts to fight terrorism to rely more on our effective and efficient law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” Gude told ThinkProgress.

In his speech today, Obama continued: “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” The clear declaration builds upon previous statements from former members of Obama’s administration that the battle against al Qaeda cannot go on indefinitely.

That desire to eventually repeal the AUMF makes up the cornerstone of the counterterrorism strategy Obama laid out today. The current Obama administration approach to conducting targeting killing and other portions that strategy were only just recently codified, as Obama acknowledged in his remarks. In it, the use of drone strikes and other applications of force will be streamlined to a more limited set of targets, with a higher level of scrutiny applied when determining those targets, while a renewed focus on the other elements of preventing terrorism will be implemented.
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The Pentagon’s former top lawyer said on Wednesday that the death of a 16-year old American in a drone strike in Yemen was effectively an accident, the first time any current or former Obama administration official has made such an admission.

On Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to members of Congress for the first time publicly acknowledging that U.S. drones had killed four American citizens. One of those citizens was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16 year-old son of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who on Wednesday the government also for the first time admitted was killed in a U.S. drone strike for his role in al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and alleged participation in attempted terror attacks on the United States.

Jeh Johson, who served as the Department of Defense’s general counsel during President Obama’s first term, appeared on MSNBC last night to discuss Holder’s letter, speaking with host Rachel Maddow. In Holder’s letter, Abdulrahman and two other U.S. citizens are described as not “specifically targeted” in the strikes that took their lives — suggesting that perhaps they were killed in a so-called “signature strike” that targets behavior. But Johnson said he thought Holder’s letter could have been more explicit:

JOHNSON: I think you could remove the word specifically from that sentence.

MADDOW: Not targeted at all?

JOHNSON: Not targeted.

MADDOW: They are effectively saying it was an accident.

JOHNSON: We are effectively saying that they were not targeted as part of those specific operations.

MADDOW: But killed anyway.

JOHNSON: But they were, obviously, killed.

Maddow wondered whether Johnson believed that U.S. culpability meant the family of those killed deserved recourse. “That is a very good question,” Johnson said, “I think you should put that to the Department of Justice.”

Nassar al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather Abdulrahman, is in the midst of a lawsuit against the U.S. government, alleging that the killing of his son and grandson was unconstitutional. After yesterday’s revelation, a federal judge asked that government lawyers within the next week file a memo on how Holder’s acknowledgement affects the lawsuit.

Prior to Johnson’s statement, the assumption was that Abdulrahman and his friends were killed in what is known as a “signature strike” or “profile strike.” Under the practice, groups of men between 16-55 who meet a certain profile are often considered legitimate targets, often with the U.S. having no concrete knowledge of their identities. There are indications that the practice will be sharply curtailed moving forward, however, as it seems that the same standards applied to the targeted killing of American citizens will be applied to suspected terrorists writ large.

In a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that a set of rules codifying the administration’s counterterrorism policies, including its targeted killing program, have been completed and President Obama has approved it.

The letter also confirms for the first time that the United States killed four American citizens in drone strikes since President Obama took office in 2009.

But the completion of the Obama administration’s codification of how it conducts targeted killings and other counterterrorism policies — or the “playbook” as it has been called — has much further reaching implications for future U.S. policy. Begun as a project of then-White House Counterterrorism Director John Brennan, and accelerated due to fears of Obama not serving a second term, the playbook was meant to put into writing many of the ad hoc processes the administration had developed to facilitate the targeted killing of suspected terrorists.

A Washington Post article on Brennan from 2012 revealed that the playbook is meant to “cover the selection and approval of targets from the ‘disposition matrix,’ the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted, and the legal authorities the administration thinks sanction its actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.” The “disposition matrix” is the benign-sounding name for the process used to approve targets for strikes. Far from being limited to drones, these strikes include the use of missiles fired from Naval warships and manned aircraft, and special operations forces.

According to Holder’s letter to Congressional leaders, the playbook has been completed, though it won’t be available to the public anytime soon:

This week the President approved and relevant congressional committees will be notified and briefed on a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities; these standards and processes are already in place or are to be transitioned into place. While that document remains classified, it makes clear that a cornerstone of the Administration’s policy is one of the principles I noted in my speech at Northwester: that lethal force should not be used when it is feasible to capture a terrorist suspect.

Among the changes rumored to be put into place in the playbook is the shifting of authority for agencies to use drones in carrying out lethal strikes. Reports indicate that while the CIA will retain control of the drone program in Pakistan, other theaters will see drones placed under the sole purview of the Department of Defense.

Despite the increased attention they’ve received, the number of drone strikes has reportedly dropped in recent years. President Obama is due to deliver a speech on Thursday at the National Defense University laying out his vision for how counterterrorism goals will be pursued in the second term, including the use of drones and the closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) on Tuesday published a new report “Drones: Myths And Reality In Pakistan,” examining the ongoing war against militant groups located in Pakistan. The report calls on both the United States and Pakistan to come clean about the ongoing use of drones against suspected terrorists, saying that more than strikes are needed to end Pakistan’s ongoing problem with militants.

Since 2004, according to the ICG, at least 350 U.S. drone strikes have taken place on Pakistani soil, within the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). Complicating operations against militant groups based in the area, the vast majority of Pakistan’s laws simply do not apply to the FATA, with the region instead following its own set of tribal laws and codes. Given the lack of control Islamabad exerts, the FATA has long been a haven for armed groups, including those who strike across the border in Afghanistan, including Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the Haqqani Network, as well as the Pakistani Taliban, which strikes against Pakistan itself.

One of the major issues ICG raises regarding drone strikes in the area is the lack of firm intelligence about precisely who is being targeted. In place of firm data, the U.S. often utilizes what are known as “signature strikes” or “personality strikes.” Groups of men between 16-55 who meet a certain profile are often considered legitimate targets, based on “pattern of life” data including where they’ve traveled while under surveillance and whether or not they were in the vicinity of known targets when the strike occurred.

As the report details, Pakistan and U.S. are locked in delicate dance over the actual use of drones within Pakistan, each concealing the full truth from the public. The U.S. still won’t officially confirm that the CIA-run targeted killing program within Pakistan even exists. The IGC says Pakistan often displays behavior that “borders on the schizophrenic” when it comes to the drone program. The Pakistani government often claims to have no forewarning about the use of drones and publicly denounces many of the strikes, even with ample evidence that they provide permission for the operations to occur, especially when carried out against its enemies.

ICG suggests both Washington and Islamabad become more transparent about the relationship the two have on drone strikes, while shifting their policies away from relying solely on military options, and instead taking a more comprehensive approach to combating militancy:

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The Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services committee said he is hoping to get more Democrats to co-sponsor a bill he introduced last week that seeks to provide oversight over the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) introduced the Oversight of Sensitive Military Operations Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to notify the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and their subcommittees, of kill or capture operations (or a “sensitive military operation”) aimed at suspected al-Qaeda militants after the operation in question has taken place.

The bill defines a “sensitive military operation” as “a lethal operation or capture operation conducted by the armed forces outside the United States” and outside of Afghanistan, as the measure assumes that military operations there fall under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Thornberry clarified to Breaking Defense that his measure does not limit oversight “to any part of the military or to any particular technology,” including the use of drones.

Currently, the bill has mostly Republican co-sponsors but the Texas Republican said that’s likely due to lobbying logistics. It “is solely a function of how fast the emails got around,” he said, adding that now that he has the support from House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) and Rep. James Langevin (D-RI), a subcommittee ranking member, more Democrats will likely sign on. “The numbers don’t reflect the opinion about it,” Thornberry said.

He also said that he is not intending to hamstring the military. “Congress will never be in position, nor should it be, to make operational decisions — ‘OK, you should capture that person, you should kill that person’ — that’s not our role,” he said. “If it’s a larger scale military conflict,” Thornberry added, “we understand the military can’t come running over to us over every few seconds.”

But, he said, his bill would give Members of Congress “the opportunity to complain about it if we don’t think that it’s justified, or if we believe that some operations are outside the bounds or even [just] a bad idea….Then we have opportunities to restrict funding or to change the authorization or to have a closed hearing on the matter. If [we] have the information, then Congress has a number of tools to use.”

Harold Koh, the former top State Department in the Obama administration, recently criticized the lack of transparency in the White House’s targeted killing program — one that has included a ramped up use of drones throughout the last four years. “It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies,” he said last week, adding that it is “fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.”

Another former Obama administration official, former DOD counsel Jeh Johnson, similarly criticized the secrecy surrounding Obama’s counterterrorism polices. “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Thornberry told Breaking Defense that this is what his bill is trying to address. “Under this framework, it lets Congress push back,” he said.

The State Department’s former top lawyer on Tuesday offered an at times scathing critique of the Obama adminsitration’s lack of transparency related to the use of drones and other tools in waging a campaign of targeted killingn against alleged al-Qaeda operatives.

Harold Koh, who served in the role of State Department General Counsel throughout President Obama’s first term, delivered a speech at Oxford University titled “How to End the Forever War?” Given the title, Koh’s talk covered a multitude of legal questions surrounding the U.S. government’s ongoing fight against terrorism. Koh said he believed that the Obama administration had gotten off to a good start in its pursuit of terrorists, pointing to the President’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech and his Executive Orders on transparency.

“But since then, to be candid, this Administration has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decisionmaking process that it has been applying,” Koh said, singling out the drone policy as an example of how the lack of transparency from the White House and other parts of the Executive Branch have alienated the American people:

KOH: It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies. Because the Administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone program, fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.

The Administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late.

Koh made certain not to cast drones themselves as “inherently evil” and to stress that he was not opposed to their use within the laws of war. But he insisted that Obama follow through on his promises and “make public and transparent its legal standards and institutional processes for targeting and drone strikes.” The administration should also, according to Koh, explain why and when Americans can be targeted under the law, clarify how it counts civilian casualties from drone strikes, and release records on those instances where strikes were carried out against a target of questionable value.

Koh isn’t the first former Obama administration official to offer criticism of the targeted killing program. Former Department of Defense counsel Jeh Johnson in March told an audience at Fordham University, “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.” Koh also echoed Johnson’s own engagement at Oxford in declaring that the war against Al Qaeda can’t go on forever.

Koh’s statements on the need for more transparancy closely mirror those of CAP Chair John Podesta, as published in a March op-ed. In that piece, Podesta called on President Obama to “[r]elease the legal guidance governing your targeted killing programs, including the justifications for targeting Americans, and take charge of the informed, free and vigorous debate that undoubtedly will follow.”