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 Inside the Killing Machine  :      Information Clearing House: ICH

 Inside the Killing Machine  :      Information Clearing House: ICH: "President Obama is ordering a record number of Predator strikes. An exclusive interview with a man who approved ‘lethal operations.’

By Tara Mckelvey

February 15, 2011 'Newsweek' - -- It was an ordinary-looking room located in an office building in northern Virginia. The place was filled with computer monitors, keyboards, and maps. Someone sat at a desk with his hand on a joystick. John A. Rizzo, who was serving as the CIA’s acting general counsel, hovered nearby, along with other people from the agency. Together they watched images on a screen that showed a man and his family traveling down a road thousands of miles away. The vehicle slowed down, and the man climbed out.

A moment later, an explosion filled the screen, and the man was dead. “It was very businesslike,” says Rizzo. An aerial drone had killed the man, a high-level terrorism suspect, after he had gotten out of the vehicle, while members of his family were spared. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo says. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.”

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