By Spencer Ackerman

You can expect to see at least two people inside the secret bunkers in Virginia where the CIA pilots its lethal drones over Pakistan. One controls the distant drone, his hand on a joystick, ready to fire off a missile at a target below. Another is a CIA lawyer, watching to ensure that the operator is within his rights to attack his target. Call it a “punctilious” method to avoid civilian casualties and legal hot water, as one of those lawyers recently did — or call it the bureaucratization of a shadow war.

Tara Mckelvey gets a very rare peek inside the processes that go into the drone strikes, an undeclared air war that peaked last year at 118 missile firings, up from 33 in 2008. Her conclusion, published today in Newsweek, is that the operations ordering them are “multilayered and methodical, run by a corps of civil servants who c...” But even the CIA’s former top lawyer, John Rizzo, is blunt about his involvement in what he calls “murder.”

Rizzo told Mckelvey that the process works roughly like this: the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center maintains a team of ten lawyers, who compile evidence that a prospective target constitutes a threat to the U.S. If Rizzo outlined the threshold that the lawyers have to meet, Mckelvey doesn’t report what it is, nor does she explain who asks the lawyers to compile a case on a particular target. But the CIA’s general counsel vets the case before issuing what Rizzo, who held the job during the Bush and early Obama administrations, calls a “death warrant.” The president doesn’t review the targeting list.

Read more here:  http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/behind-the-drones-lots-of-b...!+Mail.