Obama

Better late than never, President Obama has moved to establish more rigorous standards for the targeted killings of Americans and foreigners alike away from a battlefield. The need for what he called "strong oversight of all lethal action" was one theme of the president's address Thursday at National Defense University. Another, equally overdue, was his renewed determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and expedite the repatriation of dozens of inmates who have languished there despite being cleared for release.

WASHINGTON - President Obama took pains to place the new restrictions on targeted killings he announced Thursday into the context of a broad reappraisal of the nation's anti-terrorism effort. Drones are not "a cure-all for terrorism," he said in his speech at the National Defense University. They are not always "wise or moral," he said. "All wars must end. " But a large measure of expediency helped push those principles along, former U.S. officials and analysts say. The five-year surge in missile strikes that Obama authorized after inheriting the program from President George W. Bush already has accomplished most of what it could, the analysts say. "We're running out of viable targets," said Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA assistant director for analysis.

WASHINGTON - Deputy Solicitor Gen. Sri Srinivasan, a rising star in legal circles, won an easy and unanimous Senate confirmation Thursday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, giving President Obama his first appointee to a conservative-leaning court that decides major regulatory disputes. Srinivasan, 46, who was born in India and grew up in Lawrence, Kan., was praised as being exceptionally smart, highly qualified and even-tempered. Republicans said they had no hesitance in approving Srinivasan, unlike other Obama nominees.

WASHINGTON - Reining back the aggressive counter-terrorism strategy he has embraced for five years, President Obama declared clear, public restrictions for the first time on using unmanned aircraft to kill terrorists, a shift likely to significantly reduce U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. Obama also lifted a ban on sending scores of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to their home countries and renewed his call to move the remaining detainees onto U.S. soil for imprisonment and possible trial in civilian or military courts.

Over the last four years, there has been a strange irony. One of the greatest speakers of our era has largely kept silent about one of the signature aspects of his presidency. Under President Obama's leadership, U.S. civilian intelligence agencies have carried out a series of not-so-covert operations in so-called secret wars that have reached a huge scale. There have been nearly 400 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2008, in periods of activity that have ebbed and flowed dependent on everything from the availability of intelligence to local political tides.

WASHINGTON - President Obama said Thursday he was troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may "chill" investigative journalism and said he had asked Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to review Justice Department guidelines for going after reporters or their records. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law," Obama said, referring to those who leak secret information. The statement seemed to mark a departure for the president, who has been particularly determined to investigate those in his administration who leak national security information to reporters.

Message to the president: Resistance is futile. There are plenty of juicy targets for investigators in the IRS scrutiny of conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, but the most dangerous for President Obama is this: Did bureaucrats in Cincinnati create this mess on their own? Or did someone in the White House give the marching orders to target the president's enemies? The Treasury Department's inspector general asked that latter question of the IRS brass, and they said no - but he didn't demand their emails and phone records.

WASHINGTON - As President Obama prepared to deliver a major speech on national security Thursday, his administration acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four U.S. citizens - one more than previously known - in drone missile strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. The disclosure Wednesday raised fresh questions about the secret drone campaign, a signature part of Obama's counter-terrorism effort, in which several thousand suspected terrorists, militants and others have been killed.

Pushed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Obama administration may ask Congress for the power to snoop on more types of communication online. The timing couldn't be worse, given the outcry over the Justice Department secretly grabbing journalists' phone records and emails in its pursuit of government leakers. The bigger issue with what the FBI is seeking, though, is that it applies 20th century assumptions about surveillance to 21st century technologies. Congress passed the Wiretap Act in 1968 to give federal investigators the power to listen in on suspects' phone calls if they obtained a federal court's permission.

WASHINGTON - During the 2010 campaign, Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat from Sherman Oaks, joked, "Every time I try to encourage the White House to do more to help us elect Democrats to the House of Representatives, I send them a picture of Darrell Issa with the word 'subpoena' underneath. " Issa, who has headed the House's top investigative committee since his party won control of the chamber in 2010, has lived up to Sherman's expectations. The Republican from Vista in San Diego County has become the Obama administration's chief antagonist in Congress.