Tuesday morning kill list
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The Tuesday morning kill list was a weekly U.S. counterterrorism-targeting meeting instituted by John Brennan in 2009 during his service as Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism in the first Barack Obama administration. Per John Kiriakou, the meeting produced a written list of individuals to be killed in the following week, with assignments distributed to the responsible kill teams; the next Tuesday's meeting opened with confirmation of completion and the issuance of the next list. Kiriakou has repeated the same description elsewhere, calling it a meeting held "every Tuesday morning" at the National Security Council, where the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism compiles a weekly kill list. He has also described the meeting as one where the CIA director meets with the National Security Council and a group of lawyers to approve a weekly list of people to be killed by teams sent out around the world, reconvening the following Tuesday for a new list. Kiriakou says the Special Activities Division's targets originate from this White House kill-list meeting held on Tuesday mornings. The list itself has never been acknowledged. Asked in 2025 what government secret he would most like to see, Kiriakou named it alongside the roster of governments the CIA is currently working to overthrow: "I would love to see the Tuesday morning kill list, which they've never even admitted exists."

Format and mechanics

Kiriakou describes the list as produced each week at the White House, where CIA personnel met with the White House counsel's staff to name people to be killed that week. The head of the Special Activities Division collected the list, sent his people out, and returned the following Tuesday for the next one. Elsewhere Kiriakou places the meeting at 7 a.m., after which the Special Activities Division's "global services" teams used post-9/11 targeting technology to carry out the killings worldwide before returning for the next list. In a fuller telling, Kiriakou names the meeting's specific attendees: White House counsel, deputy White House counsel, attorneys from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA General Counsel's office, and CIA Counterterrorism Center operators, with Brennan seconded by the president to sign off on the list each Tuesday morning on the president's behalf, after which CIA teams fanned out worldwide to carry out the killings. Kiriakou adds that none of the people placed on the list had ever been accused of a crime, and that the government would not disclose whether every target was a foreign national: "All foreign? All foreign, we think. They won't say."

Once a target was set, the kill itself proceeded by one of two standard CIA modes: a drone strike, or a close-in action in which agency personnel were inserted, carried out the killing, and were exfiltrated by helicopter. "You just fire a missile from the drone, or you drop a guy in that does a close-in shot, and then you get back on the helicopter and fly home."

Enabling technology

The program's regular weekly cadence was made possible, per Kiriakou, by the maturation of CIA targeting software during this period, "the tech got sophisticated enough that you could just write up a list of people that you want to kill that week and you dish out the assignments." The substitution of automated metadata processing for manual analyst work eliminated the staffing bottleneck that would otherwise have constrained a weekly kill list.

Legal standard and accountability

Kiriakou describes the Tuesday-morning kill-list meeting as the formalization of the Obama administration's targeted-killing program. The legal framework required only that a target meet the standard of posing "a clear and present danger to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation", a standard Kiriakou describes as sounding precise but being, in practice, entirely vague. Post-mission accountability consisted of taking the kill teams' word for what happened.

Kiriakou says some names on the list were American citizens who had never been charged with any crime. He has cited Department of Defense policy at the time to illustrate how loosely "combatant" status was applied: simply being a 14-year-old male made a person an "enemy combatant" by default, meaning anyone who looked that age and was dressed as a boy could be killed from the sky.

Brennan's role and continuation under later administrations

John Brennan ran the meetings during Obama's first term; in the second term, Brennan was elevated to CIA Director. Kiriakou is uncertain whether the program was retained under subsequent administrations: "He started in '09 and kept it going. I have no idea if Donald Trump kept it or Joe Biden kept it or revived it, but it was something that they were very proud of in the Obama administration. They were just going out whacking everybody." He observes that no U.S. administration has had a political incentive to publicize discontinuation of such a program: "In their re-election campaigns: 'We need to kill fewer terrorists. If I'm reelected, we'll be a good one.'"

Kiriakou has given a fuller account of the same origin story: as Deputy National Security Advisor for counterterrorism, before later becoming CIA director, Brennan hosted the Tuesday morning kill-list meeting, convening CIA attorneys, CIA operational leaders, and NSC attorneys to compile the weekly list, dispatch teams worldwide, and reconvene the following Tuesday. Kiriakou says he is unaware of any U.S. assassinations between 1975 and September 11, 2001, and that the practice of targeted killing was normalized during the Obama administration and has apparently continued under Trump.

Kiriakou situates the program within the broader scale of Obama-era drone warfare: "Nobody dropped more missiles from drones than Obama did."

Pre-9/11 warnings and intelligence failures

Kiriakou says CIA Director George Tenet and White House counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke repeatedly warned before 9/11 that an attack was coming, but Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush insisted the threat was from China. He lists a chain of agency failures that preceded the attacks: the State Department issued the hijackers visas, the CIA could not stop them, the FAA's contracted-out airport security failed to stop them, and the FBI knew they were in the country but did not act.

The Special Activities Division chief who had been a Cali cartel hitman

John Kiriakou has described the man he identifies only as "Rick", the head of the CIA's Special Activities Division, as "the friendliest guy in the world," the colleague who greeted the counter-terrorism centre every morning with "morning, fellas." When Kiriakou asked another colleague what Rick actually did, the answer was that on Tuesday mornings Rick collected the kill list drawn up in the White House Counsel's office, sent his men to the named targets around the world, and returned the following Tuesday for the next list.

In 2007, three years after Kiriakou left the CIA, Vanity Fair published an exposé of the same man. Rick, Kiriakou says, had earlier been a hitman for the Cali cocaine cartel, and had been recruited into the agency by a "dark figure" who later became the deputy director for operations because both men were working against communist insurgents in Colombia. "The Cali cartel hated the communists and vice versa. Well, the CIA hated the communists, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The eventual DDO's pitch to him, as Kiriakou paraphrases it: "If you don't want to do cartel hits any more, I'm the CIA station chief down here. Why don't you come and do hits for me?"

How Kiriakou learned of it

Kiriakou's account of how the meetings became public places him at the start of the chain. In 2009 he was chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when a journalist from The New Yorker telephoned to say she had information that John Brennan, then deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, was hosting meetings at the White House every Tuesday at seven in the morning. She came to his office, closed the door, and described them off the record, a conversation Kiriakou treats as on the record now only because she later published.

The composition she described was attorneys from the Justice Department, the CIA and the White House, together with representatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division. The meeting agreed a list of people to kill that week; Brennan signed it on the president's behalf; the teams fanned out around the world, killed everyone on the list, and reconvened the following Tuesday for the next one.

Denial and confirmation

Brennan initially denied that any such thing existed. The story ran only when the magazine found enough corroboration, about half a dozen serving CIA officers who, in Kiriakou's rendering, responded to the question with "Of course we have a kill list. What do you think we do all day long?"

Where it sits in his taxonomy

Asked in February 2026 whether presidents authorise criminal behaviour by intelligence officers, kidnapping, drug dealing, murder, Kiriakou answered "I hate to say, but yes," and put the kill list first: "in the most egregious example, we have what has become known as the Tuesday morning kill list meeting."

His description of the mechanics is administrative: during the Obama administration John Brennan "convened a group of operations officers and attorneys from the White House, the CIA and the Justice Department to come up with a list of people every Tuesday morning, people who would be killed that week. Once the names were agreed upon, the teams would fan out around the world, carry out their assassinations, and then meet up again the following Tuesday for that week's list."

He then moves down the list: "that's just murders. Then you have to consider renditions or extraordinary renditions, which are different", and then the Contras and cocaine. His summary of all three: "these all came out of White House actions. And again, it doesn't matter who's in the White House ... This is an issue where the executive has overstepped, and neither Congress nor the courts have pushed back."

See also

- John Brennan
- Executive Order 12333
- Special Activities Division
- Blackwater
- Central Intelligence Agency
