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. The output of the meeting was 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.[1][2]
Enabling technology
The program’s regularization was enabled, per John Kiriakou, by the maturation of CIA targeting software in the 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 the weekly cadence.[1][2]
Operational mechanics
Once the list was set, the kill itself proceeded by one of the standard CIA modes: drone strike, or a close-in action in which agency personnel were inserted, completed the killing, and 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.”[2]
Continuation question
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: “In their re-election campaigns: ‘We need to kill fewer terrorists. If I’m reelected, we’ll be a good one.’”[3][4]
Obama-era drone-strike scale
Kiriakou’s contextualizing observation: “Nobody dropped more missiles from drones than Obama did.”[4]