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.[1][2] 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.[3] 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.[4] Kiriakou says the Special Activities Division’s targets originate from this White House kill-list meeting held on Tuesday mornings.[5]
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.[6][7] 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.[8][9] 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.[10][11] 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.”[12]
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.”[2]
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.[1][2]
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.[13][14]
Kiriakou says some names on the list were American citizens who had never been charged with any crime.[15] 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.[16]
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.[17] 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.’”[18][19]
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.[20] 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.[20][21]
Kiriakou situates the program within the broader scale of Obama-era drone warfare: “Nobody dropped more missiles from drones than Obama did.”[19]
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.[22] 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.[23]