Preparations for the assassination began after a series of meetings toward the end of 2019 and in early 2020 between Israeli officials, led by the Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, and high-ranking American officials, including President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel.
NYT
The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.
NYT
There will be a lot of debate over the morality of targeted assassination. But that’s what droning is; what over-the-horizon counterrorism is. It does not become more moral because you hit an innocent family by mistake.
People tune out unpleasant information. They don’t want to know where meat or solar panels come from; where batteries go or who is killed to keep them safe. As the movie said, “we don’t want the truth. We can’t handle the truth.”
The Problem of Evil has long confounded philosophers. But it will not go away and a baffled public only asks that politicians do not add, to the brokenness of the world, the grotesquery of prideful incompetence.