Within the United States, not all the high-ranking officers who were informed of these plans greeted them with enthusiasm. At the time, journalist Seymour Hersh noted that many feared that the proposed type of operation—what one advisor to the Pentagon called “preemptive manhunting”—had the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program, the sinister secret program of murder and torture that had once been unleashed in Vietnam.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 167