Oh great, esplicitly organizing "death squads".
We could lose our way here.
Worked well in Latin America, for all the crocodile tears shed about it now.
Operation Phoenix............General Giap even admitted that could have won us the Viet Nam War.
I certainly hope this activity has been underway for a while and if anything the Newsweek piece is indicating we are about to ramp it up BigTime.
The secondary(and most insidious) effect of assasination/death squad warfare is turning the Enemy paranoid. They begin to kill each other as they scramble to learn who betrayed them.
As for "innocent" civilian casualties? They are minimal compared to good old fashioned blow-it-up warfare and there is a much higher chance of getting a few we didn't know were guilty.
Lets take some scalps.
COULD be losing our way? It sounds like we already have. Death squads sound more like something Saddam Hussan would dream up than a way of building democracy to me. If this is a legitimate tool to fight terrorism, I see no indication of it... or a rationale for "secret interrogations".
Not that we're not fighting bad guys, but if we're the good guys, we need to act better and BE better than this.
What is an army but a "death squad"? You fight a war with the tactics and materiel appropriate to the situation and the goals. It's not like politics inside a democratic country that is operating by its rules.