The president and his sniper rifle

Mark Bowden, who gained access to the president and other top officials in order to write his new book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” talks to “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer about Obama’s “target killings” program, in which the president regularly decides whether to kill or capture individual terrorist suspects with no judicial review.

“He has in effect a sniper rifle and each day he is given a dossier of an individual who has come into the crosshairs of the CIA or the military, and on a regular basis has to decide whether to pull the trigger,” Bowden says. “It’s very direct, and it’s also, as the president told me, a tool that is very dangerous because it’s relatively easy and there’s so little risk involved in targeting and killing someone anywhere in the world with this technology.”