Yesterday the President acknowledged that the United States inadvertently killed an American citizen and an Italian citizen held hostage by al-Qaida.  The killings, he said, took place during “a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.”

You walk into your shower and see a spider. You don’t know whether it is venomous—or whether it is even a real spider. It could be a personal surveillance mini-drone set loose by your nosy next-door neighbor, who may be monitoring the tiny octopod robot from her iPhone 12.

David Scharia is an Israeli national security lawyer with experience prosecuting Israeli terrorism cases before the Israeli courts, including service on the Attorney General of Israel’s legal staff.