“The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period,” an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.

“About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as ‘other militants,’ the documents detail. The ‘other militants’ label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.”

“The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called ‘signature’
strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists — picking targets based in
part on their behavior and associates. A former White House official
said the U.S. sometimes executes people based on ‘circumstantial
evidence.'”

“In a major shakeup of President Obama’s foreign-policy inner circle, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, is resigning and will be replaced by Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations,” the New York Times reports.

The appointment puts Rice, “an outspoken diplomat and a close political ally, at the heart of the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus. It is also a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation.”

Samantha Power will be appointed to replace Rice as U.N. Ambassador.

Retired Navy SEAL Kristin Beck has written a memoir called Warrior Princess describing her 20-year military career and and her experience coming out as transgender. Beck previously went by the name Chris but underwent hormonal therapy after leaving the military.

Ron Fournier: “George W. Bush in 2001 declared war on a tactic (terrorism), and empowered Big Brother to tap phones, launch drones and indefinitely imprison people without due process.”

“Barack Obama in 2008 declared those Bush policies an overreach, and pledged to curb drone strikes, protect media freedoms, and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Instead, he escalated drone strikes and spied on the media. Gitmo is still open for its grim business.”

“These are facts. And yet, they are distorted by extreme and narrow-minded partisans, supporters of both Bush and Obama.”

“You couldn’t claim with a straight face that disclosing whatever he
disclosed in that story threatened the national security of the United
States.”

— Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey quoted by CBS News, arguing that the Obama administration investigation into Fox News reporter James Rosen was part of an effort to control information that’s available to the public.

Attorney General Eric Holder “signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a ‘possible co-conspirator’ in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails,” a law enforcement official told NBC News.

The Week: Finally, a smoking gun?

The Obama administration is set to restart transfers of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “kick-starting a long-stalled drive to close the prison,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

In a speech today, President Obama “will reassert his case that closing Guantanamo is crucial to U.S. counterterrorism goals. While he isn’t planning to detail how to speed up transfers from the prison, officials said the president in coming weeks plans to lift the administration’s prohibition on sending detainees to Yemen.”

President Obama “plans to open a new phase in the nation’s long struggle with terrorism on Thursday by restricting the use of unmanned drone strikes that have been at the heart of his national security strategy and shifting control of them away from the C.I.A. to the military,” the New York Times reports.

“As part of the shift in approach, the administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four American citizens in drone strikes outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that its actions were justified by the danger to the United States.”

Washington Post: “The secrecy surrounding the program — including the criteria for
choosing targets — has led to widespread opposition from international
law and human rights advocates and, increasingly, from Congress and the
public. Although the administration has stressed the precision accuracy
of drones, independent groups have charged that thousands of civilians
have been unintentionally killed.”

Senior GOP aides tell Roll Call they are worried that the “partisan overtones” in the investigation of the Banghazi attacks “are diverting Congress from identifying and addressing the real lessons learned from the attack.”

“In particular, these aides say key staffers have been overly consumed with chasing down or addressing inaccurate or unfounded accusations emerging from the inquiry.”

Josh Marshall notes that during a CBS News report on the Benghazi talking points, Major Garrett “did something I don’t feel like I’ve seen in a really long time or maybe ever on a network news cast. He basically said straight out: Republicans told us these were the quotes, that wasn’t true.”

Said Garrett: “There is no evidence the White House orchestrated these changes.”

John Dickerson: “I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I’m hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind.”

“Insiders with ties to the Obama administration tell The Cable that U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has become the heir apparent to National Security Advisor Tom Donilon — a post at the epicenter of foreign-policy decision making and arguably more influential than secretary of state, a job for which she withdrew her candidacy last fall amid severe political pressure.”

Said one source: “It’s definitely happening.”

The Week highlights five things we learned from last night’s White House email dump.

More than 100 pages of e-mails released by the White House “reveal intensive jostling between the C.I.A. and the State Department over the government’s official ‘talking points‘ in the aftermath of last September’s attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans,” the New York Times reports.

“The White House released the e-mails to reporters after Republicans seized on snippets of the correspondence that became public last Friday to suggest that President Obama’s staff had been complicit in trying to alter the talking points used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in the days after the attacks.”

CNN has obtained an email sent by a top aide of President Obama, “in which the aide discusses the Obama administration reaction to the attack on the U.S. posts in Benghazi, Libya. The actual email differs from how sources were inaccurately quoted and paraphrased in previous media accounts.”

“The significance of the email seems to be that whomever leaked the inaccurate information earlier this month did so in a way that made it appear that the White House…was more interested in the State Department’s desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and warnings about these groups so as to not bring criticism to the State Department than the email actually stated.”

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that Republicans aren’t getting much traction with their focus on Benghazi over the last week. Voters trust Hillary Clinton over House Republicans on the issue of Benghazi by a 49% to 39% margin and Clinton’s 52% to 44% favorability rating is identical to what it was in late March.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forcefully defended the Obama administration against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS News that some critics of the administration have a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.”

Said Gates: “Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were.”

“When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story,” ABC News reports.

“Twelve different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.”

The Week: The dam bursts on Benghazi.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) demanded the release of an e-mail that he said showed that State Department officials believed from the start that “Islamic terrorists” were linked to the Benghazi attack but have declined to say so publicly, the New York Times reports.

But a copy of the e-mail indicates that the senior State Department official who wrote it, referred to “Islamic extremists,” not terrorists.

“The distinction is important, administration officials said, because while the White House did not initially characterize the attack as terrorism, senior officials, including Ambassador Susan E. Rice, acknowledged the possibility that extremists had been involved in the assault.”