President Obama says he is free to use drones to attack senior members of al Qaeda who are planning to attack the United States. So far drones may have killed as many as 4,700 people, including American citizens. What, if any, limitations should be placed on the president in using drones to target and kill suspected terrorists? Council on Foreign Relations fellow Micah Zenko tells Jim Zirin that definitive standards are necessary to prevent drone attacks from spinning out of control.

But Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies counterterrorism strikes, said that in the long run, a move away from the covert side of the C.I.A. might make sense, allowing Congress to discuss the strikes and their consequences far more fully in public. "If it's a priority of the president and the secretary of defense, the military can be far more open than the C.I.A.," Mr. Zenko said.

"The drones—the responsiveness, the persistence, and without putting your personnel at risk—is what makes it a different technology," Zenko said. "When other states have this technology, if they follow U.S. practice, it will lower the threshold for their uses of lethal force outside their borders. So they will be more likely to conduct targeted killings than they have in the past."

Micah Zenko argues that the world needs a code of conduct for behavior in space—and that the United States should take the lead in negotiating one.

"Some 3,500 people have died in 420 strikes, and Congress has yet to hold a single public hearing on this issue," said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It has happened in the dark because we have allowed it to, and the press has far and away been the lead actor in surfacing this issue."

The United States has conducted more than 400 total strikes in at least three countries — Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — killing more than 3,000 people in its war on Al Qaeda, according to a report by Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations believes that political pressure is now going to mount over drones, just as it once did for Mr. Bush over torture and wiretapping, leaving the Obama administration a choice between "drone policy reforms by design or drone policy reforms by default".

But Zenko cautioned against those who would head into the Brennan hearing with high hopes for new information. Having read transcripts of the past 10 CIA director confirmation hearings, he said, "It would be unprecedented if there were an in-depth discussion about ongoing covert activities." The Senate Intelligence Committee "simply doesn't work that way, especially under chairman Sen. (Dianne) Feinstein" of California, he said.

"The Pentagon has an obligation to the American people, and the world, to provide information and tell its story — if nothing else to counter myths and misinformation," Zenko said in an e-mail. "But it should only do so in an open and transparent way. Using third-party contractors to shape public opinion is dishonest and unethical."

"In many ways, Brennan is a paradox: a devout Catholic who apparently opposes 'enhanced interrogations,' the death penalty at home, and those inside the government who want to expand the targeted-killing program further," said Micah Zenko.

That combination negatively impacts the U.S. mission in the countries it is trying to impact, Zenko argued. "Drones are the face of U.S. foreign policy" in Pakistan and Yemen, he said. "We allow the Taliban, and the Pakistani [intelligence agency], to tell the story of how our drones are being used."

"It's certainly cheaper," says Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has studied drone attacks. "The dichotomy the administration puts forward is that we can put 170,000 troops on the ground, or we can do drone strikes."

"The fact is, the U.S. might need to maintain and sustain this capability," Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told The Huffington Post. "But there needs to be significant restraints and much more transparency" both in the legal justification for the killings and in how the strikes are conducted.

"The real reason for most of these strikes has been to protect a regime in Pakistan or Yemen," Zenko said.

"Unless they were about to get on a flight to New York to conduct an attack, they were not an imminent threat to the United States," said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is a critic of the strikes. "We don't say that we're the counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, but we are."

"There is a recognition within the administration that the current trajectory of drone strikes is unsustainable," Zenko says. "They are opposed in countries where strikes occur and globally, and that opposition could lead to losing host-nation support for current or future drone bases or over-flight rights."

"It does not further anyone's career to say we are safer," said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who uncovered the fatality statistics about terrorism and falling furniture.

"If somebody could obtain reliable access to real-time Predator or Reaper video—without attribution or alerting U.S. military—that would a tremendous intel coup," says Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors in the Bush administration "were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings," because they feared the political consequences that might come when the U.S. embraces something at least superficially similar to assassination.

"I think it would be very difficult for the administration to put her forward [for secretary of state] if she willfully mischaracterized the intelligence," Zenko said.

Zenko's article has all the surgical precision commonly associated with drone strikes.

"What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a 'threat that is serious and not speculative,' and engaged in 'some operational plot against the United States,' That is simply not true," emails the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko, who has tracked the drone war as closely as any outside analyst. "The claim that the 3,000+ people killed in roughly 375 nonbattlefield targeted killings were all engaged in actual operational plots against the U.S. defies any understanding of the scope of what America has been doing for the past ten years."

"There are more mentions of Osama bin Laden than unemployment in the Democratic national platform," says Micah Zenko, a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. "You play to what your strengths are."