indicate the presence of an important operative or a plot against U.S. interests. Under the previous rules the CIA and the US military were only allowed to use drone strikes against known terrorist leaders whose location could be confirmed and who appeared on secret CIA and JSOC target lists. The justification by Brennan built upon remarks by US top officials like the State Department's top lawyer Harold Hongju Koh, US Attorney General Eric Holder, the US Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson and President Obama himself, who defended the use of drones outside of so-called "hot battlefields" like Afghanistan. In 2011/2012, the process for selecting targets outside of warzones was altered so that power was concentrated in the hands of a group of people in the White House centered around White House counterterror chief John Brennan. Under the new plan, Brennan's staff compiles the potential target list and runs the names past agencies such as the State Department at a weekly White House meeting. According to The New York Times, President Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, reserving the final say on approving lethal action, and signs off every strike in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. U.S. Congressional oversight over the targeted killing operations increased as the drone program intensified under the Obama Administration. Once a month, a group of staff members from the House and Senate intelligence committees would watch videos of the latest drone strikes, review intelligence that was used to justify each drone strike, and sometimes examine telephone intercepts and after-the-fact evidence, such as the CIA's assessment of who was hit. The procedure used by House and Senate intelligence committees to monitor CIA drone strikes was set up largely at the request of Senator Dianne Feinstein who became determined to ensure that it was as precise as the CIA had been claiming. "That's been a concern of mine from the beginning," Feinstein said in little-noticed comments after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. "I asked that this effort be established. It has been. The way in which this is being done is very careful." Feinstein explained how the oversight works in general. "We receive notification with key details shortly after every strike, and we hold regular briefings and hearings on these operations," Feinstein wrote in May in a letter sent in