On a warm spring evening this month, the group of former U.S. national security officials

and journalists gathered in Washington for a cocktail party. There was lots to talk about

President Trump, of course, and the latest twists in the Russia scandal. But there was also talk

about a dog that wasn't barking at all. Just five years ago, many of these former officials were

in the middle of what seemed like a huge controversy. The U.S. government's use of predator drones to

conduct targeted killings of suspected terrorists. These were government-ordered assassinations,

in some cases against U.S. citizens who had never even been charged much less convicted of any crimes.

By 2013, there was serious blowback, reports of innocent civilians being murdered by drones that

misfire or hit the wrong targets. President Obama, feeling the heat, gave a speech in which he vowed

to dial back the practice and imposed new, tighter standards, restricting any drone strikes,

unless there was near certainty that civilian bystanders would not be harmed.

For the Obama-era officials at that Washington cocktail party, the drone strikes had been an

agonizing legal and moral issue, testing the limits of America's counterterrorism strategy.

But what amazed them that night was that nobody was even talking about it anymore.

Drone strikes appeared to have increased sharply under President Trump,

almost entirely below radar, with no congressional hearings on the subject,

and barely any press coverage at all. Today, we'll look back at the controversy over drone strikes,

why it was such a big deal then and why nobody seems to care about it now on today's buried treasure.

I'm Michael Isgov, Chief Investigative Correspondent for Yahoo News.

And I'm Dan Clydeman, Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo News.

You know, Dan, this was a subject you and I were both deeply immersed in, not too many years ago,

and it seemed like there were real consequences to what was going on in the drone wars,

...