This is the Cato Dilly Podcast for Wednesday, May 29th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Congress gave President Bush the ability to take out Al Qaeda more than a decade ago,

lawmakers weren't exactly clear who the enemy was.

Now President Obama claims even more expansive powers under that same authorization of the use

of force.

Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense in Homeland Security studies at the Cato

Institute, evaluates the President's recent rhetoric.

The President's speech last Thursday on drone policy and on Guantanamo Bay and sort of more broadly on

counterterrorism had a lot of rhetoric, a lot of good rhetoric from my perspective on how the

war might be restrained or even end, but it was very short on concrete policy proposals.

He requested that Congress allow him to close Guantanamo Bay ultimately and

said he'll use authority he already has to send people who are Yemeni there

to Yemen which will help empty it out and he said a lot of things about how

the drone strikes ought to be, ought to end eventually.

The war in Afghanistan ends or the legal authority should end, but he said very little

about what exact restrictions he would agree to or

has authorized.

The legal rules for drone strikes remain secret as do the procedures the White House uses to decide who it's going to kill.

And they are purely within the executive branch.

They're within the executive branch to the extent that Congress in 2001 passed the authorization

of military force that said you can have a war against those who did the 9-11 attacks and those

...