U.S. officials said the agency killed more senior al-Qaeda operatives there [Pakistan] with signature strikes than with those in which it had identified and located someone on its kill list.

Why these “U.S. officials,” who may include Petraeus, approved of the illegal leaking of this classified information to the Post, is inevitably hazy in a story dependent on anonymous sources. It appears Petraeus trying to overcome reluctance of the Obama White House to expand the use of signature attacks. It may be that White House officials are trying to shed public light on the CIA practices the better to resist their use in Yemen.

A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, declined to talk about what he described as U.S. “tactics” in Yemen, but he said that “there is still a very firm emphasis on being surgical and targeting only those who have a direct interest in attacking the United States.”

Surgical strikes, otherwise known as “profile strikes,” are directed at a specific person, known or suspected of planning attacks. These too have killed non-combatants but their morality seems more defensible. Signature strikes are intentionally less discriminating and more lethal. That, it seems, is precisely why the CIA and Petraeus want to introduce them to the battlefield of Yemen.

Some U.S. military commanders recognize the folly, if not criminality, of such a strategy. Dennis Blair, four star admiral and former director of National Intelligence, called for scaling back the drone war last year:

… as the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.

But the “bitter resentment” of the family and friends of innocent people killed from afar does not overly concern the CIA. This is the sort of argument that Petraeus must overcome if the Agency is to expand the terror tactics of the drone war to another battlefield.