the biggest climate legislation ever. also for the first time in 30 years of trying, the democrats finally passed a bill to negotiate lower drug prices. they ll have a new spending cap prescription drugs, and also caps insulin prices for people on medicare, to. it would ve kept insulin prices for everybody, but republicans block that, which is astonishing. but this huge new bill, it s called the inflation reduction act. it s the latest in a string of winds for senator schumer and the democrats, and the biden administration on top of the really good jobs news in recent days, on top of the steady and sustained drop in gas prices, on top of the huge counterterrorism strike killing the head of al-qaeda. just in the last six weeks in congress, this congress passed the first bipartisan gun reform in decades. also, a huge bill on our competitiveness with china, and a big veterans health bill
based on what they call pattern of life. they re basically looking at a vehicle they believed had some association with an sizis safe house and watching this vehicle using overhead surveillance drones to see it s going here, there, we think we can build a pattern that suggests that this is a suspect. that this is a legitimate target for a counterterrorism strike. but at the end of the day by the time the missile was launched, they didn t actually definitively know the identity of the target. they just built this pattern of life that they believed suggested that he was isis. the flimsy clues as i think you said in your story. working off what they could without more assets on the ground. that is the future of counterterrorism afghanistan. one of the things we heard repeatedly from former intelligence officials and even current officials we re talking to now if this strike went so badly while the united states still has a presence on the ground, what does that say for the biden admin
they had just lost 13 u.s. service members, they believed there was an attack forthcoming, a threat to american forces on the ground, which is something the military takes very seriously. clearly commanders in charge of this strike felt that they couldn t wait, essentially, to take this shot in order to determine, number one, definetively whether or not there were civilians on the ground and number two, even with certainty who the target was, which obviously they turned out to be tragically wrong about that. you know, the other thing that i think is important to understand here is, when the military doesn t have boots on the ground, when they don t have a great human intelligence network or an ability to intercept signals communications or sort of other kind of pieces of intelligence that help them definitively say, okay, this is our target for a counterterrorism strike, they re left trying to piece together overhead images of a car of interest or a person of interest as they kind of m
i don t think anybody doubts that the agency, the agencies responsible for this mission are up for this challenge, and the president, i m sure, is going to call on them, lean on them to conduct this mission. this covert evacuation mission, this intelligence collection mission and this counterterrorism strike mission i think is going to be an enduring feature of our landscape, our natural security landscape for months and years to come. jeremy bash, one more question for you. the two agencies in which you served at the highest levels as chief of staff obviously profoundly impacted by the events not just since april but in the last 72 hours. i wonder what you are hearing from folks at the pentagon and folks at the cia? well, not surprisingly, nicolle, there s a lot of heartbreak. i mean there s heartbreak over the 2,461 souls that were lost that general mckenzie referenced, the people who gave the last measure of their
Earlier on Friday, the Pentagon warned of credible terrorist threats to US troops and civilians seeking to leave Afghanistan in the wake of the deadly Kabul airport.