Obama Heckled During Speech On Drone Use, Terrorists

President Obama was heckled loudly and clearly in a speech he gave tonight at the National Defense University, in reporting by Yahoo News.

The main theme of Obama's speech was to make it clear to Americans that it is time "to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing."

But, the speech was marked by the heckling of Obama by one Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink and a leading (and highly recognizable) critic of the so-called war on terrorism.

"Can you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious as our lives?" she shouted as she was finally ushered from the hall. "Will you apologize to the thousands of Muslims that you have killed? Will you compensate the innocent family victims? That will make us safer!"

After trying and failing several times to get her to sit quietly, Obama went off script and enlisted her protest to reinforce his message about the need to close the Guantanamo facility.

"The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to," the president said, to applause. "Obviously, I do not agree with much of what she said. And obviously she wasn't listening to me and much of what I said. But these are tough issues. And the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong."

He  invited Congress to help him scale back the country's 12-year conflict against al-Qaida and its affiliates.

"America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us," he warned in remarks at National Defense University.

In one of the growing controversies of his presidency, the use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, Obama defiantly defended their use but he asked lawmakers to join him in setting modest new safeguards.

He also renewed his call for shuttering the Guantanamo Bay prison for alleged terrorists. And he announced efforts to find a better balance between investigations of national security leaks and the freedom of the press.

"Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end," Obama said in a speech plainly shaped by his awareness of the place drones and Guantanamo Bay could occupy in his legacy.

"Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don't need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation-states," he warned.