Yesterday’s release of Eric Holder’s targeted killing letter was the apertif for today’s presidential speech on foreign policy. The Wall Street Journal’s preview spoils a line about Gitmo.
The House Ways and Means committee, being helpful, creates an online form with which people can report their own personal IRS harassment.
Rosie Gray hangs out with Thor Halvorssen in Oslo.
Halvorssen’s relationship with his home country has not improved. Ten years after his father’s stint as a political prisoner, his mother was the parent who got on the wrong side of the Venezuelan authorities. She was shot, Halvorssen has said, in 2004 by Chávez security forces at a protest in Caracas against the recall referendum that kept Chávez in office that year. He included pictures of the alleged gunmen, who shot into the crowd, in his letter to the Norwegian media.
“And the men were arrested, and then they were freed,” Halvorssen told me. “My mother is a force of nature. She’s in pain every day.”
Josh Rogin catches the Senate moving closer to arming the Syrian rebels.
And the letter about targeted killing is here.
Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qa’ida and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi. The United States is further aware of three other U.S. citizens who have been killed in such U.S. counterterrorism operations over that same time period: Samir Khan, ‘Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Aulaqi, and Jude Kenan Mohammed. These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States.
Correction, May 23, 2013: This post originally misspelled Thor Halvorssen’s last name.
