In the August issue, Tom Junod examines an entirely new application of power on the part of the president — the targeted killing of individuals deemed to be threats to the country. So far, thousands have been killed, most prominent among them Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. The decisions to target are made and the lethal missions are carried out without any public accountability, even when those targeted are Americans and even when, on one occasion, one of those Americans was a teenager. Over the course of this week, Junod considers five of the larger implications of his story on The Politics Blog. —Eds.

I received a phone call on Tuesday from a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration. He'd read my story, "The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama," which extensively detailed the unprecedented policy of "targeted killing," most often using drones, and he'd also read the subsequent blog posts that suggested a law that would require transparency whenever an American citizen is killed as a result of a covert lethal operation — that would not allow this Administration, or any Administration to come, to kill, say, a 16-year old American boy like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki without having to say something about it.

The call was a surprise, not simply because I'd tried to speak to this man over the months that I was researching my story, but also because he understood the story better than most of the people who've read it, and thought that I "captured the President fairly."

"You know, most of the people reading this piece are saying that you think that this policy is a bad thing," he said. "You don't say that at all. There's just a current of unease running through the piece that makes people come to that conclusion." In the course of our conversation, I came to believe that he understood that unease because he shared it.

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