Obtained by NBC News. As Glenn Greenwald explains, “This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.”

Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Q… by Mike Riggs

I don’t quite want to throw up my hands and just say “read Greenwald,” but the man slings words by the barrel and he explains most of the moral queasiness-inducers in the memo. The political context to view this in is that a growing (but small) number of liberals and libertarians, led today by Jeff Merkley and Rand Paul, want to pass resolutions that restore the power to declare war to Congress. Ending the authorization of military force (or, as Paul and Merkley want, requiring a new authorization from Congress for further action in Afghanistan) would complicate the legal kludging in this memo.