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ROGER WICKER: Just to clarify, for your benefit, Senator Gillibrand, you did not mean to say that we had targeted a school.
KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: That a missile hit a school.
WICKER: No. But it's the word targeting...
GILLIBRAND: Yes, of course.
WICKER: ...That you did not mean.
GILLIBRAND: How we chose a target that turned out to be a school.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
That's Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker objecting to the term targeted in a committee hearing on Thursday. The school mentioned is the Iranian girls school struck by a Tomahawk missile two weeks ago. Some 175 people died in that strike, many of them children. NPR senior contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: Ron, a Tomahawk is what's referred to as a precision weapon, isn't it?
ELVING: Yes, more or less the definitive precision weapon, but it depends on up-to-date targeting information to be both effective and accurate. It's hard to be on target if the target is now somewhere else, if it's been moved, and that appears to be the case here. As NPR's reporting has confirmed, the weapon at the school was fired by U.S. forces apparently depending on maps from a decade ago. So people will ask, isn't someone checking these things? And again, NPR reporting confirms that such updating was the job of a Pentagon unit that was cut way back soon after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took office.
SIMON: Of course, as we'd noted, the war in Iran is 2 weeks old today. This week in the U.S., three incidents that are being investigated as targeted attacks. And meanwhile, we must note, the Department of Homeland Security is not funded, is it?
ELVING: No. And there have been incidents in the U.S. in the wake of the latest round of violence in the Middle East - in Michigan, with a truck crashing into a synagogue and in Virginia with a campus shooting at Old Dominion University, also in New York City. In the end, we don't know the connections or how direct they are to the war in Iran, but that is the context, and it has brought on a fresh round of anti-Muslim sentiment coming from some Republican members of Congress and others. And whatever the state of homeland security in the United States, the funding crisis continues at the Department of Homeland Security, the focus of so much anxiety in the last weeks and months.
Until this war began, the shutdown focus had been on immigration control and enforcement - ICE and the demand for reforms there. So Kristi Noem, the department secretary, has left her job, but the impasse over the reforms remains, and Democrats in Congress who are insisting on reforms are under pressure to relent, given the length of the funding lapse now and the heightened tensions at airports and other points of vulnerability.
SIMON: Ron, Jeffrey Epstein's accountant testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday - a closed-door session. Do we know, reliably, what he said and if any of the Epstein story has become clearer?
ELVING: Well, one thing the war with Iran has accomplished is that it has shouldered news about Epstein to one side. And these closed-door hearings for that accountant, Richard Kahn, have not added much to the public record. In a prepared statement that was released, Kahn said he never saw any of the criminal acts, the abuse and sexual trafficking of minors that's been alleged against Epstein. And he says he did not see any financial documents involving President Trump. Now, Kahn himself, by the way, is mentioned more than 50,000 times in the Department of Justice files that have been released regarding Epstein.
SIMON: And, Ron, another change of leadership to note, a former ambassador, Richard Grenell, is now also the former head of the Kennedy Center.
ELVING: Grenell was a former aide and ambassador appointed by President Trump when Trump took over as board chairman of the center, about the same time that Trump moved to rename the 60-year-old cultural institution for himself. Grenell has since presided over a year in which artists have refused to perform at the center, and longtime patrons and supporters have also turned their backs. Now, Trump has responded by saying the center's just simply going to close this summer for what he calls renovations, soon to return more glorious than ever and with Grenell's current deputy at the helm.
SIMON: And what's the next assignment for Mr. Grenell?
ELVING: Still unclear at this time.
SIMON: All right. NPR's Ron Elving. Thanks so much for being with us.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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