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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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I mean the big one that sticks out to me for Obama crossing lines is when he put out a hit list that included American citizens, and then actually killed said American citizen in a targeted strike (also killing said American citizen's teenage American citizen son). He was a terrorist shitbag who deserved to die, mind you, but the right way to do it would have been in a plausibly deniable way through one of our allies like the Brits, not straight up saying "We're going to assasinate this American citizen" and then actually following through.

Anwar al-Awlaki is the American citizen terrorist shitbag in question, by the way:

https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2010/08/aclu-anwar-al-awlaki/

The only significant leftwing criticism of this came from the ACLU, I don't recall any democrats in congress voicing opposition. Republicans were also generally supportive as well, for shitbag Muslim terrorist reasons.

This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists. There was quite a bit of leftist criticism at the time, I recall, although the antiwar left was already marginalized and so didn't make it into prestige institutions. Now that "line" mostly matters insofar as it points out liberal hypocrisy when they claim Trump crossing much lesser ones is completely unprecedented.

GWOT probably did more to completely normalize line-crossing as a matter of government procedure than anything else - but that's how it works, if it's a matter of government procedure, then by definition it isn't crossing a line.

This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists.

The thing is, the legal line isn't where people think it is.

This goes into war powers, specifically the Congressional authorization of use of force against Al Qaeda, wherever it was, which included Yemen via AQAP, which is what those Yemeni-American Jihadists were a part of. Once the United States is in a legal state of armed conflict (colloquially 'war'), individuals start falling under various laws of wars and relevant precedents. The precedents applicable to American citizen joining, say, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, are the precedents established during WW2 with American citizens found serving in the Axis militaries. In Re Territo from WW2 is a relevant case.

The very short version of that is that the legal red line is 'Americans who take up arms against the United States on behalf of parties in conflict with the United States are considered belligerents of that other party, and do not get special exemptions from the normal rules governing conflict.' It is not a violation of constitutional rights to kill a belligerent fighting against the United States, even if that belligerent is an American citizen, any more than taking that belligerent prisoner and keeping them as a POW without an arrest.

The legal issue with hitting a Yemeni-American citizen in a drone strike in a conflict isn't the American citizenship, but the drone strike itself. The American citizenship is immaterial to whether the target is a belligerent- the issue is if you can take the drone strike against a belligerent in the first place.

Now, this doesn't mean that it was a good idea. I myself think it wasn't. But the issue is the awful, not the lawful.