Charlie Savage

And that therefore meant the United States was engaged in an armed conflict with a particular group of terrorists, not all terrorists everywhere in the world, but al-Qaeda.

And in the years since then, the war on al-Qaeda has expanded as the original al-Qaeda has splintered and morphed and moved around the world to failed states like Somalia and rural Yemen and groups like what we now call the Islamic State.

That use of military force to target them for death has continued.

because there is a congressionally authorized war against this particular group of terrorists.

But that doesn't mean that the executive branch has open-ended authority to kill people it deems any kind of terrorist anywhere in the world it might find them.

It doesn't even mean that the executive branch could kill al-Qaeda suspects in a place like Paris or London where there's a police force that could arrest them.

There's constraints on the use of armed force, both as a matter of domestic and international law, that are not overcome by the executive branch saying, we're going to designate this group as a foreign terrorist organization.

I have been struck by how widespread

The alarm for what is happening is among the various spectrum of people who pay attention to the laws of armed conflict.

We've had 20 years of arguments over the war on al-Qaeda, and all of those people from the left to the right, from the dovish to the hawkish, are agreed, as far as I can tell, that this has crossed a line.

And it's not just something that Trump is doing on his own, but he and Pete Hegseth are causing the troops, American troops, under their command to cross this line themselves.

If these strikes are illegal—

You know, we don't have a court ruling that says that.

I'm just describing the conversation outside the government.

It's difficult to see a forum where this gets cleanly adjudicated.

The most obvious place...

as a matter of international law, would be the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which notably right now is prosecuting the former president of the Philippines for crimes against humanity and murder for his war on drugs, which included gunning down people in the street

who were suspected of being drug dealers.

But the United States has not joined the International Criminal Court, and so there's probably not ever going to be jurisdiction there.

And the legal experts I've spoken to all think it's incredibly unlikely that domestically soldiers would ever be prosecuted for obeying the president's orders.