Obama also personally ordered the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, two US citizens who produced speeches and web materials in support of al-Qaeda. We will never know whether they were guilty of committing terrorist acts because they were killed by drones, an act that many civil libertarians saw as a violation of constitutional guarantees of due process and trial by jury. More recently, the White House gave its support to the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the executive branch to detain foreigners and perhaps Americans accused of “substantially supporting” terrorism indefinitely without trial.

QUESTION: Does this represent a durable erosion of constitutional protections or an isolated counterterrorism overreach? XREF: Connects to broader debates about executive power in the post-9/11 era and indefinite detention.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 421