Title 18 U.S. Code § 2381 defines treason, but since that was written before Congress cravenly abdicated most of their duty to officially declare war, 50 USCS § 2204 was written to officially define enemies using the internationally recognized legal term hostilities*. Under any precedent based reading, or indeed any serious study of the process of defining treason in the USA, treason simply cannot happen without a state of open war, although not necessarily one ritually declared as such by Congress. However, the Obama administration has found it convenient to discard the conventional, international definition of hostilities, in order to avoid being accused of violating the War Powers Act. So it’s all totally up in the air now.
Look, you asked.
* “[W]here Congress borrows terms of art in which are accumulated the legal tradition and meaning of centuries of practice, it presumably knows and adopts the cluster of ideas that were attached to each borrowed word in the body of learning from which it was taken and the meaning its use will convey to the judicial mind unless otherwise instructed.” Morissette v. United States, 343 U.S. 246, 250 (1952)
