On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 07:06 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
This is correct. There are U.S. citizens who have spent the past 50 years living in Britain, or France, or even Afghanistan. Until they renounce (or are stripped, which is very, very rare), they remain U.S. citizens. This is the way the system now works.Michael Cardenas wrote:I think you're overreacting a bit. The actual case involves someone who was in a foriegn country for years, and was in the war zone at the time he was fighting the US.Hey, I'm not a USAan and I don't even live there. But I think I know your Constitution well enough to know that I never read the bit about how long you have to live in a foreign country to lose your rights.
If they strip him of his citizenship, this cannot be done retroactively. That would be an ex post facto law, in essence. Thus, regardless of what is _now_ done to him, citizenship-wise, he was a citizen when he allegedly committed whatever crimes he is not being informed of, his lawyers are not being informed of, and which the U.S.G. considers too sensitive (har har) to tell _us_ about.Someone, somewhere, has to decide whether this man's service in a foreign army is naughty enough to lose him his constitutional rights.
(In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that he is just a routine spear-carrier.)
--Tim May
"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the
people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some
rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789
