Re: No Ex Post Facto Laws, No Easy Loss of Citizenship

[Tim May]

On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 09:55  AM, Trei, Peter wrote:

While I agree with most of Tim's post, it's not as hard to
lose your US citizenship as he makes out.

I grew up as a US expatriate in various European countries,
including the age period when compulsory military service
...

Of course, you could appeal, but your options were pretty
limited.

Fine, then take away his citizenship, using established and formal procedures. This zeroes the clock. For things he does after the clock is zeroed, he does not have citizenship status. For things he did before the clock was zeroed, he was of course a citizen.

(There is the ancillary issue I raised, that it is a misconception for people think the Constitution and Bill of Rights only applies to _citizens_. It applies to those facing trial in the U.S. or its territories (mostly), save for cases where an illegal immigrant, for example, is deported out of the U.S. promptly.)

Mr. Hamdi seems to have US citizenship almost by accident -
he was apparently born in the US while his Saudi father was
receiving military training here, and returned to Saudi
soon after. He joined the anti-US forces in Afghanistan,
apparently voluntarily, and bore arms against the US.

By all the rules I lived by as an expatriate, he could be
stripped of his citizenship in a heartbeat.

But they didn't, and haven't.

As for his "almost by accident," this may be so, but so what?

But what I object most strongly is the neologism 'enemy
combatant'. Most of these people are in fact POWs,
and should have all the protections of such.

Indeed.

Mr Padilla,
the other  US citizen tagged in this way, is a much
more worrying case. He was born in the US, always
lived here, and was arrested in the US. Bush and his
gang have stuck the 'enemy combatant' label on him,
and he is now denied most of his Constitutional rights.

As were the 1000 Arabic-ancestry men rounded up and held on vague "material witness" grounds.

A police state. The Bill of Rights is toilet paper.

--Tim May
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
convinces himself." -- David Friedman