The continuing debate over home grown Islamic TERRORISTS, or citizens gone astray (enemy combatant) and their right to protection under our Constitution (including free attorneys) is just plain silly. Treason is treason.
Anwar al-Awlaki, who had dual citizenship, was either an enemy combatant or a traitor. Either way, he should have been treated like a wanted prisoner of war or a traitor; both carry a death sentence. He was killed on the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia by U.S. drones. In my OPINION this the best way to get rid of these Islamic terrorists thugs with the lest collateral damage to our troops.
The article below sheds light on my reasoning.
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Hat Tip: Patriot Post Digest, Friday, October 7, 2011
Anwar al-Awlaki: ‘Citizen’ Enemy?
This week’s PC oxymoron, “U.S. citizen enemy combatant,” has driven heated debates on the topic. Specifically, many on the Left, as well as GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), have protested the U.S. drone strike death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric linked to several terrorist plots and attacks against the U.S. (Fort Hood, the Christmas Day underwear bomber, the Times Square car bombing), on the basis of his U.S. citizenship.
Al-Awlaki, along with his understudy — another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan — were both killed on the Saudi-Yemen border by drone missiles specifically targeting al-Awlaki. The controversy surrounding the attack centers on the idea that the U.S. owes its citizens — wherever they happen to be — the constitutional protections afforded to all U.S. citizens, to include rights of due process as well as the ability to have “a day in court.” The problem, of course, is that such thinking is simply wrong.
For starters, American citizens have never been accorded such “rights” when they have taken up arms against their own country. The Supreme Court has reinforced this fact several times. Notably, in World War II it ruled that the U.S. citizenship of captured German spy/saboteurs was irrelevant when the citizen associates himself with the enemy power and operates as an enemy belligerent. In essence, the Court used a walks-like-a-duck-and-quacks-like-a-duck analysis to conclude that U.S. citizens who operate as enemy combatants in wartime are, in fact, enemy combatants, and that the classification preempts any citizenship status.
More recently, the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) added support to this conclusion, stating, “A citizen, no less than an alien, can be part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners and engaged in an armed conflict against the United States.” In other words, independent of any “rights” Al-Awlaki and Khan may have claimed as U.S. citizens, when each joined a belligerent foreign military force — al-Qa’ida — and entered the battlefield as an enemy combatant against the U.S., they gave the U.S. the “right” to shoot back. And we did. End of (al-Awlaki’s) story.
In a story that hasn’t yet ended, Operation Enduring Freedom marks its 10-year anniversary today. Hundreds of thousands of troops have deployed to Afghanistan since October 2001, and some 1,700 have paid the ultimate price. At least 70,000 troops are scheduled to remain through 2014.
