The ‘What Reasonable Doubt?’ Act of 2010

Posted by Julian Sanchez

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA), joined on the House side by Reps. Jason Altmire (D-PA) and Charlie Dent (R-PA), today introduced a little publicity stunt in legislative form called the Terrorist Expatriation Act, making good on Lieberman’s pledge to find a way to strip the citizenship of Americans—whether naturalized or native born—who are suspected of aiding terrorist groups. It does so by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lays out the various conditions under which a person may renounce or be deprived of citizenship. 

A couple things to note about this:

First, the act as it stands now contains a provision that could probably be used to revoke the citizenship of terrorists. One of the ways to trigger the loss of citizenship is by:

committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, violating or conspiring to violate any of the provisions of section 2383 of title 18, or willfully performing any act in violation of section 2385 of title 18, or violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them…

So why isn’t this enough to satisfy them?  Well, I left off the very end of the clause:

if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction.

Needless to say, actually “bearing arms against the United States” is a rather more serious offense than providing “material support” for terrorist groups.  Indeed, someone who knowingly provides funding or “expert assistance” (including legal or humanitarian aid) to a designated group may, under current law, be guilty of providing “material support.”  Yet these more serious acts of betrayal still require that someone be convicted in court before the penalty of expatriation can be imposed. If they want to revoke Faisal Shahzad’s citizenship, they can do it already: just convict him of one of those offenses.

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Fort Hood and Political Correctness

Posted by Roger Pilon

This morning, Politico Arena asks:

The Fort Hood tragedy: Why does it matter, or not, what we call it? Is it being politicized?

My response:

If we want to be technical, what we call the Fort Hood massacre matters, and James Taranto got it right in Monday’s Wall Street Journal:  It was not a terrorist attack, targeting noncombatants, but an act of guerrilla warfare, carried out by one of our own in apparent contact with the enemy, and hence an act of treason.

But the deeper and far larger problem is why the Army didn’t act sooner against this man and, even more, why it is, as Dorothy Rabinowitz put it in yesterday’s Journal, that “the tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace.”  After all, it is not as if “the Hasan problem,” richly detailed elsewhere, were unknown to the Army.  So why was nothing done?  We all know why.  It was stated simply in an NPR report yesterday:  “A key official on a [Walter Reed] review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim.”  If this isn’t ”political correctness,” nothing is.

And it goes beyond the naive analyses that say we can do nothing about these kinds of problems.  It infects our very culture, from the newsroom to the college campus and far beyond, crippling sound analysis and judgment.  We learn just this morning, for example, again in the Journal, that the FBI may not have briefed the Army, or done so sufficiently (it’s unclear), about Hasan’s intercepted emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni imam.  There may have been intelligence reasons for compartmenting that information.  But in other cases it is an obsession with privacy that cripples investigation, itself a species of political correctness.  Yet the conflicting “rights” at issue in risk contexts are never more than right claims until they’re delineated by statute or adjudication.  Too often, however, that obsession blinds us, including in our legislation and adjudication, to the rights on the other side.  After all, the 3,000 who died on 9/11 and the soldiers who died at Fort Hood had rights too.

The Fort Hood massacre cries out for further investigation.  But it must be clear-eyed and free from the prejudice that today is rightly called “political correctness.”