New Ideas In The War Of Terror

Decitizenship. A slippery slope. If they can decitizen you for participating in a foreign brigade, they can decitizen you for parking your car outside the lines:

At the highest levels of the US military, a quiet discussion is going on about putting in place a legal framework that would permit the US government to strip American citizenship from terrorists.

The case of Las Cruces, New Mexico born al Qaeda commander Anwar al-Aulaqi, who has been a key organizer and recruiter for the terrorist organization in Yemen is the primary driver of this exploration of possibly modifying US law to allow "de-citizening."

As the Washington Post's Dana Priest recently revealed, al-Alaqi was added recently to a short list of other Americans for whom there are kill orders in place.

A senior Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has told me that to his knowledge, there has been no serious discussion in the Committee of stripping US citizenship from terrorists, but a senior Pentagon official has confirmed that some in the military are exploring the upsides and downsides of such a more routenized mechanism for stripping citizenship.

A national security attorney who serves in an advisory capacity to President Obama has reported to me that there is no legal way for the US military or the government to strip citizenship from Americans.

But Eugene Volokh, exploring in a Salon article the case of American gone al Qaeda adventurer John Walker, writes in 2001 that "8 U.S.C. § 1481 : US Code - Section 1481" may provide such a mechanism.

As Volokh then wrote pondering whether a terrorist could be stripped of his US citizenship:

Maybe. A federal statute says that a citizen loses his citizenship by "serving in the armed forces of a foreign state if such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States" but only if he does so "with the intention of relinquishing United States [citizenship]."