Terror backers should lose US citizenship: lawmakers

Editor’s Note: No doubt to subvert any legal constraints on targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens

US Senator Joe Lieberman
© AFP/File Saul Loeb

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Americans who support or engage in acts of terror against the United States should have their citizenship revoked, said a group of lawmakers who on Thursday introduced legislation to that effect.

The bill submitted to both chambers of Congress by hawkish independent Senator Joe Lieberman, Republican Senator Scott Brown and Republican congressmen Charlie Dent and Jason Altmire come fresh on the heels of the killing of US-born radical cleric and Al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaqi in Yemen by a suspected CIA drone.

That killing was authorized by US authorities in a secret document, drawing fire from civil rights advocates who argued it permitted the execution of a US citizen without due legal process.

The so-called “Enemy Expatriation Act” is aimed at US nationals “engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States.”

Lieberman said in a statement that “the repeated attempts by the now-deceased Al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Alwaqi to recruit other American citizens to strike our homeland demonstrates the necessity of updating our laws to account for an enemy who would subvert our freedoms to attack us.”

Awlaqi’s demise in an air strike in Yemen late last month rekindled an American debate over whether the federal government has legal authority to order the killing of a US national who is deemed a terror threat to the United States.