Posted on 02/02/2004 1:00:30 PM PST by quidnunc
The Supreme Court recently agreed to review Yaser E. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a case in which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the government's detention of an enemy combatant captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan who later was discovered to be an American citizen. The Fourth Circuit's decision is clearly correct; historically and as a matter of just plain common sense, federal courts have never had authority to interfere with the detention of combat prisoners. The fact that Yaser Hamdi is a U.S. citizen does not alter that longstanding conclusion, but it does gives us the opportunity to reconsider a profound error the Court made more than a century ago.
The principal question that the Court will consider is whether "the Constitution permits Executive officials to detain an American citizen indefinitely in military custody in the United States, hold him essentially incommunicado and deny him access to counsel, with no opportunity to question the factual basis for his detention before any impartial tribunal, on the sole ground that he was seized abroad in a theater of the War on Terrorism and declared by the Executive to be an 'enemy combatant.'" With all due respect, that is the wrong question. The real question should be: Why is Hamdi being treated as a citizen at all? He was born in Louisiana — and has a birth certificate to prove it — to be sure. But he was born to Saudi citizens; his father, Esam Fouad Hamdi of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was working in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at the time on a temporary worker visa for a brief stint as a chemical engineer with Exxon. His mother, Nadiah Hussen Hamdi, was born Nadia Hussen Fattah in Taif, Saudi Arabia. The entire family returned to Saudi Arabia while Yaser was still a toddler, and Yaser never set foot on U.S. soil again until after his capture in Afghanistan during a battle with U.S. forces near Konduz. Hamdi was armed with a Kalishnikov AK-47 military assault rifle at the time of his capture.
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Today, the common perception of the clause is that it mandates citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. Such a reading dates to an erroneous Supreme Court decision in the 1898 case of United States v. Won Kim Ark, decided by the same Court, by nearly the same line-up, that two years earlier had decided the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It is a wrong reading.
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(Excerpt) Read more at claremont.org ...
Bingo! The O'Connor Court will drive another nail through the eye of freedom. What a legacy that wretched woman is leaving.
Natural Born Citizenship should require two American Citizen Parents, natural or naturalized.
So9
Some pro-legal immigration group filed a brief with the Fourth Circuit on this very point during their hearing of the Hamdi case, but darn if I can find it now!
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