"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. "
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