NYTimes:

Lt. Kenneth Tenebro enlisted in the armed forces after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, signing up even before he became an American citizen. He served one tour of duty in Iraq, dodging roadside bombs, and he would like to do another. But throughout that first mission, he harbored a fear he did not share with anyone in the military. Lieutenant Tenebro worried that his wife, Wilma, back home in New York with their infant daughter, would be deported.

[. . .] Immigration lawyers and Department of Homeland Security officials say that many thousands of people in the military have spouses or close relatives who are illegal immigrants. Many of those service members have fought to gain legal status for their family members — only to hit a legal dead end created in 1996, when Congress last made major revisions to the immigration laws. Today the issue is not only personal. “It is an issue of readiness for the American armed forces,” says Representative Zoe Lofgren, the Democrat from California who leads the House subcommittee on immigration. “We have many Americans who are afraid to deploy.”

Mrs. Tenebro is snagged on a statute, notorious among immigration lawyers, that makes it virtually impossible for her to become a legal resident without first leaving the United States and staying away for 10 years. [. . .] The legal boomerang that snared her and many others was created in 1996, when Congress imposed automatic restrictions on illegal immigrants, barring them from returning for periods of 3 to 10 years after they leave the country, regardless of whether they were deported or left voluntarily.

Hey Joe Lieberman. Maybe you can deal with this citizenship problem.

I know, I've been MIA from blogging almost all week. There's just been too much going on at work and I haven't been online. It's 9:30 and I'm just getting home -- and about to start sifting through 300 emails and checking the news. I will be around here tomorrow.

I hope I haven't missed anything major, this is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Tonight in San Antonio at 9:30. Go Los Suns!

Presently, the Cavs are demolishing the Celtics.

Yanks are playing the Sox in Fenway this evening in the first of a 3 games series. Go Yanks.

Tomorrow the Giro d'Italia starts in Rotterdam (next year it starts in Washington, D.C.) Podium Cafe remains the best site for commentary on this first of the 3 big 3 week cycling races (the others are the Tour de France and the Vuelta de Espana.)

34 days till the World Cup in South Africa.

Open Thread.

Open Thread for non-citizenship stripping issues.

How is "assasination" different than citizenship stripping?

Citing with approval news reports that President Obama has signed a secret order authorizing the targeted killing of a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, Mr. Lieberman argued that if that policy was legal — and he said he believed it was — then stripping people of citizenship for joining terrorist organizations should also be acceptable.

This echoes Glenn Greenwald:

Outrage over Lieberman's citizen-stripping bill is odd in light of Obama's assassination program: which would you rather have done to you?

I think this argument features a strain of divergence I have with Greenwald (a good faith disagreement) and people like Joe Lieberman. You'll also see it in my discussions of preventive detention. The Laws of War are simply different from criminal law. Thus, killing an enemy combatant or detaining an enemy combatant is a different matter than incarcerating (or even executing) an individual for criminal actions. More . . .

Citizenship stripping proponents seem to have as their goal removing terror trials from the federal courts:

“It reflects the changing nature of war and recent events,” [Sen. Scott] Brown [R-MA] said Thursday. “War has moved into a new dimension. Individuals who pick up arms — this is what I believe — have effectively denounced their citizenship, and this legislation simply memorializes that effort. So somebody who wants to burn their passport, well, let’s help them along.”

Identical legislation is also being introduced in the House by two Pennsylvania congressmen, Jason Altmire, a Democrat, and Charlie Dent, a Republican. The lawmakers said at a news conference that revoking citizenship would block terrorism suspects from using American passports to re-enter the United States and make them eligible for prosecution before a military commission instead of a civilian court.

(Emphasis supplied.) This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the Sixth Amendment:

NYTimes:

Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take “a hard look” at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.

“United States citizenship is a privilege,” she said. “It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers — or in this case, foreign terrorists — are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.”

(Emphasis supplied.) This is incorrect as a legal matter in my view. The 14th Amendment states that:

NYTimes:

The American economy added an unexpectedly strong 290,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent, the government said Friday.

U6 is 17.1%. Hopefully, job growth will accelerate.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a whopping 1,000 points at one pointtoday, it's biggest intra-day drop ever. It later rebounded somewhat so that the final drop was 347.80 points.

Algorhithms may be the culprit.

High-speed trading, which uses sophisticated computer algorithms based on specific scenarios to automate transactions at speeds in the millionths of a second, now accounts for about 60 percent of U.S. equity volume.

"The potential for giant high-speed computers to generate false trades and create market chaos reared its head again today," Senator Edward Kaufman said in a statement.

Or, it might have been circuit breakers. Bloomberg has more here.

Four reporters, including Michelle Shepphard of the Toronto Star, who has done ground-breaking reporting on Omar Khadr, have been banned from attending the hearings underway in his case.

Their violation: Publishing the name of one of his interrogators. The interrogator's name has previously been published in news articles, and he gave on on-the-record interview to Michelle Shepphard in 2008. The ACLU responds:

“That reporters are being punished for disclosing information that has been publicly available for years is nothing short of absurd – any gag order that covers this kind of information is not just overbroad but nonsensical. Plainly, no legitimate government interest is served by suppressing information that is already well known.

We strongly urge the Defense Department to reconsider its rash, draconian and unconstitutional decision to bar these four reporters from future tribunals. If allowed to stand, this decision will discourage legitimate reporting and add yet another entry to the long list of reasons why the military commissions ought to be shut down for good.”

Busy. More thread.