Do Terrorist Symps Have Rights?

I was just reading the tale of a teen-ager being arrested for assisting a slightly older acquaintance to travel to Syria to join ISIS.  Elsewhere in the news, we've all seen the various reports of the Department of Homeland Security intercepting people, some of them as I recall American citizens, and preventing them from travel to Syria or Iraq. 

It's true that this seems a good thing from the standpoint of our security.  But sometimes, it's fun to play devil's advocate.  So let me do so here:

First: In very short order, those who want to go to Syria to join up will become much more wily about hiding their tracks, and no longer so easy to find.  Surely, intercepting the earlier ones, and boasting about how we caught them, will accelerate that learning process.   So in the long run, might it not be better to let them go, but garner identification, including facial recognition, and maybe fingerprints, so as to find and track them when they return to the U.S. 

Second:  Some of these would-be soldiers of Islam are reportedly U.S. citizens by birth.  If so, is it really legal to stop them from traveling?  I understand it may be something we need to do for security reasons, but that hasn't always sufficed as a justification for rights violations.  Admittedly, perhaps I need to do more research in the finer points of the law that governs this.  I know there are some extraordinary measures included.

Yet if there are those in this country (I'm not one of them) who were concerned about a drone strike killing a U.S. citizen who was actively fighting with al-Qaida, aren't there probably those who would decry this interference in a citizen's right to leave the country when he wants, and travel where he wants? Golly, where IS the ACLU when you don't need them, anyway?  

   

Comments

[PiedType]

I don't really understand all the efforts to find and stop these people. If they want to die with ISIS, that's their problem. Numerically they don't pose a big threat to us. Legally we probably can't stop them from leaving the county. But let it be known that any US citizens who join ISIS will lose their citizenship and their right to return to this country.