Fort Liberty

Andrea Salcedo at WP:

Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the United States, has officially been renamed Fort Liberty, following a ceremony Friday. The North Carolina post’s new name is part of a congressionally mandated plan to rename military bases, ships and streets that previously honored Confederate leaders.

The plan is the culmination of a years-long effort that intensified in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning it brought over the nation’s history of racism. A panel established by Congress recommended the Army rename nine installations that honored Confederate military officers.

“Welcome to Fort Liberty, the center of the universe,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and the newly christened Fort Liberty, said during the ceremony Friday. “We were given a mission to re-designate our installation, no small task with its history. We seized this opportunity to make ourselves better and to seek excellence. That is what we always have done and always will do.”

The other eight Army bases selected to be renamed are Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Polk in Louisiana; Fort Rucker in Alabama; and Fort Hood in Texas.

The nine Army posts were all built during the first half of the 20th century in former Confederate states. Fort Bragg had been named in honor of Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who was relieved of command after losing the battle for Chattanooga in 1863, though he remained active in the rebel cause, serving as an adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

January 6: Seditious Conspiracy, Domestic Terrorism, Treason

 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTFOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIAUNITED STATES OF AMERICA v.ELMER STEWART RHODES III,KELLY MEGGS,KENNETH HARRELSON,JESSICA WATKINS,ROBERTO MINUTA,JOSEPH HACKETT,DAVID MOERSCHEL,THOMAS CALDWELL, andEDWARD VALLEJO, Defendants.Case No. 22-cr-15-APMGOVERNMENT’S OMNIBUS SENTENCING MEMORANDUM ANDMOTION FOR UPWARD DEPARTURE

These defendants were prepared to fight. Not for their country, but against it. In their own words, they were “willing to die” in a “guerilla war” to achieve their goal of halting the transfer of power after the 2020 Presidential Election. As a co-conspirator recognized, their actions made these defendants “traitors.”

Using their positions of prominence within, and in affiliation with, the Oath Keepers organization, these defendants played a central and damning role in opposing by force the government of the United States, breaking the solemn oath many of them swore as members of the United States Armed Forces. To support their operation, they amassed an arsenal of firearms across the Potomac River and led a conspiracy that culminated in a mob’s attack on the United States Capitol while our elected representatives met in a Joint Session of Congress. Two juries found all nine defendants guilty of participating in this grave conduct. These defendants are unlike any of the hundreds of others who have been sentenced for their roles in the attack on the Capitol. Each defendant therefore deserves a significant sentence of incarceration.

...

 “[T]he violent breach of the Capitol on January 6 was a grave danger to our democracy.” United States v. Munchel, 991 F.3d 1273, 1284 (D.C. Cir. 2021). “The chaos wrought by the mob forced members of Congress to stop the certification and flee for safety.” United States v. Fischer, 64 F.4th 329, 332 (D.C. Cir. 2023). As this Court has explained:

January 6, 2021 was supposed to mark the peaceful transition of power. It had been that way for over two centuries, one presidential administration handing off peacefully to the next. President Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address described “the orderly transfer of authority” as “nothing less than a miracle.” Violence and disruption happened in other countries, but not here. This is the United States of America, and it could never happen to our democracy. Thompson v. Trump, 590 F. Supp. 3d 46, 61 (D.D.C. 2022) (footnote omitted).

But, because of these defendants’ actions, it did happen to our democracy. Rioters injured more than a hundred members of law enforcement and inflicted significant emotional injuries on law enforcement officers and Capitol employees alike. The attack caused substantial damage to the Capitol, resulting in millions of dollars of financial losses. But the cost to our democracy and system of government was incalculable. See United States v. Gardner, No. 21-cr-622 (Mar. 16, 2023), Sent. Tr. at 68 (identifying one of the “victims” on January 6 as “democracy itself”)

...

 In short, the defendants’ conduct displayed a clear, shared intent to stop Congress from certifying the results of the election, including through the organized use of force and the staging of weapons nearby. That conduct—calculated to stop the peaceful transfer of Presidential power for the first time in the nation’s history—is a quintessential example of an intent to influence government conduct through intimidation or coercion and warrants an upward departure pursuant to Note 4. Indeed, the terrorism enhancement in Section 3A1.4 is meant to “punish[] more harshly than other criminals those whose wrongs served an end more terrible than other crimes.” Benkahla, 530 F.3d at 313

The Last Day of the Lost Cause

The Confederacy was dedicated to slavery.

Everyone who fought for the Confederacy was committing treason.

Ned Oliver at Axios:

Workers in Richmond, Virginia removed the last city-owned Confederate statue from its pedestal on Monday morning.

Why it matters: The moment marks the close of a two-year effort to remove memorials to the Confederacy in its former capital. City and state leaders had long resisted calls to take down Confederate iconography.

What’s happening: A crane lifted a statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill from the center of a busy intersection just before 10am.

Context: While most city-owned Confederate memorials came down in the summer of 2020 amid widespread protests against police misconduct, Hill’s removal was delayed because his body is buried beneath the statue.

What they’re saying: “This is, I would say, the last day of the Lost Cause,” Mayor Levar Stoney said as workers loaded the statue onto a flatbed trailer.

The Insurrectionist View of the Second Amendment

Contrary to dangerous claims from GOP colleagues, nowhere does the Constitution endorse armed resistance against our police and government.

I count at least seven times our founding document refutes and contradicts this absurd "insurrectionary theory” of the Second Amendment. pic.twitter.com/bGrFg15ZU1

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) July 27, 2022

Article IV, sec. 4: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

Article III, sec. 3: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Amendment XIV, sec. 4: "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

Article I, sec. 8, clause 15 The Congress shall have Power * * * To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.

Nathan Bedford Forrest Was a Racist and a Traitor

 Matt Shuham at TPM:

In 1978, a bust of the slave trader, Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was installed in the Tennessee capitol building, immediately prompting protests.

Forty-three years later, the effort to remove the bust has some state Republicans grinding every bureaucratic lever at their disposal to a halt, the latest in a long line of fights on the general’s behalf. This week, several Republicans backed a bill to sack members of a historical commission that voted to remove the bust.

Larry McCluney, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, thinks the solution is simple: those offended by the Forrest’s likeness should simply look away.

“We’re dealing with a time period now where everybody is offended by something,” McCluney told TPM. “They talk about the issues of slavery, racism, white supremacy — well, you know, our nation has a history of that, and it’s been around a lot longer than people realize.”

Nowadays, it’s a bit more difficult for elected Republican politicians to stick up for Forrest, whose presence in the capitol is at the center of the fight over the legislation to replace the historical commission.

“I don’t know that it’s specifically related to the three statues that are up on the second floor, but that could be the motivation behind it,” Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R) told reporters Thursday when asked about the bill.

“But overall, not looking at the motivation, I think it’s a good thing,” he added.

McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) have written to the state’s attorney general, raising concerns that the commission didn’t follow the legal requirements for issuing its decision.

Justin Jones, a young activist who has pushed for years for the statue’s removal, said the vote to move the bust out of the Capitol felt like a victory. To Jones, the bust has a clear purpose.

“It’s meant to remind us that, even though they did remove those ‘colored’ and ‘white’ signs in the 1960s and 70s, they never replaced it with a ‘you’re welcome’ sign,” he said. “This symbol is a reminder that we’re not welcome there.”

Flag of Treason in the US Capitol

Maria Cramer at NYT:

Amid the images and videos that emerged from Wednesday’s rampage, the sight of a man casually carrying the Confederate battle flag outside the Senate floor was a piercing reminder of the persistence of white supremacism more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War.

Months after statues of Confederate leaders and racist figures were removed or torn down around the world, an unidentified man in bluejeans and a black sweatshirt carried the emblem of racism through the Ohio Clock corridor, past a portrait of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an abolitionist.

The emblem has appeared in the Capitol before.

The Mississippi flag, which once featured the Confederate symbol prominently, hung in the Capitol until June 2020, when it was replaced after a vote by the State Legislature to remove the emblem.

But Wednesday was the first time that someone had managed to bring the flag into the building as an act of insurrection, according to historians.

Secession, Rebellion, and the Disqualification Clause

 Section 3 of the  14th Amendment:

No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

 Drew Knight at KHOU-TV:

On Tuesday, Rep. Kyle Biedermann (R-Fredericksburg) said that he is committed to authoring legislation in the 2021 legislative session that will give Texans a vote to allow the state to secede from the U.S.

"The federal government is out of control and does not represent the values of Texans," he wrote on Facebook. "That is why I am committing to file legislation this session that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation."

Oyez describes Texas v. White:

In a 5-to-3 decision, the Court held that Texas did indeed have the right to bring suit. The Court held that Texas had remained a state, despite joining the Confederate States of America and its being under military rule at the time of the decision. The Court further held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas legislature--even if ratified by a majority of Texans--were "absolutely null." Even during the period of rebellion, however, the Court found that Texas continued to be a state.

 

Flag of Treason

At The Washington Post, Frances Stead Sellers writes of the Confederate battle flag -- the familiar stars and bars.

Historians wrestle with how a flag that stood for treason can be seen as patriotic. In the more than 150 years since it was adopted by the Confederacy, the battle flag has been redefined numerous times by the people who display it — at times worn as a symbol of youthful rebellion and at others wielded as a show of racial hatred.

The effort to pair it with displays of patriotism is met with resistance from those who note that Dixiecrats brandished the Confederate battle flag in opposition to the civil rights movement, and that neo-Nazis paraded it through Charlottesville last year.
“The flag can mean anything you want it to mean,” said Jarret Ruminski, author of “The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi” — often a poke in the eye of political correctness.

“But the history of the flag is very clear and unambiguously connected to white supremacy. That history is undeniable, whether people want to acknowledge it or not.”

...

The cognitive dissonance created by using Confederate symbols as patriotic emblems is familiar to John Coski, author of “The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem.” He has documented a “dual loyalty” among some Southerners who believe the “Confederacy had a positive effect — making the nation stronger” and thus view its flag in a benign light.

The language and logic of the Lost Cause, which sought to sanitize Southern culture after the Civil War and emphasize the hardships faced by whites, has returned, according to W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Most of it can be cut and pasted to the 21st century,” Brundage said, noting that Southern soldiers saw themselves as victims whose Protestant values were under attack in a way that is often echoed by evangelicals today.

Treason

From Findlaw.com:

The fact that treason is the only crime explicitly defined in the U.S. Constitution speaks volumes about just how vulnerable to attack the constitutional Framers considered the new nation. The relevant section on treason (Article II, Section 3) states the following:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

One of the reasons for adding the crime of treason to the Constitution was to limit the ability of Congress to define or modify it for political purposes (although the Constitution states that "Congress shall have the power to declare the punishment" for treason). The Framers were well aware that in Britain treason charges often were levied against political enemies in an effort to silence opposing viewpoints, so they wanted to make sure it wasn't similarly abused in the U.S.

The United States Code (18 U.S.C. § 2381) repeats the constitutional definition of treason and outlines the range of punishments upon conviction. Specifically, the statute states that anyone found guilty of treason:

...shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
...

Treason charges have been filed in the U.S. only about 30 times, resulting in roughly a dozen convictions. Below are some examples of treason cases:

• The Whiskey Rebellion (1794) -- Several farmers led an armed rebellion against the newly imposed whiskey tax. Two men were convicted, but later pardoned by President George Washington.
• Aaron Burr (1807) -- The third U.S. vice-president, famous for killing first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel, conspired to invade Mexico and form an empire that would include parts of the United States. Burr was acquitted because there was no "overt act" beyond the conspiracy to do so.
• Thomas W. Dorr (1844) -- Dorr led a rebellion against the state of Rhode Island, protesting against the state's lack of a bill of rights. He was elected governor through a dubious process (resulting in two administrations for about a year), but was convicted of treason by the U.S. Supreme Court and sentenced to life in prison.
• Mildred "Axis Sally" Gillars (1949) -- The American broadcaster was hired by the German Nazi government to broadcast propaganda during World War II. She was captured in Germany, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison in 1949, serving 11 years before her release.

Refighting the Civil War

Philip Bump at The Washington Post:

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was the guest for the premiere of Laura Ingraham’s new show on Fox News Channel on Monday night. During the interview, he outlined a view of the history of the Civil War that historians described as “strange,” “highly provocative,” “dangerous” and “kind of depressing.”

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria, Va., to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

“That statement could have been given by [former Confederate general] Jubal Early in 1880,” said Stephanie McCurry, a history professor at Columbia University and author of “Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.”

...
Kelly makes several points. That Lee was honorable. That fighting for state was more important than fighting for country. That a lack of compromise led to the war. That good people on both sides were fighting for conscientious reasons. Both McCurry and David Blight, a history professor at Yale University and author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” broadly reject all of these arguments.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” Blight said. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump, who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But General Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

...
Blight noted that Lee wasn’t simply defending his home state of Virginia against Northern aggression.

“Of course we yearn for compromise, we yearn for civility, we yearn for some common ground,” he added. “But, look, Robert E. Lee was not a compromiser. He chose treason.”

Robert E. Lee

At The New York Times Book Review, Eric Foner writes of the whitewashing of Robert E. Lee:

As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for “devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But “slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five. Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation, rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians, although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.

Two years ago, David Brooks wrote:

As the historian Allen Guelzo emailed me, “He withdrew from the Army and took up arms in a rebellion against the United States.” He could have at least sat out the war. But, Guelzo continues, “he raised his hand against the flag and government he had sworn to defend. This more than fulfills the constitutional definition of treason."

Inequality Was the Cornerstone of the Confederacy

On March 21, 1861, Alexander H. Stephens frankly explained the basis of the  Confederacy, of which he was vice president. 

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Moral Treason

In Crisis of the House Divided, Harry Jaffa wrote of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Douglas's crucial statement in his reply to Lincoln was his assertion that Lincoln's question implied that the judges were capable of "moral treason." This, of course, is precisely what Lincoln believed. Not only did he believe the judges capable of moral treason, but he believed they had actually committed it. For Lincoln believed that moral treason consisted, above all, in denying tike proposition that "all men are created equal"
or in denying that this was in fact the foundation of the American constitutional system.

Reading his staff-written statement Monday, Trump recited a line saying that all men are created equal. When he was speaking for himself, however, he said the opposite.

Monuments

Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans explains the removal of Confederate monuments:

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Loyalty

CNN reports:

Donald Trump appeared to call on Russian intelligence agencies Wednesday to find 30,000 of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, adding a stunning twist to the uproar over Moscow's alleged intervention in the presidential election.

...
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said during a news conference in Florida.
...
Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta suggested the remarks raised questions about Trump's loyalty to the United States.

"No presidential candidate who's running to be president of the United States ought to be asking a foreign country, particularly Russia, to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts to try to determine what the Democratic candidate may or may not be doing," Panetta, a Clinton ally, said in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"This just is beyond my own understanding of the responsibilities that candidates have to be loyal to their country and to their country alone, not to reach out to somebody like Putin and Russia, and try to engage them in an effort to try to, in effect, conduct a conspiracy against another party," he said.

Politico adds:

And William Inboden, who served on the NSC during the George W. Bush administration, said Trump's comments were "tantamount to treason."

"Trump's appeal for a foreign government hostile to the United States to manipulate our electoral process is not an assault on Hillary Clinton, it is an assault on the Constitution," said Inboden, who now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

Whether Trump's comments actually would meet the high legal bar that defines a case of treason is a question unlikely to be explored by any federal agency anytime soon. But just the fact that people were using the word was an indication of how worried the national security establishment, including on the Republican side, is about a potential Trump presidency. (According to the gurus at Merriam-Webster, online look ups for the definition of the word "treason" spiked by 76 percent after Trump's comments.)

An American in al Qaeda

As of Sunday night, there were conflicting reports on whether Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for al Qaeda, was actually under arrest. Gadahn is the first American to face treason charges since the Second World War era, and the charges carry a possible death penalty.

The story touches on two points from our textbook.

First, as we explain in the mass media chapter, news involves uncertainty. Reporters often err, especially in the early stages of a breaking story.

Second, as the citizenship chapter describes, it is possible to renounce citizenship. But the State Department explains that any American who wants to renounce citizenship must

1. appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer,
2. in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate); and
3. sign an oath of renunciation

Renunciations that do not meet the conditions described above have no legal effect. [emphasis added]

The last point is important. Gadahn appeared in a video ripping up his passport and saying he was renouncing his citizenship. But because he did not meet the specified conditions, what he did on the video did not count. He is still an American citizen, so the charges remain in effect.