But here's where it all goes haywire, and dangerously so. First, his legislation is not just aimed at "terrorists" or their supporters; it would strip away citizenship (by finding that one had intended to surrender it) even if one had no intention of doing so. For example, if one were to work with a "terrorist" organization to push it to renounce the use of violence and adopt the peaceful pursuit of its goals. Or if one were to provide support for the building of a hospital or a child-care center for an organization that has been labeled "terrorist" but is not in conflict with the United States. An individual who contributes to a fund to repair a medical facility in Gaza might thus fall into the category of persons Mr. Lieberman's legislation would construe as having chosen to renounce their American citizenship.

This determination of intent to surrender one's citizenship would not be made in a court of law but (a) by a bureaucrat in the State Department and (b) on the basis of "suspicion," the suspicion needing only to exist in the mind of the bureaucrat. Given the political pressure to be proactive in safeguarding the homeland, one can easily imagine that it would be easier, and safer, to determine that one intended to revoke one's citizenship than to correctly note the tenuous nature of a contention that one was engaged in an assault on the security and liberties of fellow Americans.

But it's still better to be cautious, right? Better to inconvenience one person than to put the rest of us at risk? But we're not talking about inconvenience here: the triggering suspicion is not like a local policeman making an arrest and a local district attorney filing charges. In that case, the accused could avail himself of the opportunity to prove that he had no desire to harm Americans and no interest in furthering the bloody ambitions of America's enemies. The government's evidence could be weighed. The grounds for the suspicion could be evaluated. People who are as patriotic and as committed to our safety as the State Department bureaucrat would judge whether to kick the guy out of the country, demote him to the status of non-citizen, with the attendant loss of a citizen's rights and privileges (including those citizens enjoy when accused of a crime), or conclude that he is innocent.

Remember, the goal must be to take the passports of those who are actually guilty of having placed themselves in the ranks of our enemies. When one determines "guilt" merely by dint of the suspicions of a government agent, one raises worrisome specters of Stalinist apparatchiks. I am pretty much like the rest of you: if somebody is plotting to blow up a car in Times Square or plant a bomb on a subway, the only "country" he is entitled to is a small cell behind stout iron bars. If he succeeds in killing, I'm ready to send him to the same fate. But only if he, as an American citizen, has been found guilty in an American court of law under American rules of justice; we don't punish, by death or by exile, the innocent.