Hey may have defended the rights of people in the rest of the world, but only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution.
Untrue, though this is a popular myth. There are a few Constitutional rights explicitly restricted to citizens (voting is the big one), but pretty much all the rest are rights of people generally that the government (either federal or state, depending on which Constitutional provision is involved) is restricted from intruding on. Both the plain text and the case law of the Constitution is inconsistent with this “only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution” view.
There is some case law that certain actions by the US government affecting noncitizens outside of the US are not limited by certain provisions of the Constituion that would affect actions that were either within the US or directed at citizens (or, at least, that such actions are not subject to legal process in the federal courts, which amounts to the same thing), but the particular exception is quite narrow.
>U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the U.S. surveillance of phone records was indeed illegal.
The U.S. surveillance
That's because of statutory restrictions (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) on surveillance of citizens adopted in the wake of the foreign intelligence apparatus being broadly used against domestic opposition, not Constitutional limits on rights to citizens.
From the ruling at issue: «We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans»
If you mean other nations don't recognize the same rights, then I grant you that, but the constitution doesn't limit this recognition to US citizens.
Of course, the conclusion to draw from this is that a new constitution is needed, one that does actually, at the time of writing, explicitly intend to disallow slavery and other offenses against human rights. Why should a document that has been shown to be compatible with slavery (and anti-gay sentiment, and segregation, and extra-judicial killings, and internment camps for the japanese and so on) be considered to carry any weight?
If the courts are free to interpret the letter of the law without thinking about the intention of the framers, and the meaning that was given before, what is the difference between courts and lawmakers?
Note: I'm talking entirely philosophically here. In practice, I'm extremely happy that the Supreme Court doesn't allow slavery and that they consider gay marriage to be a human right, that elective abortion is also a human right etc. But, as happy as I am that these are accepted as fundamental human rights, as I think they should be, I don't understand what the point of the constitution really is in this place.
My point was that those things do nothing to add to the lore that he is an American patriot that defended American constitutional rights. The question of should he receive a pardon by a US President should should put significantly more weight in the service he did to Americans compared to the service he did to other people.
I don’t mean to come off as xenophobic or nationalist. However, the title American Patriot is earned for services given to Americans and the United States itself.
Patriot definition: a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors.