It is consistent with appropriate due process against the enemy during war*, including American turncoats, to attack them. If you don't agree then you are apparently against the Constitutional war making powers of Congress, and the President's role as Commander in Chief. You may notice the courts don't have a role there.

* Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, equivalent to a declaration of war.

I've participated as actively as I've advocated. Is there some other standard to which you'd arbitrarily hold me?

You make good points, but I think EMP would be considered as a sort of "decapitation" strike while not necessarily creating the conditions for a full nuclear counter-strike.

How much in the way of modern microelectronics was in use at the time of Starfish Prime as opposed to vacuum tubes which are much more resistant? The ability of EMP to damage modern computers is known.

How much would the EMP attack be enhanced by optimizing the warhead for that in a fashion similar to what is done for neutron bombs?

If EMP doesn't do that much, why would the military harden its electronics against it?

If you've only got one shot in the face of missile defenses, do you go for an obvious high value target that may fail, or maybe something else?

Either way I think that it is prudent to take steps to harden the infrastructure, especially where it can be done at moderate cost.

An EMP attack is most likely from a hostile nation. Terrorists, assuming they somehow got hold of a nuke, would probably use it against a city.

Put that explosion over the central United States, and then draw a 1,000 mile radius of damage. Which do you think will have a bigger impact? One city hit by a nuke, or most of the US hit by EMP?

When those citizens take up arms as part of a military force at war with the United States, and the US Congress has authorized military force against them.

Al Qaida declared war in 1996 and has conducted many attacks since then. The US Congress authorized military action in 2001.

If you are whining about the "collateral murder" incident, they were killed because they were sneaking around with terrorists and weren't wearing the special journalist hat. So no, "we" really don't like killing journalists.

No my dear moderator, that was not "flamebait." That is what is called an opinion, and a reasonable and justifiable one at that. The fact that you don't like my opinion doesn't make it flamebait. The fact that I invoke the history of previous dealings with similar problems does not make it flamebait. You have misused your modpoint, no doubt because you don't have a counterargument. You penalize me for your shortcoming.

This isn't a new problem for the United States. The US has dealt with the same or similar problems in the past. The American renegades get all the due process needed for the circumstances. In fact, American renegades today are almost certainly getting more due process than has been performed in the past.

You can see a depiction of Americans in a similar legal status and how they were dealt with here.

Constitutionally it is fine. Arrests, formal legal charges, trials, judges and lawyers are not needed. If the renegades want that they can surrender and get those instead.

Your chronology is wrong, so I assume that is party of the confusion. Snowden was at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong for several days although it was not made widely known at the time. He waited until his passport was canceled, then boarded the plane for Russia (the Chinese weren't going to stop him). On his arrival in Russia his arrival was proclaimed a "surprise" despite his time at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong. Snowden then went through the public motions of applying for asylum while often successfully evading reporters at the airport. His spokesman in Russia is a lawyer on the public committee of the FSB security service, and has ties to former KGB officer Putin. All coincidence? "Maybe." I find it interesting that published reports indicate that Snowden was known to be disgruntled while still working at the CIA, years before he stole nearly 2,000,000 Top Secret documents and fled the country for Hong Kong. The papers report that intelligence officials in the UK and US assess it highly likely that the Chinese, the Russians, or both have everything he took. Mitigation efforts are now being made. It will cost billions of dollars and take years to fix. They basically have to do that since there is no way to prove that enormous cache of documents, some of which have been handed over to multiple third parties, hasn't been compromised somewhere along the line by either Snowden or someone on the inside of one of those other document holders. Since Snowden fled and started leaking the documents to be published, Russia has announced that it is upgrading its internal computer surveillance systems in line with what has been revealed in the documents Snowden took. Both Russia and China have embarked on a path of aggression against their neighbors. Do you think it is possible that they became confident about the limits of US intelligence? And finally, various terrorist organizations have been changing their communications methods and have been evading surveillance. Coincidence? No.

I have to wonder if you read your own link?

CNC machines rely on computers.

I'm pretty sure that modern microelectronics aren't made with blast furnaces, molds, and pig iron.

You must have misread the sections about motor vehicles. It isn't just a few with "blinking lights" that clear with a reboot as you stated even if the effects are less severe than I stated.

Also, nobody should overlook the magnifying affect of the widespread damage occurring simultaneously across the country. Not only will there be huge damage, but the problems will multiply due to the disruption of supply chains for everything from fuel to food to repair parts.