That's a good point that you had to dig to find out their faith, whereas Atta and the others had theirs right out front.
But the fact remains that people have had their civil liberties curtailed in the past due to religion or ethnicity, and nothing good came of it. Remember the Holocaust? I'm not saying that you advocate that kind of thing, but I'm sure there were plenty of Germans who thought it was okey dokey to send the Jews to concentration camps and never spared a thought as to what might happen next.
We established a freedom of religon here (1st Amendment ring a bell?) for a reason. I don't think tinkering with the Constitution on this one is a good idea...too many people can hijack the process and pervert it to their own ends. I don't think anything like the Holocaust could happen again, or the Japanese internment camps, for that matter. And I am GLAD. That type of behavior offends me as an American.
I, frankly, don't care to have anyone telling them that they cannot practice their religon or curtail civil rights on the basis of religon alone. Not a good precendent. I am all for defense, so let's use the laws and technology we have, rather than treating some citizens as second-class out of a misguided sense of caution.
My familiarity with the Bill of Rights is very healthy, thankyouverymuch.
I am tempted to say that the Founding Fathers were naive in not defining "religion". That they should have known what islam is. It is bastardization of the concept of a nation. Clearly it is not a religion in the commonly understood way.
The only explanation I can imagine is that in the Founding Fathers day, Islam was clearly and obviously a joke; not to be taken seriously, and only a fool would cite it as anything serious, religion or otherwise.
Read everything you can get your hands on about dar al Islam and dar al Harb. That defines your religion for you.
The first edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was published in 1771. It has a beautifully un-PC entry on islam, or as it was referred to then, mahometans. Here is a brief excerpt. Wish I had time to transcribe the whole thing:
...he also repeated to her( Khadijah, his wife ) a passage which he pretended had been revealed to him of the ministry of the angel...
A choice of words and phrasing sure to enrage the current incarnation of the so-called religion.