Enemy Aliens Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism by David Cole (New York: The New Press, 2003. 316 pages.)

Abstract

David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is a brilliant
constitutional attorney and an outstanding advocate of civil liberty. In
Enemy Aliens, he articulates the case that Attorney General John Ashcroft’s
abridgements of the civil liberties of non-citizens and alleged “enemy combatants”
in the name of the war on terrorism is at once part of an old strategy
of establishing such constitutionally questionable actions against those
people least politically able to defend themselves and, at the same time, the
first step to expanding such incursions against civil rights into the population
at large.
Cole writes with the meticulous care appropriate to a legal mind of
the first caliber and with a graceful and literate rhetorical style. “The line
between citizen and foreigner, so natural during wartime,” he writes (p.
5), “is not only easy to exploit when restrictive measures are introduced,
but also easy to breach when the government later finds it convenient to
do so.” Cole writes with authority on facts of which too many Americans
are completely ignorant: selective detention and deportation based on
religion or national origin, secret trials (or no trials), prolonged interrogation
“under highly coercive, incommunicado conditions ... and without
access to lawyers,” and “indefinite detention on the attorney general’s
say-so” (p. 5).
Cole presents the historical precedents that justify his thesis. In 1988,
President Ronald Reagan signed a bill apologizing for the appalling detention
of Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, that internment
was an extension of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, “driven by nativist fears
of radical French and Irish immigrants” (p.7), but still on the books. The
“Palmer Raids” of the early twentieth century, wherein thousands of for ...