Enemy Aliens

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 ...