Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism

by David Cole

Overview

When David Cole was first writing Enemy Aliens, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the anti-immigrant brand of American patriotism was at a fever pitch. Now, as the pendulum swings back, and court after court finds the Bush administration's tactics of secrecy and assumption of guilt unconstitutional, Cole's book stands as a prescient and critical indictment of the double standards we have applied in the war on terror.

Called "brilliantly argued" by Edward Said and "the essential book in the field" by former CIA director James Woolsey, Enemy Aliens shows why it is a moral, constitutional, and practical imperative to afford every person in the United States the protections from government excesses that we expect for ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565849389
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/11/2005
Edition description:	New Introduction by Author
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Cole is the George Mitchell Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown UniversityLaw Center. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is the author of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, the American Book Award–winning Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism, and The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable and is a co-author (with James Dempsey) of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security and (with Jules Lobel) of Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror, both published by The New Press. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
Part 1	Responding To 9/11
1.	Their Liberty, Our Security: An Overview	17
2.	The Disappeared	22
3.	Ethnic Profiling	47
4.	Patriots and Enemies: Redefining Terrorism	57
5.	Targeting Citizens	72
Part 2	History Lessons
6.	Crossing the Citizen-Noncitizen Divide: An Overview	85
7.	Enemy Aliens and Enemy Races	88
8.	Alien Radicals and Radical Citizens: From Anarchism to Sedition	105
9.	"The Course of Least Resistance": J. Edgar Hoover's First Job and the Palmer Raids of 1919-20	116
10.	The Second Red Scare: Targeting Radical Citizens	129
11.	Extending the Boundaries: From Martin Luther King, Jr., to Watergate	154
12.	From Communism to Terrorism: Lessons of a Young Lawyer	159
Part 3	Security
13.	Legitimacy and Double Standards	183
Part 4	The Right Thing To Do
14.	The Bill of Rights as Human Rights	211
	Conclusion: Breaking the Cycle	228
	Notes	235
	Index	295

Editorial Reviews

"David Cole is one of the country's greatest voices for civil liberties today." —Anthony Lewis

"If there is a flaw in Cole's logic, it escapes me." —John W. Dean, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Remarkable and fascinating." —The New York Review of Books

"A forceful antidote to the current round of xenophobic zeal. . . . Lucid and reasoned." —The Village Voice

From the Publisher

The harsh treatment of aliens since September 11 has had little political attention.... In this powerful book, Enemy Aliens, David Cole shows why we should care... He lays out the Bush administration's policies in the way they can best be understood, in their impact on individual aliens. His tone is measured, his legal hand sure. He lets the facts speak, and the result is gripping. Cole gives the most convincing view that I have read of the legal and bureaucratic threats that now face immigrants and visitors to America. But then he goes on to make an even more important point. The repressive measures that President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft first took against aliens are now being applied to citizens.
—The New York Review of Books

Anthony Lewis

About 5,000 foreign nationals have been detained by the United States since September 11 and denied basic constitutional rights in the name of "wartime" expediency. Cole, who has litigated civil liberties cases on behalf of resident aliens and writes for the Nation, argues that denying foreigners rights within our legal system usually ends with citizens being stripped of those same rights. Cole (No Equal Justice) documents how this process has already started and discusses provisions of the Patriot Act that he believes will allow for even further government encroachment on our freedom. He also provides detailed historical examples of the government's record of persecuting opposition voices in the name of security against a foreign menace. He argues for the moral and pragmatic importance of avoiding a double standard and according foreigners the same rights as citizens. (Sept. 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly