Synopses & Reviews
"David Cole is the country's great voice for civil liberties today. In this important book he shows how 9/11 has been used to undermine the legal rights of immigrantsand that after them, it will be easy to target American citizens." Anthony Lewis Since September 11, the United States government has detained more than 1,200 people in connection with its investigation of that day's attacks, not a single one of whom has been charged with any crime. In Enemy Aliens, award-winning author and Georgetown law professor David Cole argues that such steps represent a dangerous sacrifice of the liberty of immigrants for the purported security of the majority. He argues that we have relied on a double standard, imposing measures on foreigners that we would not tolerate if they were applied more broadly to us all. While the trade-offs are politically easy (the twenty million noncitizens living among us can't vote, after all), historical precedents such as the internment of Japanese citizens in World War II and the harrassment of immigrants in the McCarthy witch hunts show that acceptance of such treatment for outsiders often paves the way for similar measures against American citizens. Coming on the heels of his multi-award-winning No Equal Justice, which exposed race and class-based double standards in the criminal justice system, Enemy Aliens brings Cole's keen intelligence, constitutional acumen, and personal litigation experience to bear on this deeply troubling issue.
Review
"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
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-293) and index.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
David Cole is the George Mitchell Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law 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.