Abstract: David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is a brilliantconstitutional attorney and an outstanding advocate of civil liberty. InEnemy Aliens, he articulates the case that Attorney General John Ashcroft’sabridgements 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 strategyof establishing such constitutionally questionable actions against thosepeople least politically able to defend themselves and, at the same time, thefirst step to expanding such incursions against civil rights into the populationat large.Cole writes with the meticulous care appropriate to a legal mind ofthe first caliber and with a graceful and literate rhetorical style. “The linebetween 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 todo so.” Cole writes with authority on facts of which too many Americansare completely ignorant: selective detention and deportation based onreligion or national origin, secret trials (or no trials), prolonged interrogation“under highly coercive, incommunicado conditions ... and withoutaccess to lawyers,” and “indefinite detention on the attorney general’ssay-so” (p. 5).Cole presents the historical precedents that justify his thesis. In 1988,President Ronald Reagan signed a bill apologizing for the appalling detentionof Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, that internmentwas an extension of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, “driven by nativist fearsof radical French and Irish immigrants” (p.7), but still on the books. The“Palmer Raids” of the early twentieth century, wherein thousands of for ...