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Today's
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November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8, 2003
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
A
Review of David Cole's Enemy Aliens
By ELAINE CASSEL
With Enemy Aliens, David Cole offers us a compassionate
and compelling book about the U.S. government's discrimination
against aliens since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Cole is a law professor at Georgetown University Law School and
legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.
Cole's thesis in Enemy Aliens also serves
as a warning: Americans should worry about the way their government
treats immigrants, for it is often a precursor to the way it
will treat its citizens. Quoting Justice William O. Douglas,
Cole reminds us that while it is easy to be aware of creeping
oppression, and difficult to fight it, "[W]e all must be
most aware of the change in the air...lest we become unwilling
victims of the darkness."
Cole's Background
As an Attorney: A Primer on Persecution
Cole finds the root of today's witch-hunt
in the Cold War. To explain the parallels, he discusses several
cases in which he represented defendants alleged to be communists.
In the 1980's, Cole represented Margaret
Randall, who faced deportation for advocating "world communism."
He explains how, then, immigrants who fit the "red scare"
profile were targeted for discriminatory prosecution and deportation.
The government's modus operandi was: Target, snoop, charge, and
deport.
Since 1987, Cole has been involved in
the case of the "L.A. 8" -- seven Palestinians and
the Kenyan wife of one of them. The government claimed that they
were associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP), an organization that advocated "the doctrines
of world Communism."
Time and again, the government sought
to deport the L.A. 8, but federal judges found no cause to justify
deportation. (Under the McCarran Act, those involved with an
alleged  Communist organization were eligible
for deportation. But in 1990, Congress repealed the McCarran
Act.)
Later, FBI Director William Webster admitted
that his agency never found evidence of criminal or terrorist
activity. Yet, according to the Immigration and Naturalization
Service district director who authorized the deportations and
whom Cole interviewed, the FBI insisted on deportation proceedings.
Cole argues that the same tactics used
against Randall and the L.A. 8 are now being repeated. Those
who seem "suspicious" -- then, Communists; now, Muslims
and Arabs -- are targeted. Then the government makes every effort
-- and invokes every possible pretext to deport them.
Ironically, since Cole's book was finalized,
two of the L.A. 8 have once again been arrested. They are charged
with supporting "terrorism," based on their past association
with the PFLP - and the government is again trying to deport
them.
Cole told me that the new charges are
based upon portions of the immigration laws that were amended
as part of the USA PATRIOT Act. The charges are also bolstered
by the fact that -- in a 1996 opinion penned by Justice Antonin
Scalia, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm. v. Reno -- the
Supreme Court has sanctioned the selective enforcement of immigration
laws in unspecified "extreme" situations.
Guantanamo: A Flashpoint
in the War on Noncitizens
As even the cover of Enemy Aliens indicates,
the situation at Guantanamo Bay is a major focus of Cole's book.
The cover bears one of the first photos of the prisoners held
there. It is a depressing sight: Clad in orange jumpsuits, brown-skinned
men wearing hats, goggles, and masks are kneeling on the ground,
with their hands tied together in front of them. Leaning over
them is an American military man in camouflage.
President Bush designated the over 650
Guantanamo prisoners "enemy combatants" -- as opposed
to prisoners of war, who would be entitled to the protections
of the Geneva Conventions. The government has taken the position
that the "enemy combatants" -- captured mainly in Afghanistan
and Pakistan two years ago, where they are alleged to have been
fighting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda -- are not entitled to attorneys,
or even to hearings to determine if they are being wrongfully
held.
Some day, these men may be tried before
military tribunals, but it is unclear when that will be, and
what protections, if any, the tribunals will afford them.
Cole points out that those who believed
this treatment would never have been applied to Americans have
been proved to be very wrong indeed. To the contrary, American
citizens Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla have now been declared
"enemy combatants" as well. (Hamdi is alleged, but
has not been proven, to have fought for the enemy abroad; Padilla
is alleged, but has not been proven, to have conspired on U.S.
soil to aid terrorists in procuring a "dirty bomb.")
As a result, both men are being held,
to this day, in military prisons. Neither citizen has been charged
with a crime. Neither citizen has been afforded access to a lawyer.
And when these two U.S. citizens finally go on trial -- or face
military tribunals -- the government may prosecute them based
on "secret evidence - "proof" that they will never
have the opportunity to challenge because they won't know what
it is. So much for limiting civil rights infringements to aliens
alone.
Witch Hunts and Deportations:
The Fallout of September 11
Besides the treatment of "enemy
combatants" -- both citizens and noncitizens -- Cole's other
major concern is post-September 11 immigration proceedings.
Immediately after September 11, the government
rounded up of thousands of Arab and Muslim men. It held them
without charges and without access to attorneys or their families
for far longer than the law allowed.
On October 21, 2001 the USA Patriot Act
was enacted. It sanctioned law enforcement holding immigrants
without charges for seven days. But -- as a report by the Inspector
General of the Justice Department has since revealed -- men were
held months at a time. And many faced physical abuse in the local
jails where they were held.
Finally, many were deported -- after
closed hearings -- for minor infractions of immigration law that
prior to September 11, would have been entirely overlooked.
According to the Inspector General's
report, not one of these men was even charged with an act of
terrorism. Cole argues that this is hardly surprising: "[W]hen
the government uses the immigration process to get a 'terrorist,'"
he notes, "you can be "fairly certain that it does
not have the evidence that the individual has actually engaged
in or supported any terrorist act."
In this context, it seems absurd that
Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Department of Justice
have touted such deportations as evidence of fighting and winning
the "war on terror." Actually, this is more like a
war on immigrants.
An ugly conclusion cannot be avoided:
The U.S. government is using the "war on terror" as
a justification for selectively targeting and prosecuting foreign
nationals from Arab and Muslim countries, virtually none of whom
have ever been remotely involved with terrorism.
The Strategic Argument,
and the Human Rights Argument
Cole criticizes all of these tactics
as both strategic and human rights failures.
From a strategic point of view, Cole
argues that if the U.S. indeed has reason to believe that terrorists
are lurking in Arab and Muslim immigrant communities, then it
ought to work with the communities to identify the threats. Instead,
however, it has discriminatorily targeted these ethnic groups
for selective prosecution for immigration violations.
The result, Cole says, is a loss of goodwill
among these communities. And that loss, he contends, will have
a long-term negative effect both on the war on terrorism, and
on our relationships with Arab and Muslim communities both here
and abroad.
Cole deftly presents the legal issues
that abound in the treatment of immigrants post-September 11.
Granted, he concedes, the Supreme Court has long allowed -- at
least since Johnson v. Eisentrager -- the differential treatment
of alien fighters captured on the battlefield abroad. But that
ruling does not extend to aliens who are not fighting against
the U.S. And that may be the case with respect to a significant
number of those still on Guantanamo. Moreover, it was certainly
the case with those illegally detained after September 11.
The Bill of Rights generally refers to
"persons," not citizens -- a significant choice since
other parts of the Constitution (such as eligibility for the
Presidency) depend on citizenship. It suggests that citizens
and noncitizens, as equal persons, should be treated the same
-- not differently.
In the end, though, Cole's most passionate
argument is moral and constitutional, rather than legal. It is
that the way the U.S. government has treated immigrants is morally
and constitutionally wrong. Indeed, Cole argues that the only
morally acceptable option is a simple one: to treat them as human
beings entitled to the same fundamental rights as citizens. But
the U.S. government, especially since September 11, has fallen
terribly short of this ideal.
This moral argument should be justification
enough for changing the government's policies. But Enemy Aliens
also emphasizes another reason for doing so: The historical truth
that constitutional and human rights violations, though they
begin with immigrants, will not end with them.
Cole's valuable book is a must-read for
anyone interested in the profound legal and governmental changes
the U.S. has seen since September 11 -- and, especially, for
anyone concerned about the harms those changes have inflicted
on civil liberties.
Elaine Cassel
practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teachers
law and psychology, and follows the Bush regime's dismantling
of the Constitution at Civil
Liberties Watch. She can be reached at: ecassel1@cox.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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