From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (review)

This dense—227 pages of text abetted by 184 pages of footnotes—passionately argued volume by a professor of law, seeks to tie together various racial and ethnic discriminations by the American government with a particular emphasis on two events: the incarceration of the West Coast Japanese Americans in the years after December 7, 1941, and the injustices done to persons of Middle Eastern nationality and ethnicity in the period since September 11, 2001. Five of its seven chapters were originally published as law review articles and all deal, more or less, with historical injustices.

The burden of the book is encapsulated by the title of the fifth chapter: "History Repeats Itself: The Racing [sic] of Arab Americans as the Enemy." Historical analogies are highly problematic tools of analysis—Dick Cheney on Saddam as Hitler comes to mind—and the linking of the processes by which Japanese Americans were incarcerated after the outbreak of war between the United Sates and Japan with those by which a significant number of unnaturalized immigrants were incarcerated in the wake of the events we have learned to call 9/11 is done here with none of the care with which such analogies must be treated.

There are glaring differences in the status, numbers, and incidence of the victims in the two cases. More than two-thirds of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans were United States citizens; only two or three of the perhaps 5,000 "Arabs" rounded up in the United States in 2001 had such status. Only a small fraction of unnaturalized "Arabs" in the United States were taken into custody as opposed to more than 90% of the persons of Japanese ethnicity in the continental United States in 1943.

None of this is to argue there these were unrelated events, or that the fewer persons involved means that one should not be concerned about the violations of civil liberties by the Bush administration. But this book recklessly overstates what has been done. Perhaps the worst example is the way the author rings a change on Martin Niemoller's famous analysis that "first they came for the Jews" to "first they came for the Arabs, and then their lawyers" (226). This seems to equate the killing of millions of Jews with the conviction of one Arab—Sheik Abdel Rahman for plotting to blow up a number of structures in New York City—and the later conviction of his lawyer, Lynne Stewart, for violating an agreement she had consented to. Her conviction—on charges of abetting terrorism—was outrageous, but is not to be compared to mass murder.