The article by David G. Savage is from the Los Angeles City Times.
"Reporting from Washington— Acting Solicitor Gen. Neal Katyal, in an extraordinary admission of misconduct, took to task one of his predecessors for hiding evidence and deceiving the Supreme Court in two of the major cases in its history: the World War II rulings that upheld the detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.
Katyal said Tuesday that Charles Fahy, an appointee of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, deliberately hid from the court a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that concluded the Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not pose a military threat. The report indicated there was no evidence Japanese Americans were disloyal, were acting as spies or were signaling enemy submarines, as some at the time had suggested.
Fahy was defending Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which authorized forced removals of Japanese Americans from "military areas" in 1942. The solicitor general, the U.S. government's top courtroom attorney, is viewed as the most important and trusted lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court, and Katyal said he had a "duty of absolute candor in our representations to the court."
So they knew. They didn't intern Italian-Americans or German-Americans, but they interned (pretty much jailed) 110,000 Japanese-Americans causing them to lose pretty much everything including their dignity.
This brings me to the whole issue of the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
And yet through my anger I have to remember one thing. We are living in a country where we can bring these things to light and try to make it right.
In the case of the Internment Camps, it came too late for most of those who suffered. And yet, it did come to light and hopefully will make those in power think before they do it again.
I hope.
TROUBLE WITH BLOGSPOT:
I've just figured out that the people I've been unable to leave a comment with are the ones where the comments are embedded below the post. It seems I can comment on the ones who have a pop-up comment window or the full page. Strange that Blogger is having so much trouble lately.
Blogspot Postscript: I've also found that I can usually manage to post a comment on those embedded comment boxes if I choose ANONYMOUS instead of Google Account.
Shocking, indeed! There's always paranoia in high places in times of war.
ReplyDeleteThanks for figuring out that little problem with Blogger. I'll go change mine to full page right away. I just finished reading "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" which was about the Internment. It is disgusting what they did, but not surprising.
ReplyDeleteWhy weren't the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii not interned? After all, there were Pearl Harbor and other military installations here -- all great places to spy on. Instead, they actually served in the US Army! Never could figure that out.
ReplyDeleteThere was the same sort of paranoia in Canada, too. I knew it happened but I've never understood it. Japanese Canadians on the west coast were uprooted from their homes, businesses and farms, and sent to the interior of British Columbia (not very far, but across a few mountain ranges) to keep them from aiding the Japanese navy.
ReplyDeleteWe lived in the BC interior all through my school years and I went to school with many Japanese-Canadians. Of course, as young baby-boom children, we knew nothing about what had happened. We just knew these were our friends and schoolmates.
And you're right, the government, or the armed forces, or whoever, didn't do it to German Canadians or Italian Canadians on the east coast.
I didn't understand it when I first learned about it, and I don't understand it now.
— K
Kay, Alberta, Canada
An Unfittie's Guide to Adventurous Travel
Gigi: There were too many Japanese Americans in Hawaii so they couldn't intern all of them. However, many of the leaders of the community or highly educated Japanese were put into the Internment camps. Some were sent to the mainland and I've heard that one camp was hidden in a gulch somewhere between Waipahu and Pearl City. Art's aunt's book was even published about the camps. My mother's father's name was on the Internment list because he was a priest working in Kalaupapa helping the victims of Hansen's Disease (leprosy). My mother said the newspaper reporters at the Hawaii Times where she later worked said they were all imprisoned.
ReplyDeleteEven though their families were imprisoned in the camps, young men were allowed to join the military because soldiers were needed.
Art's uncle worked as a carpenter at the army's Schofield Barracks. Japanese Americans were issued black badges that they were always supposed to wear. Everyone else had white badges.
Two of Art's uncles and two of mine served in the 442nd.
NOTEs: Yes, I had a great many complaints about not being about to leave notes. I finally began using that pop up format, and now most folks are happy.
ReplyDeleteI visited the Japanese American Museum in downtown LA earlier this year and I was much moved by the display on the internment camps. They even have one building inside the museum itself. We were so wrong to do that.
Sometimes, I just have to shake my head. What are/were people thinking when such things as this occur? Why don't more people rise up in protest when such things as interment camps are even suggested? Why do people suffer from xenophobia? And then, why do they act on that fear in such devastating and cruel ways?
ReplyDeleteThis awareness, that someone in power knew does not surprise, but it makes it worse in some ways.
I have reset my settings on blogger. We will see if this works. You are a good problem solver, but then we already knew that. :)
Glad it came to light...
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear about your issues with Blogger, Kay
Aloha from Honolulu
Comfort Spiral
><}}(°>
><}}(°>
<°)}}><
maybe blogger would be interested in your findings, Kay. Good work.
ReplyDeleteTerrible about the internment, life lessons to be learned here. History does tend to repeat itself, that is the horror.
Sad to learn.
ReplyDeleteEven i am facing the same problem,have commented as anonymous in many blogs .
This is a startling revelation. One man with so much power over the fate of so many.
ReplyDeleteI'll try the 'Anonymous' trick and see if it works for me.
I think a lot of it had to do with the very strong anti-Asian prejudice on the West Coast and the opportunity for some people to get their hands on property belonging to the Japanese. It was easy to pick on Asians but not on Germans or Italians. When I was a child it was still almost impossible for Chinese to find housing outside of Chinatown. And Japantown was just gone.
ReplyDeleteKay - Like your aunt's book, a book called "Pearl Harbor Child" describes the author's friends and parents being taken to camps, I thought onto one of the small islands in Pearl Harbor. (Ford or Sand?)
ReplyDeleteThe "white man's fear" seems to repeat itself historically. One "dark skinned woman" in a headscarf died of a heart attack, after being openly accused of being a terrorist at the Okla. City bombing. Turned out to be a "white guy" (or 3) who caused that tragedy.
DrumMajor
What shocked me most was the mention of the badges - like the Jews' yellow stars. The more things change...
ReplyDeleteThey knew!! So saddening, heartbreaking.
ReplyDeleteThis is awful!! But I am glad to read that the original (concealed) report was sane.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the added details you give in the comments section.
First Blogger, now Skype. Mine has been down for days. And of many others.
The trouble with the Blogspot comment posting could be with YOU and not Blogger. (I can't belive I am sticking up for them!) This happened to me recently. If you block 3rd party cookies, you can't comment in the page bottom comment boxes.
ReplyDeleteQuilly: Good grief! Really? Since I don't want 3rd party cookies (I don't even know how to change that.) I'll just continue to post as Anonymous. That seems to be the trick for the few who use the embedded comment boxes.
ReplyDeleteOf course they knew...I am becoming more cynical as I get older...what a terrible thing..
ReplyDelete