IsThatLegal?

"Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also a lawyer."
-- Sparkey of "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing"
"Relentlessly sensible and often important."
-- Michael Froomkin of "discourse.net"

The next time the Administration says it needs new powers to fight the war on terrorism, ask why it's so bad at using its old ones. Thirty-seven illegal aliens--a number of them with falsified papers--were arrested while on their jobs yesterday at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That's the headquarters of the nation's largest arsenal of intercontinental nuclear missiles.

I'm getting a bunch of emails about my earlier post on human shields as traitors. They fall into two main categories, and I'll briefly respond to both here.

A first group is telling me that I'm being "coy" by not coming out and saying clearly whether I think the American citizens who act as human shields after the start of hostilities ought to be charged with treason. This sort of comment points up something I think is going a bit wrong in the blogosphere--the notion that anybody who's blogging is really just trying to run their own mini-O'Reilly Factor. You know--their own personal soapbox for shouting to the world how they know every goddamn thing and how they have everything all figured out. That's not always what I'm up to here. Sometimes, yes: I'm quite sure that Howard Coble's views supporting the Japanese American internment were wrong and dangerous, and I've said so (ad nauseam). But sometimes, no. And this is one of those times. I'm just thinking something through.

A second group is telling me that the government would be ill-advised to try to punish people for expressing their dissent, even if their actions are technically treasonous. That, I suppose, is a political judgment for George Bush and John Ashcroft to make. But I'm really not at all persuaded that tying yourself to an Iraqi bridge with a t-shirt that says "Human Shield" on it is, in any meaningful sense, essentially an expression of dissent. I can stand on the sidewalk outside a hall where George Bush is speaking and say, loudly, "George Bush's Iraq policy makes me so mad that I feel like punching somebody in the nose!!!" and that's protest. If I walk up to George Bush, say, "your Iraq policy makes me so mad!" and then punch him in the nose, that's a crime. A serious one. As it should be.

The question of whether it would be a wise exercise of prosecutorial discretion to charge a human shield with treason strikes me as a close one. I think that for me as a prosecutor, the question might well turn on the punishment I was choosing to seek. The value of a treason prosecution in a case such as this would be primarily its declaratory value about the limits on dissent during military conflict. (Of course, in the eyes of some, that would be its primary danger.) So I wouldn't think it appropriate to make somebody risk life imprisonment for this conduct. If I could couple the announcement of an indictment with a declaration that I was seeking only a modest term of imprisonment, I might be persuaded to go ahead and do it.

Another word about (and from) Fred Rogers:

In a world of children's TV dominated by a purple dinosaur singing about how much fun it is to eat fruits and vegetables, Fred Rogers was singing this song:

The Truth Will Make Me Free

What if I were very, very sad
And all I did was smile?
I wonder after a while
What might become of my sadness?

What if I were very, very angry,
And all I did was sit
And never think about it?
What might become of my anger?

Where would they go, and what would they do
If I couldn't let them out?
Maybe I'd fall, maybe get sick . . . or doubt.

But what if I could know the truth
And say just how I feel?
I think I'd learn a lot that's real
About freedom.

I'm learning to sing a sad song when I'm sad.
I'm learning to say I'm angry when I'm very mad.
I'm learning to shout, I'm getting it out,
I'm happy, learning
Exactly how I feel inside of me--
I'm learning to know the truth--
I'm learning to tell the truth--
Discovering truth will make me free.

Rest in peace, Mr. Rogers.

The mainstream press is picking up on the Democratic National Committee's recent call for Rep. Howard Coble to resign his chairmanship of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and National Security.

Even though Mr. Coble has had his head down for weeks since he made his mistaken comments about the Japanese American internment, the story has not gone away. Some will say that the story has stuck around because of rank partisanship and such. But personally, I think it's because his comments were scary, coming from the mouth of the guy who's supposed to oversee homeland security issues, and his follow-up assertion that he was just "stating historical fact" was outrageous.

RSS? Newsfeeders? Huh? I'm still pretty new to this blogging game, and I'm seeing references all over the place to this stuff. I've just googled for an introductory site that explains these things in Plain English, and everything I found seems pretty technical. If somebody would be kind enough either to email me a few pointers or at least a couple of URL's of good explanatory sites, I'd be much obliged...

Coverage of Howard Coble's support for the Japanese American internment in, of all places, the National Catholic Reporter.

Donald Rumsfeld has made clear that any Iraqi involved in using civilians as human shields will be guilty of war crimes.

But what is the government’s position on the American citizens who have travelled to Iraq to volunteer their services as human shields?

This may not be treason now, but it will be when the hostilities begin, and someone at the Department of Justice is undoubtedly thinking about seeking some indictments.

We rightly prize our freedom to protest government actions with which we disagree, and for that reason, raising the specter of treason prosecutions probably gives many people the willies. Understandable. Still, I think it’s worth thinking about whether this might not be a good place for the law of treason to remind people that wartime dissent knows limits. Speaking—fervently and loudly—in opposition to an impending or ongoing war is a sign of a healthy democracy. Taking actions that complicate and hinder the military effort is a different thing altogether. That is not just dissent; it’s also, in the language of Article III of the U.S. Constitution, “adhering to the enemy, giving him aid and comfort.”

Treason is a charge that is very rarely sought; there have been only around 40 treason prosecutions in the nation’s history, and many of them ended in acquittals. Part of the reason for that is the difficulty of proof: Article III of the Constitution requires proof of an overt act of treason by the testimony of two witnesses. And another part of the reason is that for the first eighty or so years of the nation’s history, the mandatory punishment for treason was death, and most people today still tend to think that a conviction for treason triggers the death penalty.

But neither of those concerns will stand in the way in these cases. Given that this “human shield” effort is at least as much a public relations effort as a gambit for peace, it’s not going to be tough to find two eyewitnesses. And death is no longer the mandatory penalty for treason; the Justice Department would not even be required to ask a jury for a death sentence. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, a first offender would likelier face a sentence of life imprisonment or a sentence of between ten and thirteen years (depending on whether a court analogized this particular treasonous act to an effort to compromise the effectiveness of war material, premises, or utilities).

A treason charge is “bringing out the big guns”—no doubt about it. But so is volunteering to serve as a human shield for Saddam Hussein.

I hope these folks have lawyers.

The Democratic National Committee, at its winter meeting, passed a resolution calling on North Carolina Congressman Howard Coble to resign as chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security for his remarks in agreement with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Take a moment out of your busy day and read the commencement speech that Fred Rogers delivered at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, last spring.

If there were such a thing as American sainthood, I would nominate Fred Rogers. His death makes me very, very sad.

Just about every weekday morning from around when my older daughter turned two to around when she turned four, she and I snuggled side by side in front of the TV in a big soft maroon chair, tuned in to Rocky Mountain PBS (KRMA from Denver), and entered Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for a half hour.

And what a half hour it was--simple, quiet, meditative, whimsical, thoughtful, tuneful, sensitive--and somehow never dull, at least to me and to my older daughter. (My younger daughter did find it dull, and never really took to the program.)

As I reflect on his passing this morning, it occurs to me that Fred Rogers was a very brave man.

He lived in a heavily commercialized world of children's television that catered to flash, celebrity, and short attention spans. Yet he had the courage to stay with a formula that he believed was best for young children, one that thought children could also respond to simplicity and calm, and that demanded sustained attention. Each story that took place in the Neighborhood of Make Believe took a whole week to tell—a whole week—and children would follow those wonderful stories from start to finish. Every now and then Mr. Rogers told a week-long story through opera—opera!—and children paid attention.

Mr. Rogers also had the courage to address with young children many of the topics that we adults—usually because of our own discomfort—think children need to be protected from: death, fear, divorce, anger, illness. He believed it better to create a quiet, comfortable space for children and then to name those events and those feelings with them, to give them a chance to begin to get to know how they actually felt about them, and even to play through their feelings with puppets and toys.

And most of all, Mr. Rogers had the courage to be the sort of man that our society doesn’t usually think much of—a man with very strong feelings who was more interested in getting to know them and accept them than in hiding them and besting them.

My older daughter has outgrown the big maroon chair now, and she has outgrown Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But a time will come when she will want to sit down in a big chair early in the morning with her son or daughter and enjoy a half hour of quiet exploration of the joys and sufferings of the big world of events “out there” and the big world of feelings and thoughts that we all carry deep inside ourselves.

I hope, for her sake and the sake of my grandchild, that Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is still in reruns.

Here's another amusing cartoon lampooning Rep. Howard Coble's comments about the Japanese American internment.

The importance of the pending Moussaoui case. The federal government's prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui has largely fallen off the war-on-terrorism radar screen. I guess that's understandable, what with the defendant himself ranting, Colin Ferguson-like, about Zionist conspiracies, and the court filing everything, including its own opinions under seal.

But the legal issue that is pending in the case--now on interlocutory appeal in the Fourth Circuit--is of enormous importance to the legal/judicial component of the "war on terror." This article from last Wednesday's Washington Post emphasizes the importance of the case, although it doesn't say much about the legal issues involved. I will post at greater length either late today or tomorrow morning (I have a seminar to teach this afternoon) on the legal issue before the Fourth Circuit, and why I think it likely that the Fourth Circuit is not going to bend to the government's will on this one, wartime or not. For now, though, I thought I'd at least link to the Washington Post piece. More later.

Another editorial condemns Howard Coble's defense of the Japanese American internment. This one, by Roy Saigo, president of St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, is in a major North Carolina newspaper.

Ken Masugi of the Claremont Institute has written a piece that supports Representative Howard Coble's assertion that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a reasonable national security measure. He empathisizes with Mr. Coble, who, he says, is "dealing with forces beyond the pale of reason." The question of whether an American citizen of Japanese ancestry was loyal to the Emperor was, he says,

a perfectly legitimate question to raise. It has nothing to do with anachronistic charges of "racism." After all, Japanese and other Asian-Americans had experienced discriminatory laws, especially in California. Time for some payback?

As Congressman Coble argues, the relocation and contemporary policies have to be judged with these questions in mind. This is sobriety, true moderation and restraint in a crisis. After all, the more questions we ask, the better policy we are likely to get. Anything else is ideological fanaticism. Congressman Coble's critics are the fanatics. They are the ones who should be regarded with wariness in these nervous times.

In the end, Masugi is left to ask why "even the mildest defense of the reasonableness of the relocation (which my parents underwent) [should] evoke" a response like Coble's did?

Well, for one thing, because Mr. Coble was howlingly wrong when he said that the government placed Japanese Americans into camps in order to protect them. When the head of a homeland security subcommittee gets a basic historical fact that badly wrong, it's important that somebody tell him. Maybe the volume with which people (like myself) have been telling him about it in the last few weeks has something to do with what seem to be the problems that Rep. Coble is having in hearing the correction.

Masugi instead defends Coble's "mild" comments on the other ground Coble offered for them, which was the concern that some American citizens of Japanese ancestry posed a threat to national security.

Let's set to one side--as Masugi (tellingly) does--the fact that the government did nothing (on a group basis) to white American citizens who posed identical risks. Let's instead take his argument exactly in terms, and assume that it was reasonable for the military, in the winter and spring of 1942, to fear Fifth Column activity by Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancesty. How does that fear make "reasonable" the actual three-and-one-half-year-long program of barbed-wire incarceration that the government actually implemented? I can understand the notion that the fear may have made it appropriate for the government to do something. But how did it justify this?

(Thanks, by the way, to Brett Marston for bringing Masugi's piece to my attention.)

Update. Steve Ross over at the Mountaintop responds with appropriate outrage to Masugi's thinly veiled suggestion that anyone who disagrees with Howard Coble on the internment is dangerous, and maybe a traitor.

Following up on his duct tape announcement, Tom Ridge has suggested that all Americans, while closeted behind their duct-taped plastic sheeting, have on hand a copy of my book Free to Die for their Country, for enjoyment "until the chemical plume moves on."

Great suggestion, Tom!

(Tom, remind me: where do I send my $100,000 contribution to the GOP?)

Here's an amusing editorial from poppolitics.com lampooning NC Rep. Howard Coble's justification of the Japanese American internment.

This story soldiers on--as it should--nearly three weeks after Mr. Coble uttered these remarks. God bless the internet.

Here's a touching story from today's San Francisco Chronicle about two Japanese American internees, friends as young girls at the Tule Lake Relocation Center, reuniting after sixty-one years.

In California, Rep. Howard Coble's voiced approval of the Japanese American internment in World War II is still drawing reaction and condemnation.

Who would've imagined? A story in the online Atlantic Monthly on how to survive in the world as an introvert is one of the most-blogged stories of the day, according to Blogdex. Hmmm. Imagine that. A bunch of people who spend lots of time alone at their computers, pouring out their innermost thoughts and having virtual relationships, discussions, and arguments with people they can't see or hear, respond powerfully to a story urging compassion for introverts. Incredible!

Seriously, the article is worth reading. Personally, I find the bipolarity of the introvert/extrovert distinction to be so oversimplified as to be almost useless. Somewhat more sophisticated, I think, is the recent work of pyschologist and author Elaine Aron toward linking a cluster of temperamental traits under the rubric of "high sensitivity." Much of what she describes certainly rings true for me, and I've found her approach quite comforting.

On the other hand, if all of this talk about introversion and sensitivity is making you feel the urge to go chop some wood or sneak in a quick game of rugby, go over and read John Stryker on how real men handle pain.

Snowmobiles stink to holy heaven and are as noisy as a buzzsaw factory working overtime. They destroy the experience of a Yellowstone winter. (I know; I was just there 6 weeks ago on a cross-country skiing trip.) Yet the National Park Service, under pressure from the administration (and, undoubtedly, Wyoming boy Dick Cheney), has decided to allow snowmobiles to stay in the park. This is a mistake, and a very bad decision.

Representative Coble, Hawaii might not be the best spot for a vacation right about now.

The Hawaii House of Representatives is set to vote late next week on a resolution condemning Rep. Coble's pro-internment comments of a couple of weeks ago. The measure recites that "it is particularly troubling that someone in as critical a position as Congressman Coble is in harbors the kind of beliefs that he expressed on that radio talk show," and declares that "the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives is requested to review the fitness of Congressman Howard Coble to continue as Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security."

Mr. Hastert?

Storm Clouds for Coble? Here's an article that appeared in today's Nichi Bei Times, one of the leading Japanese American newspapers. (The story is not available online, and I reproduce it here with permission.)

JACL, Other Groups Request Meeting With N.C. Rep. Coble

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On the national Day of Remembrance Wednesday, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), together with representatives from numerous other organizations, delivered a letter to Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), expressing their ongoing distress at his comments in a radio interview earlier this month.

In the interview, Coble endorsed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision 61 years ago to incarcerate those of Japanese descent into concentration camps, and also impugned the Arab American community as a threat to national security, the JACL noted.

“We continue to be frustrated by the congressman’s lack of responsiveness to our concerns despite numerous letters and requests — as early as two weeks ago — and are directly requesting a meeting with him to resolve this issue,” said a JACL statement.

Accompanying the letter were two petitions — one organized the JACL and the Organization of Chinese Americans and the other by ModelMinority.com — demanding that Coble step down from chair of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Also delivered were statements by 11 organizations “representing millions of people across the country,” all seeking Rep. Coble’s resignation as chair, according to the JACL.

The letter, signed by a diverse group of community, civil rights and faith organizations from across the country, stated, “Your comments and the continued insistence that your statements were ‘historical fact’ have raised alarm among Americans throughout this country, as evidenced by the thousands of signatures on the attached petitions, which call on you to step down from your position as chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.”

It continued, “On this National Day of Remembrance as the Japanese American community around the country observes the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 and endeavors to educate people about the injustice of internment, we
respectfully request the opportunity to meet with you to share our concerns and move towards a resolution on this issue.”

The JACL further noted that Rep. Coble’s comments continue to evoke outrage and that approximately 1000 messages had been — and continue to be — sent through its Website to Congress, urging the House leadership to remove Rep. Coble from his position.

“The JACL is saddened that we must observe the Day of Remembrance by insisting that a member of Congress be held accountable for his inexcusable and incomprehensible endorsement of the U.S. government stripping American citizens of their basic Constitutional rights,” said the JACL statement.

“Further, the JACL believes that a man who has destroyed the trust of the American people with such an endorsement has eliminated any expectation that he would carry out his duties with a respect for the Constitution and for the civil rights of our people and should therefore step down.”

Signatories on the letter to Rep. Coble include: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Arab American Institute, Asian American Coalition of Chicago, Asian American Institute, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, Asian Health Coalition of Illinois, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance/AFL-CIO, Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), Chinese Mutual Aid Association, Chicago chapter of FilCRA (Filipino Civil Rights
Advocates), Hmong National Development, Inc. (HND), Japanese American Citizens League, Japanese American Service Committee, Korean American Coalition, NAACP, National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA), National Coalition For Asian Pacific American Community Development (National CAPACD), National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National
Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA), Organization of Chinese Americans, Sikh American Heritage Organization, Sikh Coalition and Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC).

This year's San Francisco commemoration of the signing of Executive Order 9066 will include a formal call for President Bush and other Republican leaders to repudiate Rep. Howard Coble's comments supporting the Japanese American internment. The event will take place in Japantown at 12:30 p.m., and the man issuing the call will be Dale Minami, the lawyer who helped Fred Korematsu to overturn his 1942 conviction for resisting his exclusion from the West Coast.

Coblegate soldiers on.

Rumors are circulating that the seemingly waning controversy over Howard Coble's comments justifying the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II might not be waning after all: further action from prominent Democrats might come early next week. I'll blog it as soon as I hear about it, so check back!

This--and I'm not making this up--is the cover of a 2002 album by the band Great White, whose unlicensed pyrotechnics show killed nearly 70 people and injured about 170 in Rhode Island last night. And here's a song from that album, in which the protagonist contemplates revenge on an ex-girlfriend through--you guessed it, arson.

No, I don't know exactly what my point is in posting this. Metal bands have a perfect right to do their musical obsessing about about violence, pain, death, and the like. I'd never question that for a moment. But there is a tragic irony lurking in here somewhere, isn't there?

My post about the impact of the PATRIOT Act on real estate lawyers seems to have gotten a bit of a yawn from folks.

I'm puzzled by that. When the Attorney General announced about a year ago that the government would be monitoring certain conversations between jailed terrorists and their lawyers, people went nuts. (Excessively so, in my view, because the regulations were nowhere near as broad or intrusive as some made them out to be.)

Here, the government is placing a lawyer in the position of doing a mandatory background check on his own client(s), and then reporting to the government on his own client(s) without telling the client he's doing so.

It's one thing, I think, when the guy behind the counter at Wal-Mart has to process a backround check on you before he can sell you a handgun. It's quite another when your lawyer has to run a background check on you before you can buy or sell a piece of property. Wouldn't it be less threatening to the attorney-client relationship to require the local clerk or register of deeds to run the background check?

Oh yeah, right. That would be an unconstitutional invasion of state power.

Real estate attorneys are government informants. In most places that I know of, a real estate closing is handled by a "closing attorney" or "settlement attorney," typically (although not invariably) hired by the seller, often from a list of approved attorneys supplied by the company that's supplying the title insurance for the deal. Real estate is not my field, mind you, but the quick research I did this evening tells me that the closing attorney typically represents one of the parties to the deal (usually the seller), and in some places and circumstances represents both buyer and seller.

Now that you know that, check out this memorandum (page 1 and page 2) that a Richmond, Virginia title insurance company sent out at the end of January to their "approved attorneys." The "re:" line tells it all: "New Requirements imposed on settlement agents by the USA PATRIOT Act." It tells lawyers that from now on, before doing a real estate closing, they must first check a federal database to ascertain whether either seller or buyer is a "Specially Designated National"--that is, a person or entity on a "terrorist list" compiled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department. And here's the kicker: if seller or buyer is on the list, then the lawyer must (a) report the fact to the federal government, (b) delay the closing, and (c) not tell the client(s) that the lawyer has done (a) and (b).

Two things jump out at me here. First, this is a spot where the reach of the USA PATRIOT Act is just enormous. It affects every single real estate transaction in the nation. From an administration that purports to be concerned about protecting state and local power from the reach of the federal government, this is an extraordinary foray into what has always been understood to be a core matter of state and local concern--transactions in real property.

Second, the USA PATRIOT Act here seems to tamper with the attorney-client relationship in a fundamental way. Not only does the law create an obligation for lawyers to rat on their own clients, it also creates an obligation for lawyers to conceal things from their own clients.

(Note, as well, the amusing instruction on page 2 that real estate lawyers should not be on the prowl for just "'middle eastern' sounding names. They should be looking for people with names like "Joseph Gilbert" or "Roy Ricks" too. I suppose they might also have added "Timothy McVeigh.")

All you insomniacs--you can catch an interview I just did about "l'affaire Coble" on the nationally syndicated overnight talk radio program "America Live" with host Ernie Brown. If you have an AM talk radio station in your city, there's a decent chance that this is their overnight program. Fortunately, they taped me, so I don't have to stay up until all hours to do the show.

Three brief, and final, responses to CPO Sparkey.

First, Sparkey quotes some of my words back to me, in an attempt (I guess) to prove to me that I've argued that the Japanese American internment was grounded solely in racism (as opposed to where Sparkey thinks it was grounded--appropriate fears about national security). Here are my words, which he quotes back to me:
"What I have maintained is that the scope of the government's program, the enormity of its deprivations--that is, the essence of the tragedy of the Japanese American internment--can be explained only by reference to racism...[emphasis added]"
Sparkey missed my point. My point was (and is) that the enormity of the deprivations imposed on Japanese Americans can be explained only by reference to racism. A narrowly and carefully tailored program against selected Japanese Americans that placed the least burdensome impositions that would have been effective to achieve the goal of protecting national security would not have been explicable solely by reference to racism; it would have been explicable largely (if not entirely) by reference to national security. A program of forcing an undifferentiated mass of 70,000 U.S. citizens, defined only by their ancestry, into tarpaper shacks for three-plus years of detention behind barbed wire in high desert wastelands, on the other hand, is explicable only by reference to racism.

Second, Sparkey's factual assertions about the clannishness and insularity of the average American citizen of Japanese ancestry in 1941 are false. Here's what he wrote:
The odds are just as good that Miss Yamashita didn't even go to school with Jimmy or Teddy, but to an all-Japanese High School funded, staffed, and propagandized with Yen from Tokyo, and there was a 1 in 5 chance of her being educated in Japan. Encouraged by Tokyo, the Japanese community in the United States was insular, keeping to their own language, separate schools (or additional schools at the end of the regular school day); forming and joining a wide and varied array of clubs and associations (ranging from the notoriously pro-fascist Silver Shirt Society to the relatively benign Japanese American League); patronizing their own newspapers, stores, and businesses.
Sparkey, there were no all-Japanese high schools funded by Tokyo along the West Coast. The Nisei (American citizens of Japanese ancestry) went to the public high schools in their communities, alongside all of the other American kids in their communities of various races and ethnicities. What I think you are referring to was the after-school programs in Japanese language and culture that many Nisei attended--at which (as you would expect with kids) most Nisei learned very little Japanese language and very little Japanese culture, in just the same way as my kids learn very little Hebrew and very little about Judaism at the after-school Hebrew School program I send them to. (Does this make me insular and suspicious too, by the way?) Sparkey really ought to go meet some Nisei--as I did in order to write my book--before speaking about them. Their real lives bear little relationship to the clannish, insular ones that Sparkey describes. The "1 in 5" chance of being educated in Japan to which Sparkey refers is the highest estimate I've seen of young male Nisei educated in Japan; the rate among females was much lower. And Sparkey does not note that a significant percentage--nobody has any good numbers on this--of those "educated in Japan" actually received just a couple of years' education in Japan, often as young children. The assertions about the Nisei patronizing only "their own newspapers, stores, and businesses" are totally unsupported and unsupportable. (And I think Sparkey meant the "Japanese American Citizens League," not the Japanese American League. And to call the JACL "relatively benign" is incredible; this was an organization that fell all over itself to ingratiate itself with the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor, to the point of assisting the government in evacuating Japanese Americans, fighting community efforts at resisting the program of internment, surreptitiously cooperating with the FBI in the prosecution of people who resisted the internment, and urging internees to volunteer for the U.S. army. Relatively benign?!?

Third, Sparkey again takes me to task for "placing [racist] thoughts into the heads of people long dead." Race, he continues to argue, is a national concern today, but it wasn't back then. And so, he says, what I'm arguing is that "the enlightened and noble must recast the motivations of past generations with an entirely new paradigm along lines very different from those which they used to discuss it amongst themselves, and we must consider it more accurate." For Sparkey, the key to accurately perceiving "the real motivations" of "[his] parents' generation" is their words.

Here, I'm nearly at a loss for words. General John DeWitt justified the program of eviction and incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry on the basis that "The Japanese race is an enemy race . . . and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil have become 'Americanized,' . . . the racial strains are undiluted." OK, Sparkey, I'll judge DeWitt's motivations by his words, as you'd have me do. How does one wring the racism from the words? Don't know about you, Sparkey, but it's way too big a task for me.

Here's an analogy to chew on: For much of the nation's history, some states had laws that made it illegal for people of different races to intermarry. (Sometimes, the laws just made it illegal for whites and non-whites to marry; non-whites could marry across racial lines without violating the law--and this made the white supremacist motivation of the laws that much clearer.) But some states' laws were genuinely "neutral": no intermarriage across any racial lines was permitted. The stated reason for these laws were racial purity: in the words of one Virginia court, "both sacred and secular history teach that nations and races have better advanced in human progress when they cultivated their own distinctive characteristics and culture and developed their own peculiar genius." In other words, the state claimed that it wanted to keep whites white, blacks black, Chinese people Chinese, and so on.

That's what legislators said they were doing when they passed miscegenation laws.

Do you believe them?

If you are of a mind to do so, why not write a letter to your congressman urging him or her to support Rep. Mike Honda's request that the House leadership condemn Howard Coble's comments supporting the Japanese American internment and persuade him to resign as chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Here's a sample letter, courtesy of Steve Ross at The Mountaintop.

Anyone who thinks that Representative Howard Coble's views about the balance between national security and individual liberty don't really matter much should think about where he is for the next couple of days (in his capacity as chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security: he's in Germany for a roundtable with German government and business leaders that "is expected to focus on the effects of terrorism on the world economy and how government and industry can work together to address security risks without imposing costly regulations that could further disrupt an already fragile global economy." Hmmm... What, I wonder, are today's "security risks?" And what counts as a "costly" regulation?

Do we really think a man who views the Japanese American internment as justified ought to be representing us at such a roundtable?

Calls for Howard Coble's resignation as chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security continue to pile up.

Japanese Americans are continuing to try to get Howard Coble's attention. But thus far, Coble has declined to meet with Japanese American congressmen who asked for a meeting, and has not responded to any of the voluminous correspondence he has gotten protesting his comments of two weeks ago supporting the Japanese American internment. Neither did he ever respond to my letter explaining why he was wrong when he said that Japanese Americans were placed in camps for their own protection.

Perhaps it's noteworthy that Alan Nakanishi, the California state legislator quoted in the article, is the first Republican to publicly condemn Coble's comments.

Today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance. So remember: here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

More on racial transformation in the 1940s. The very knowledgeable Ed Hasbrouck sent me a note today reminding me that the World War II era saw not just first steps toward the integration of the U.S. military, as I blogged earlier today, but also the end of officially mandated racial segregation of the federal prisons. Thanks, Ed.

Could the Coble story finally be "catching"--as it should have two weeks ago? I was surfing the web and happened upon none other than Bill Walton criticizing Howard Coble's support of the Japanese American internment--on ESPN.

The NAACP today ended its 94th annual meeting with a call for the resignation of Howard Coble from the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Annie Nakao of the San Francisco Chronicle writes today of the parallels between the Japanese American internment and today. As I've said here before, I think those parallels can sometimes be too easily and unthinkingly overstated. But on February 19, it's a great thing to think about nonetheless.

Ed Cone's got the local angle of the Coble story covered, and he notes today that the Greensboro News-Record is carrying several letters to the editor on the subject. One of the letters urges Guilford College to uninvite Representative Howard Coble as their commencement speaker. I think that's a bad and disrespectful idea.

A much better idea would be for the college to accompany Coble's appearance with some good teaching and learning about the Japanese American internment and its lessons for today's national security/civil liberties debates.

Gee, I can even think of a speaker right here in North Carolina who could be persuaded to give a talk on the subject.

CPO Sparkey over at Sgt. Stryker has posted two lengthy responses to my suggestions on this site that racism was at the core of the government’s wartime decision to force 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (70,000 of them U.S. citizens) into concentration camps and keep them there between 1942 and 1945.

I’ll respond directly to Sparkey about some of my smaller disagreements with his facts, and focus here just on the bigger picture. (If you’re looking for an aggressive point-by-point refutation of Sparkey, check out David Neiwert’s blog.)

Sparkey’s recent posts are illuminating. Gone are his earlier claims that specific government actors built an eviction and internment program on specific top-secret decyphered cables. (I knew he’d have to drop this assertion, because virtually none of the people—in or out of government—who actually lobbied for, planned, and implemented the program actually had access to the cables.) Instead, what Sparkey presents are two related claims: (1) Everybody living in the USA in 1941 and 1942—not just the top executive officials with access to the MAGIC cables—justifiably and correctly saw American citizens of Japanese ancestry as a national security risk. (2) It is anachronistic to attribute racism to the architects of the government’s program, because race was not an issue at the forefront of anybody’s mind in 1941 and 1942 (as it is today).

(Here’s the concluding paragraph of Sparkey’s post, just so you get the flavor of it:

To suggest that racism was at the heart of the FDR's exclusion order, one must assume that the people of the time thought and felt about issues the same way we do. One must further believe that National Leaders were willing to marginalize National Policy to pursue a racist agenda. What I have attempted to do in this space is to illustrate how that is not the case, that a reading of the times shows people were concerned, very concerned, for our nations safety. In fact, I believe that the record shows that for every charge of "racism" there is a more plausible explanation for people's actions. It may be possible to argue that in the wake of Pearl Harbor the national leadership overreacted and made our Japanese population scapegoats, but I don't believe such an argument can stand on its own. Additionally, I do feel that the charge of racism is scurrilous and can only be supported by placing thoughts into the heads of those long since dead with nothing but circumstance to support it; and that is truly indefensible.)

Sparkey’s first claim—that the internment was about “the nation’s safety” rather than racism—is based on a simple fallacy: it need not be an either/or proposition. No scholar whose work I know contends that the Japanese American internment was just a trumped-up program of unadorned racial hatred for its own sake. (Even those in California who, at the time of Pearl Harbor, had spent years lobbying for restrictions on Japanese aliens and Japanese American citizens had economic, and not just racial, reasons for hating and envying the Japanese and wanting them out.) The claim is instead that a very real history of anti-Asian racism clouded and distorted people’s perceptions of the risks to our national security. People of Japanese ancestry just seemed scarier, more “inscrutable,” and more treacherous than people of German or Italian ancestry. You may have gone to high school with IreneYamashita, Jimmy Wagner, and Teddy DiCurcio—but at the end of the day it was Irene you just couldn’t trust. That is a racism-tinged assessment of national security. Isn’t it, Sparkey? The point here is not that people were wrong to be afraid of invasion, subversion, and all manner of terrifying risks that war poses. It’s that they were dreadfully wrong—for racial reasons—in deeming citizens of Japanese ancestry to be so much more threatening than other citizens, and in visiting on them a program that was so ludicrously overinclusive and so ludicrously burdensome, even in relation to their actual security concerns.

Sparkey’s second claim—that attention to racism is a late-twentieth-century concern, and that nobody “back then” really attended much to racial matters when they were formulating policy—is also false. Sparkey depicts the WWII era as being removed by two long decades from the time in American history when race moved to the forefront of the American mind. Not so. Look at it this way: The Supreme Court decided the Korematsu case in the fall of 1944. The plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education decided to sue for the integration of the Topeka public schools six years later—in the fall of 1950. The Supreme Court decided Brown just ten years after Korematsu. And by the time the plaintiffs sued in Brown, the Supreme Court had already moved much of the way toward Brown by striking down racial segregation in a state’s Graduate School of Education (McLaurin (1950)) and in a state’s law school (Sweatt v. Painter (1950), Sipuel v. Board of Regents (1948), and Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938)). The Court had also struck down racially restrictive covenants that kept black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods (Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)).

And this is just the judicial process I’m describing. At other levels and in other areas of American society—including the military—the decades from 1930 to 1960 were times of significant attention to, and movement on, matters of race. Black leaders lobbied intensely during World War II for the integration of the military, and with some success: military recreational facilities were desegregated in 1943, and military buses followed in 1944. Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. military in 1948, and these efforts really began to take hold during the Korean War. It’s interesting to note that when the military was thinking about letting Japanese Americans back into the army after Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans (and some within the military) lobbied hard for integrated service. (They lost, by the way, which is why the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was an all-Japanese American unit.) When doing the research for my book, I found in the National Archives a wonderful memo from Provost Marshall General Allen W. Gullion in which he argued against integrating Japanese Americans into the service. His reason? Integrating Japanese Americans might lead to (horrors!) integrating black people: “In view of the fact that the colored people and their friends have, since the beginning of this war, been increasingly bitter in their protests against segregation of colored people,” Gullion argued, “no one short of the Commander-in-Chief should order the general assignment of Japanese-Americans with its resulting emphasis on colored segregation.” (memorandum, November 1943, National Archives Record Group 165, Entry 43, Box 445, Decimal 291.2, Japanese, 1 June 42 – 31 Dec. 43.)

So of course, Sparkey, race today plays an open role in policy debates and in public discussion and in popular culture in ways that were either very new or not yet existent in the early 1940s. But it is just wrong to say that racial issues were just “on a slow simmer” (Sparkey’s words) at that time, and that race did not play an important—and overt—role in public discussion and debate.

But there’s a larger point here too. The fact that people didn’t talk about race back then the way we do now doesn’t mean that people didn’t act on the basis of race back then. (Indeed, something close to the opposite is true: a big part of the reason there is less race-based government action today than there was sixty years ago is that we have been talking about race for several decades and exposing its corrosive presence throughout American society.) Sparkey seems to want us to think that because people back then understood themselves to be worrying and thinking about national security and not race, we have to understand them that way too and take them at their word. I genuinely believe that most supporters of the Japanese American internment believed they were really just worried about their security. But I also genuinely believe that those people were influenced by racist views of Asian Americans in ways that most probably were not even aware of.

This, by the way, is no indictment of the World War II generation. I’m sure that we today are blind to some of our own motivations, too, and to some of the unjust consequences of what we genuinely believe to be good policy choices. And if the world changes in a way that exposes our blindnesses and our shortcomings to my children or grandchildren, I hope they’ll have the courage to name them for what they are, and not to fear that by doing so they are somehow stabbing me in the back. I call that progress, not betrayal.

Tomorrow, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance--the 61st anniversary of FDR's signing Executive Order 9066, which gave the military carte blanche (sort of--see below) to evict Japanese Americans from their homes and place them in camps.

What better day for Howard Coble to acknowledge the error of his defense of the Japanese American internment?

Why am I not holding my breath?

(I said "sort of" above, because it turned out that the military only thought that 9066 gave them carte blanche. As it turned out, the Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Endo in 1944 that 9066 did not give the military the authority to do what it ultimately did--incarcerate loyal American citizens indefinitely.)

Here's a great story from the Denver Post about how Rep. Howard Coble's comments are playing in Colorado, the site of the Granada Relocation Center (also called "Amache") for Japanese Americans during World War II. It's where Congressman Mike Honda, who's still screaming about Coble's comments, spent some of his childhood.

Bravo to Congressman Mike Honda for continuing to try to get somebody--anybody--in a position of power to pay attention to Howard Coble's dangerous comments about the Japanese American internment almost two weeks ago.

It is sad, though, that this task has now fallen on the shoulders of a single Congressman who did time behind barbed wire in one of the wartime camps that Coble maintains was set up for that Congressman's own protection.

Where is the Congressional Black Caucus on this issue? If a congressman had gone on record as supporting racially segregated education--or, to make the analogy to Coble's comments slightly more precise--as saying that segregation is wrong today but was understandable and defensible back in the 1940s--there'd (appropriately) be no end to the outrage from the Caucus. Why the silence as to Japanese Americans?

Where is Tom Lantos on this issue? He could presumably say something quite meaningful about what it's like to lock up a people on the basis of irrational fears and prejudices. And where are the other Jewish congressmen, many of whose recent family histories undoubtedly include stories of wartime victimization on account of nothing more than their religion?

Maybe a Jewish congressman might note that eighty years before a U.S. Army general, John DeWitt, evicted Japanese Americans from their homes in the Western Defense Command, an earlier U.S. Army general by the name of Ulysses S. Grant evicted all of the Jews from their homes in the military Department of the Tennessee? (More on this fascinating story later...)

Where are the members of the Congressional Native American Caucus and Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell? Surely the parallels between a "relocation center" for Japanese Americans and a "reservation" for Native Americans are not lost on them. Why the silence? (I'm not saying they're the same--just that there are some important similarities that you'd think somebody might pay attention to.)

Mike Honda must be feeling pretty lonely.

In today's Sacramento Bee, a columnist suggests that Howard Coble could use a vacation, and suggests a visit to Manzanar. I think such a field trip for the entire U.S. Congress is in order.

"Coble case shows power of weblogs as watchdogs," writes Ed Cone in his weekly column at the Greensboro, NC News-Record. The piece focuses on my efforts of the last 10 days to set Howard Coble straight on the story of the internment, but also nicely illustrates a larger point about how blogs are changing the face of journalism, changing the direction that stories can take, and (especially) changing the speed at which it all happens.

A couple of excerpts:

As chairman of the House subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, Coble’s views on locking people up are of particular interest these days. During a radio call-in show on WKZL, Coble said he did not think Americans of Arab descent should be interned due to current events, but his endorsement of the past use of ethnicity-based internment was more than a little spooky.

Coble justified his stance in part by ascribing some humanitarian motives to the practice of confining American citizens to camps ringed with barbed wire. In subsequent days this became his defensive position—no apology was forthcoming because he was sure that concern for the safety of Japanese-Americans was a key element in the decision to lock them up.

There it might have ended, but for the efforts of a Chapel Hill law professor named Eric Muller, who used his weblog (isthatlegal.blogspot.com) to demolish Coble’s version of history with prosecutorial efficiency. Just Coble’s luck: Muller had written a book called Free to Die for Their Country about the internment era, and he quickly posted original documents and detailed analysis of the internment program that clearly refuted the for-their-own-good argument.

By early last week, Coble was backing away from his earlier statements. On Monday he said that internment had been wrong, although he did not admit that his facts on the motives for internment were incorrect, or respond to a request by three Asian-American congressmen for a meeting. Muller doesn’t get all the credit, but his work was clearly a crucial element in the coverage and understanding of Coble’s remarks.

* * *

Whatever its political fallout, the Coble affair highlights a unique power of weblogs: the ability for people with specific expertise to bring that expertise to bear quickly and in depth when circumstances push their chosen subject into the limelight.

Agreed, Ed.

Coble stonewall. Representative Howard Coble obviously decided simply to keep his head down after voicing his support for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, assuming that the story wouldn't have much lasting power. Sadly, his strategy seems to be working. Mike Honda, a California congressman of Japanese ancestry, continues to call for action, but not a peep has been heard from the Republican leadership since the story broke ten days ago. Even the Democratic leadership seems to have moved on--Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle weighed in early, and then dropped the story.

Writing in today's Raleigh News & Observer, Rob Christensen notes that "[i]f there were more people of ... Japanese ... descent in [Coble's] increasingly homogeneous district[ ], you can bet ... Coble ... would be more careful." But Christensen sees the issue as one of mere politeness: "What we are really talking about," he says, "are old notions of common courtesy, manners and thinking before speaking." But that's just the problem: we're not just talking about being "careful" or "polite," or about "thinking before speaking." Howard Coble did think about the Japanese American internment before he spoke ten days ago. He thought and spoke about the internment at length back in 1988 when he voted against the federal bill to apologize to the internees and award them a token redress payment. The problem is not that he was impolite, but that he is deeply wrong about how the nation balanced national security and the rights of an ethnic minority group 60 years ago. That matters tremendously today--not because he has hurt the feelings of Japanese Americans (which of course he has) but because he's in a position to have an important say about the balance of security and freedom today.

I faxed Howard Coble a long letter more than a week ago detailing the error in his understanding of the internment. He did not respond.

No Blood for Tourism. Assuring his listeners that he understands that "war is not a good thing," the Speaker of the Wyoming House of Representatives yesterday outlined at a news conference how a war will help Wyoming's economy. The Casper Star-Tribune quotes him as saying that "Wyoming tourism may benefit because people want to travel within the United States and Wyoming is a safe place." Not only that, but "the structure of Wyoming's revenues are such that a war with Iraq is likely to spike energy prices, and have a positive effect on our revenue flows."

Wyoming native son Dick Cheney, secluded at his Jackson Hole home, was unavailable for comment.

Truth, Reconciliation, and the American Way (continued)--The Heart Mountain example. The Heart Mountain Relocation Center was one of the War Relocation Authority's ten wartime concentration camps (as they were then called) for Japanese Americans during World War II. It sits between the towns of Cody, Wyoming, and Powell, Wyoming, about an hour from the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. During its existence from 1942 to 1945, it was Wyoming's third largest city.

A couple of years ago, the (then) governor of the State of Wyoming and the mayor of Powell jointly authored a letter that was billed as an "apology" to the surviving internees. Here's what the letter said:

Dear Former Heart Mountain Camp Residents and Families:

We wish to acknowledge the difficulties and hardships faced by internees and the lack of consideration given to those at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.

In viewing the historical records from 1943 and 1944, we are all saddened to see the negative sentiments and restrictions that elected officials imposed during that time. Those officials felt compelled to adopt and enforce regulations on the internees housed at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center between Powell and Cody.

We do not judge and cannot rectify those official decisions and actions that took place in the 40's knowing that we cannot change history, but we can learn from the past.

Today our citizens understand more clearly that each one of us is entitled to the rights of freedom, equality, and justice, regardless of ancestry. It is our hope and prayer that a similar situation is never repeated, and that we can work together to see that it does not happen again.

Some apology, huh? Exactly who did wrong? How? Why?

Owning up to the mistakes of the past sure is tough.

I wrote an article explaining just how Wyoming's wartime public officials contributed to the suffering of the internees at Heart Mountain. You can read it here if you're interested. The feedback I got from people in Wyoming was that the article mostly pissed people off. But it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that if you're going to apologize for something, you really ought to say clearly what you're apologizing for. That's how you keep it from happening again.

Incidentally, a fine organization called the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is currently building a memorial and museum on the site of the camp. (I'm on its board of directors.) Because of its proximity to Yellowstone and Cody's extraordinary Buffalo Bill Historical Center, the Heart Mountain museum will eventually attract lots of summertime visitors. Think about contributing to the Foundation, and helping us build an outstanding civil rights museum.

For those of you who just haven't been able to get quite enough of my recent yappings about Rep. Howard Coble, you can listen here to my commentary on the subject on last night's edition of the National Public Radio show "Pacific Time." The story on the same page by reporter Sam Chu Lin is also very much worth a listen.

Truth, Reconciliation, and the American Way. Ed Cone published a great piece the other day in the Greensboro, NC News-Record, about the little-known story of five 1979 murders on the streets of Greensboro by Klansmen and Neo-Nazis. He writes about "shushers"--natives who cannot bring themselves to look into the ugly moments of their hometown's past. Ed, it seems, was himself a shusher about these events until their twentieth anniversary, when his conscience got the better of him. I hope Ed will update us on the progress that the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project makes--and on the obstacles that some in the community will undoubtedly place in its path.

Greensboro might look to the coastal city of Wilmington, NC, as something of an example--of both the possibilities, and the difficulties, of inquiry into the sins of the past. In 1898, a cabal of white businessmen and community leaders launched a violent attack on the integrationist Republican city government of Wilmington. The coup d'etat succeeded. Wilmington's sizable black middle class and its black political and business leaders were terrorized into submission or flight. Now, more than one hundred years later, a foundation is trying to create a museum to tell the story. But, as you might expect, some in Wilmington just don't want to look back at what they call the "unpleasantness" that took place in 1898.

Most telling, I think, is the memorial foundation's "philosophy," which they advertise with a bright red banner on their homepage: "No one living in Wilmington today was a participant in the events of 1898. Consequently, none among us bears any personal responsibility for what happened." These events took place one hundred and five years ago. Anyone who was old enough to bear any responsibility for anything that happened in Wilmington in 1898 has been dead for more than fifty years. And still, those who wish to tell the story have to reassure the community that they're not pointing a finger at anyone.

I've tried to do some of my own telling of an ugly local history--the responsibility of Wyoming's elected officials for the day-to-day sufferings of the Japanese American internees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center from 1942 to 1945--and I've encountered some of the same resistance. If I have a chance, I'll post a bit more about this later today.

TalkLeft had a half hour with Gary Hart today, and quizzed him about the passage of his recent speech that some are construing as anti-semitic. Hart says he intended nothing anti-semitic, and indeed nothing selectively about Jews at all. TalkLeft was persuaded: "His comment," says TalkLeft, "applies equally to Cuban, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Greek and Turkish-American citizens. He was talking about all Americans, wherever we come from."

I'm persuaded too, although if I had Gary Hart's ear I'd urge him to reflect on whether a suggestion of divided loyalties might not have a different connotation--even if unintended--for, say, Hungarian Americans than for, say, Jewish Americans.

Teal Sunglasses has the Coble issue just right, I think.

The blogsphere is buzzing with debate about whether the last phrase from the following passage from a recent speech by Gary Hart is veiled antisemitism: "We must not let our role in the world be dictated by ideologues with their special biases and agendas, by militarists who long for the clarity of Cold War confrontation, by think-tank theorists who grind their academic axes, or by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests."

If this is, in fact, a reference to Jews, then I don't like to hear a non-Jew saying it. But I have to admit that for me, at least, the question of how I integrate my identity as an American and my identity as a Jew is complicated. (Of course, for me just about everything about seems complicated at one time or another, so maybe that's not saying much.) Eugene Volokh moots the question(s) in characteristically thoughtful fashion over at the Volokh Conspiracy. I (an American Jew) identify as an American, to be sure, in a very deep and powerful way--all the moreso because this country provided a safe haven for my father and his parents when they belatedly fled Nazi Germany. I feel entirely assimilated. But you know what? If you had asked my grandfather, a decorated WWI veteran (for Germany, of course), whether he identified as German and felt entirely assimilated in, say, 1931 when my father was born, he would have said "yes" with the same commitment I feel. Boy, did he turn out to be wrong. So sometimes, when I find myself thinking of myself as a completely and securely assimilated American Jew, a little voice in my head asks me how, in the space of just a single generation, I could have forgotten not just at least thousand years of Jewish history, but my own grandfather's experience. Tough stuff.

Still, I wonder: am I alone in thinking it very unlikely that Gary Hart was referring to Jews? Hart spoke of loyalties to people's "original homelands." Was he, perhaps, referring just to naturalized citizens, or perhaps their American-born children? If instead he was actually speaking of all Americans (excluding, presumably, Native Americans, for whom this continent is their "original homeland"), then Jews are, in a basic sense, the most (not least) attenuated from their "original homeland." I do not view the modern State of Israel as my "original homeland." To the extent that the typical American Jew has a bond with the modern State of Israel, it is, I think, primarily because of what the country represents (about, among other things, Jewish survival), and not because of an intuitive sense that that place and culture are where his people "came from." Certainly not in the same way one might hear, say, an Italian American or a Greek American talk about what life is/was like in the "old country."

By the way, a propos what I just posted, I don't think it's a fair shot to call Coble "the enemy within." As I've said before, I've heard from people who know him that Coble's a thoroughly decent man and a very hardworking legislator. I think he's very wrong about the internment, but I don't see anything like malevolence here.

Still, the image and the balloon captions did make me smile.

It's for your own protection, sir. From modelminority.com.

Coble in Radioland. I've been asked to do a brief commentary about Howard Coble's comments of last week on the syndicated NPR show Pacific Time, which airs on more than 40 stations around the country. The commentary will air tomorrow, Thursday, February 13.

Orcinus flatters me by calling this site Information Central on "l'affaire Coble," but if I am the newscaster, he is the color commentator. His stuff is great. Read him.

Check out my op-ed on Rep. Howard Coble's remarks about the Japanese American internment in today's Raleigh, NC News & Observer.

Is it just me, or do these comments on federal policy by local governments seem a little, well, silly? [Thanks to monkeytime for bringing this one to my attention.] What's next? "Oak Bluffs City Council Seeks Input on Shuttle Redesign"?

Outside Coble's district, the reaction is not subsiding. Perhaps Representative Coble does not realize the extent to which his comments about the Japanese American internment have galvanized Asian Americans. Petitions are circulating. The presses are humming. Can it really be that none of Coble's West Coast colleagues see the significance of the issue? The silence of the Republican leadership has been deafening. And disturbing.

I just finished giving one of my talks up here at Western New England College School of Law--a pretty little New England campus if ever there was one--and was told, during the Q and A that followed, a really interesting story. A person here told me that years ago she worked for the US Department of Agriculture, screening new arrivals at airports for foods that were not permitted to be brought into the country. She related that in her training, she was advised to ask people arriving from specific countries (or regions of the world) whether they had specific forbidden foods. In other words, it was not effective to ask, simply, "Do you have any forbidden foods?" because people would invariably (and innocently) say "no." But if you said, "Do you have pepper sauce?" people would say "yes" and surrender it. So there were certain foods that she'd ask, say, Jamaican arrivals about, and others that she'd ask, say, Danish arrivals about. There was no point in asking a Swede whether he had Jamaican pepper sauce, so she didn't.

Is this impermissible racial (or national-origin-based) profiling?

How not to handle a controversy of your own creation. I posted here last night that Representative Howard Coble was moving toward saying what he needs to say in order to repair the damage he's done to the work of his Homeland Security subcommittee: "I was wrong about the Japanese American internment. It was not for the protection of Japanese Americans, and it was a racist overreaction to any conceivable threat the nation faced in 1942."

This morning, though, we have confirmation that Representative Coble did not see fit to meet with Representatives Mike Honda, D-CA, Robert Matsui, D-CA, and David Wu, D-OR, after they'd asked him by letter for a meeting last week.

This is not collegial. This is insulting. But it's also very foolish. Representative Coble's attention may be focused on his home district in North Carolina, where (it seems) he is getting a lot of support for his comments of last week. Perhaps he does not realize how this story is playing in parts of the country where Asian Americans are more of a significant bloc. If he doesn't, he should. Or maybe one of his Republican colleagues on the West Coast ought to clue him in.

I heard a story this evening--unconfirmed at this point, though I'm trying--that Howard Coble declined to meet with the three Asian American members of the House (Wu, Matsui, and Honda) who had requested a meeting with him to discuss his comments of last week. If this is true, it strikes me as an extraordinarily insensitive move on Coble's part.

Newsday is reporting that Howard Coble "said Monday the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was wrong and should not be repeated." The article also relates that "Coble said he was trying to show that Roosevelt made a decision that he believed was in the best interest of national security, based on the circumstances at the time and the information available." "Today we can certainly look back and see the damage that was caused because of this decision," Coble said. "We all now know that this was in fact the wrong decision and an action that should never be repeated."

This is a very positive development. One gets the sense that he is slowly coming around to where he should have been last Wednesday morning: confessing that his understanding of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was erroneous.

He has not apologized for what he said. He's uttered the usual "I regret that what I said offended people" sort of thing that we've come to expect from politicians. But he has also not said something that I think is more important than "I'm sorry"--namely, "I was wrong."

Remember: he volunteered last Tuesday morning on the radio that he supported FDR's action. Now, six days later, he says that the decision to incarcerate Japanese Americans was "the wrong decision and an action that should never be repeated." I'm left wondering why six days ago he "supported" something that he actually views as a "wrong decision." What I want to know, and I think we all should want to know, is that Howard Coble--chair of the homeland security subcommittee--knows both that he was wrong and why he was wrong. A clear statement of the truth about the internment would go a long way toward assuring us that he might know a human rights violation if it hits him in the face, and will do his best to stop it. That's what we want him to be doing as subcommittee chair.

I'm a bit troubled, on the other hand, by what seems to be a continuing, or even possibly an escalating, demand from some in the Japanese American and Arab American communities for an apology (as opposed to a confession of error). Yes, Coble's comments opened old wounds. He should be sorry for doing that. But the most important thing right now, I think, should not be the (understandably) hurt feelings of Japanese Americans. It should be the correction of a powerful person's dangerously mistaken views. Digging in and demanding a heartfelt "I'm sorry" is, I think, likely to drive Coble away from where he seems to be going, and, perhaps more importantly, is likely to play in the press as a bit petulant and hypersensitive.

I'd counsel people to keep the focus on the error of Coble's views, not their hurfulness.

Blogging from an airport cybercafe while waiting for a plane. Is this what it feels like to be Glenn Reynolds?

There's some good Coble coverage over at The Mountaintop. I don't agree with the idea that he should give up his seat in the House over a comment like this. That's extreme, isn't it? I do think he ought to be relieved of the Chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, because I find it hard to believe that a guy with his views on the internment of Japanese Americans is going to strike an even tolerable balance between national security and personal freedom. But some of my students here at the University of North Carolian are from Coble's district out in Greensboro, NC, and they tell me he has been a good and able representative of the district for many years, well liked by his constituents. And a nice guy too, they tell me.

I'm off to Massachussetts this afternoon, to deliver the Clayson Lecture at Western New England College School of Law. Back Wednesday morning. I'll do what I can to blog on Coblegate from up north.

Military necessity? For her own protection? You decide.

Orcinus, too, is explaining the irrelevance of the MAGIC cables to the actual matter at hand.

CPO Sparkeyhas been very critical of my posts on the Coble matter. He highlights certain MAGIC decrypts that suggest the participation of people of Japanese ancestry in the USA in subversive activities, and from these, concludes that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was in fact militarily necessary, and not based in racism.

My concern--and, as Sparkey concedes, not his--is the perspective on the internment of Howard Coble, our new Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Sparkey does not undertake to defend Coble, as Coble's view is indefensible.

But in any event, let us suppose that someone brought these particular intercepts to FDR's attention during the few minutes that we believe he actually devoted to the issue of evicting Japanese Americans from their homes before signing Executive Order 9066. (This, to my knowledge, has not in fact been proven, although I admit I'm not an expert here. Indeed, CPO Sparkey nowhere says which people in charge of the formulation and development of the plan of eviction and incarceration actually had access to, and relied on, the MAGIC intercepts. If this is known, I'd be curious to learn more about it.) What would that demonstrate? It would demonstrate that the Japanese were saying to each other that they had some unidentified number of people working for them within the USA. These moles would have been, I guess, a bit like the 6 American citizens of Arab ancestry up near Buffalo, NY, who went for training at an al Qaeda camp and met Osama bin Laden.

I raise the Buffalo Boys for a reason: who could plausibly argue for the wholesale eviction and multi-year detention of every man, woman, and child of Arab ancestry in the USA--citizens and aliens alike--on the basis of these guys up in Buffalo?

Most of the people involved in arguing for, planning, and executing the government's plans for Japanese Americans did not have access to the MAGIC intercepts. Why did they propose the program? FDR and his cabinet officials had almost no hand in the actual devising and administration of the eviction, the assembly centers, and the relocation centers. The internment was the creature of bureaucrats, not cabinet officials. Why were those people acting as they did? We know it wasn't the MAGIC intercepts. So what was it?

The only reason that Japanese Americans ended up behind barbed wire and under armed guard was that the governors of the Mountain West refused to consent to the relocation of Japanese Americans within their borders unless they were held under armed guard. These western governors didn't have the MAGIC intercepts, I assume. Why did they take the position they did?

Not long after the Battle of Midway, the ability of the Japanese military to undertake any sort of action in or against the continental United States disappeared. But this was the summer of 1942. Not a single person had been moved from a temporary assembly center to a permanent relocation center at that point. Why were 120,000 people put on trains and shipped inland after the military threat began to diminish? Why were they kept out of the zone of exclusion along the Coast for three years, until it became clear that the Supreme Court was going to force the government to let them back in? All because of the MAGIC intercepts?

How, CPO Sparkey, do you account for and justify the entirety of the government's program?

Read the archives of this blog, or my book, and you'll see that I have never been much taken by the politically correct notion that it was entirely irrational to fear disloyalty among some Japanese aliens and even some Japanese American citizens. What I have maintained is that the scope of the government's program, the enormity of its deprivations--that is, the essence of the tragedy of the Japanese American internment--can be explained only by reference to racism.

In other words, it is entirely possible that, in early February of 1942, FDR had a valid reason to worry about the presence in the USA of some disloyal people of Japanese ancestry. But that fact doesn't even begin to explain the policy that the administration chose to implement. That's what Coble was defending the other day. And it was indefensible.

Three cheers for Orcinus for superb and especially deep coverage of matters relating to Coblegate.

A guide to the DeWitt memorandum.

Note, first, that the Western Defense Command's purposes are (1) to defend the West Coast against attack from without, and (2) to protect important installations within the Command against attacks from within. Protection of any civilian within the Command was just not the military's bailiwick; that was the job of civilian law enforcement authorities. And as we know from the Biddle memorandum I posted yesterday (pages 1 and 2), the Justice Department wanted no parts of the military's plan, and thought the plan illegal as to American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

The memo recites the concerns that the eviction and incarceration plan is designed to address: the risk of attack, and the risk of sabotage. And, on the latter point, the memo sees danger--danger from the simple fact of "racial affinities" of American citizens for their parents' country of origin. "The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.

Of course, DeWitt did have the slight problem that in the two months since Pearl Harbor, no Japanese American had been accused of any act of subversion. But, he "reasons" (and I use that term loosely), "[t]he very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken."

From this Orwellian proposition, DeWitt moves on to a lengthy overview of the Japanese alien and Japanese American citizen populations of Washington, Oregon, and California, and then a single sentence noting "large numbers of Italians and Germans, foreign and native born, among whom are many individuals who constitute an actual or potential menace to the safety of the nation." (Of course, the only group to be extirpated from the region en masse would be those of Japanese ancestry.)

DeWitt then recommends action. And the central action he recommends is "[t]hat the Secretary of War procure from the President direction and authority to designate military areas in the combat zone of the Western Theater of Operations ..., from which, in his discretion, he may exclude all Japanese, all alien enemies, and all other persons suspected for any reason by the administering military authorities of being actual or potential saboteurs, espionage agents, or fifth columnists."

"People at risk of vigilante violence" did not make DeWitt's list. Surprise, surprise.

There is but a single mention of anything having to do with the protection of Japanese Americans in the whole document, and it comes at the very end, at the bottom of page 6. DeWitt here asks that military officials and state and local civilian officials try to protect the property that the displaced thousands would be forced to leave behind. Incidentally, neither military nor civilian authorities ever really got around to this part the proposal, and most of the evicted people ended up selling their property for pennies on the dollar, trying to store it privately (and, typically, discovering it ransacked upon their eventual return), or just abandoning it.

I submit that it is impossible to read this chilling memorandum and maintain, as Representative Coble did, that the Japanese American internment had anything to do with protecting the safety of Japanese Americans.

If you agree, drop Representative Coble a line at howard.coble@mail.house.gov , or call him at 202.225.3065. Tell him you've read the original documents here on IsThatLegal, and you think he needs to retract his comments he made last Tuesday (and reiterated later in the week). Remind him that he said he'd apologize if he was proven wrong. Ask for the apology.

The definitive memorandum.

Tonight I am posting, in its entirety, the key memorandum detailing the reasons on which the War Department based its decision to "evacuate" and incarcerate every man, woman, and child of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast, regardless of citizenship.

General John DeWitt, the commander of the Western Defense Command, sent this memorandum to Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, on February 13, 1942. It is the most concise extant summary of the reasoning behind the military's request for presidential authority. FDR signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942.

Here is page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, page 6, and page 7.

A bit later, after I put my kids to bed, I'll post a summary of the memo. But read it yourself. It's fasinating and disturbing reading. And it proves Howard Coble wrong about the Japanese American internment beyond the flicker of a doubt.

Coblegate update. I'll be posting an additional 1942 memorandum this evening that shows with painful clarity that protecting Japanese Americans was on nobody's mind at the time FDR approved Executive Order 9066.

Even the editiorial page of the High Point Enterprise (a newspaper in Coble's district) is saying today that "Coble ought to repudiate his endorsement of a mistaken policy."

The same editorial, however, says that Coble ought to keep the chairmanship of the Homeland Security subcommittee. "The uproar," says the Enterprise, has done more than his comments to harm the work of his subcommittee. It's time to return to business."

Ah, yes. Back to business. And what exactly is the business of this particular subcommittee? Homeland security, that's what it is. You know--overseeing Tom Ridge's new department, and making sure that (among other things) it strikes a sound balance between security and freedom during a time of crisis. And that's just why it is not time to get back to business, especially before Coble responds in any serious way to the outcry about his comments. This is not some petty academic dispute about a historical footnote. Since September 11, 2001, we have been struggling to preserve our safety while also preserving our freedoms and protecting the rights of the millions of good Americans of Arab ancestry and Muslim faith. Representative Coble’s dismissive comments about the largest-scale American human rights violation of the twentieth century bear directly on his commitment—and his ability—to avoid another one in the twenty-first.

Here's more proof. Today and tomorrow I am posting scanned versions of original contemporaneous documents that prove that protection of Japanese Americans was not among the reasons for their internment. First, here (page 1) and here (page 2), you'll find a memorandum dated February 12, 1942, from Attorney General Francis Biddle to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. By this time, Biddle has realized that his opposition to the removal of American citizens of Japanese ancestry has been unavailing, and he is washing his department's hands of responsibility for what is to come. "The question as to whether or not Japanese should be evacuated, whether citizens or not, necessarily involves a judgment based on military considerations," Biddle writes on page 1. "This, of course, is the responsibility of the army." And on page 2, Biddle adds "that the Department of Justice, and particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is not staffed to undertake any evacuation on a large scale -- larger, in fact, than has already been undertaken."

Protection of American citizens from vigilante violence is in no way the business of the military. That is a job for law enforcement. If protection of Japanese Americans had anything to do with what the administration was contemplating, Biddle and his Department of Justice would not have been pulling out of the whole enterprise on February 12 and turning it over to the army.

Tomorrow I'll post the multi-page memo that formed the basis of the military's final request to FDR for the authority to "evacuate" (a euphemism) all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. It's fascinating reading. And guess what? You won't find a mention of the safety of Japanese Americans anywhere in the document.

Roger Daniels, the man who just about singlehandedly created the field of Asian American history and now an emeritus professor at the University of Cincinnati, said the following of Executive Order 9066 in his book The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (1975):

Why did Roosevelt do it? No historian can ever answer, definitively, this kind of question, but every historian worth his salt must at least try. Nothing anyone can say in explanation, however, can expiate it; no doctrine of historical relativism can absolve Franklin Roosevelt of the responsibility for giving the army the right to treat American citizens of Japanese ancestry as it wished. But the student of history must also try to understand the forces of history that were at work. Roosevelt, as we have seen, harbored all sorts of racist prejudices against Asians, along with most Americans. In addition, February, 1942, was a particularly bad time for the United States. The Japanese offensive that had begun with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December continued. Imperial forces had landed on the island of Singapore on Febuary 8, on New Britain on February 9, and were advancing rapidly in Burma. Roosevelt was concerned, first, with winning the war, and second, with unity at home, so that he, unlike Wilson could win the peace with the advice and consent of the Senate. He could read the congressional signs well, and knew that cracking down on the Japanese Americans would be popular both on Capitol Hill and with the nation at large. And the last thing that he wanted was a rift with establishment Republicans like [Sec'y of War] Stimson and [Stimson's assistant] McCloy, despite urgings for restraint from a few of the staunchest New Dealers in his administration. So do what you think you have to do to win the war, he, in effect, told the civilian spokesmen for the military. And one can imagine him on the phone in the great Oval Office where so much of our history has been made, that leonine head lifting up and with the politician's charm and equivocation saying, "Be as reasonable as you can." Thus do great and good men do evil acts in the name of good.

Roger Daniels. Howard Coble. Pick your historian. Me, I'm going with Daniels.

Coblegate update. Hell no, he won't go.

It has been suggested to me that some original documents from around the time of the framing of Executive Order 9066 might be helpful in further proving that the protection of Japanese Americans was not a reason for their internment. I'm in the process of scanning a few, and I'll post them later today.

Coblegate update. Howard Coble says he was just "stating historical fact" last Tuesday morning when he volunteered that FDR interned Japanese Americans in order to protect them.

Read my letter, Representative Coble.

Ed Cone is on the Coble story too.

Coblegate update. Nancy Pelosi has weighed in on Coble's remarks. Good for her.

But this should not be a partisan issue.

Orcinus is refuting Coble brilliantly. Coble wanted proof; now he's got it in spades.

More wobble from Coble. Missy Branson, Rep. Howard Coble's spokesperson, continues to try to persuade us that her boss's comments about the Japanese American internment were harmless. She's quoted in the L.A. Times as saying that Coble "would not endorse the internment policy today, but he thought it was an appropriate decision at the time because American society was much less integrated and multicultural." "We were much less tolerant and understanding of other cultures," Branson continued. "The emotion that surrounded the bombing of Pearl Harbor was so intense, the possibility of harm coming to Japanese Americans was very strong as a result."

This explanation is so lame that it's hard to know where to start.

There were lots of hate crimes directed against Arabs and Muslims (and people thought to look like Arabs and Muslims) in this country in the weeks after September 11. Would the mass internment of Arabs and Muslims have been appropriate then? They would have been safer in camps, after all, than in their homes, their mosques, and, according to Rep. Sue Myrick, their convenience stores.

Coble says that the mass internment of Japanese Americans was "appropriate" at that time because America was less integrated and multicultural. OK. That must mean that other race-based rules would have been appropriate at that less integrated, less multicultural time too. So what is Representative Coble's position on, say, racially segregated schools? Were they "appropriate" in 1942 as well? How about racial segregation in the U.S. army? "Appropriate?" How about the laws forbidding people from Asian countries to naturalize as U.S. citizens? "Appropriate?" How about the categorical exclusion of women from serving on juries? "Appropriate?"

And what does Rep. Coble actually think of that less integrated, less multicultural era? Was it good that way?

I assume Rep. Coble would say today that there were serious injustices in that less integrated, less multicultural time. But then why did he vote against an apology for the internment fifteen years ago when Congress was passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988? Was there nothing for the government to apologize for?

It is high time to stop spinning the remarks and start retracting them.

The Greensboro News-Record (Howard Coble's hometown paper) has a great editorial on Coble and Myrick.

I've just faxed a lengthy letter to Congressman Coble's office with the proof of his error, and a request for the promised apology.

Rep. Howard Coble is quoted as saying the following: "I still stand by what I said ... that, in no small part, it (internment) was done to protect the Japanese-Americans themselves." And he said that "if it is proven to him that was not one of FDR's motivations, then he will apologize for that remark."
The internment of Japanese Americans was not "done to protect the Japanese Americans themselves," Representative Coble.
Here's what happened. Just after the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR asked Navy Secretary Frank Knox to investigate the possibility that Fifth Column work by people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii had contributed to the success of the Japanese sneak attack. Knox reported his conclusions to FDR by December 15, and on that day, said to reporters that he thought "the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception of Norway." J. Edgar Hoover immediately registered his strong disagreement with Knox's conclusions, and it turns out that Knox was wrong and Hoover was right. But it was Knox's views that were made public, and they triggered hysteria on the West Coast.
Well before the war, FDR, anticipating a possible war with Japan, had commissioned his own secret intelligence investigation of Japanese aliens and their loyalties. Leading this effort were John Franklin Carter (an author and columnist) and Curtis Munson (a prominent Republican businessman). And the Office of Naval Intelligence ("ONI") and the FBI were, for quite some time before Pearl Harbor, gathering names of Japanese aliens who might need to be apprehended in the event of war. ONI and the FBI actually compiled a list of such aliens which came to be called the "ABC" list--so named because the list presented three categories (Categore A, Category B, and Category C) of potentially dangerous aliens. (In the days after Pearl Harbor, all of the aliens in these three categories were in fact arrested--a total of some 1500.)
Carter and Munson's investigations had led them to conclude that the overwhelming majority of Japanese aliens and an even greater percentage of American citizens of Japanese ancestry were in fact loyal to the United States, and that of those whose loyalty was even questionable, few could be expected even to consider actuallydoing something to support Japan or undermine the United States. Carter and Munson grew alarmed by Knox's report and the anti-Japanese outcry that followed it.
Carter and Munson quickly put together a plan for FDR's consideration that was designed to bolster the Japanese American communities of Hawaii and the West Coast. Their plan called for a number of things: FDR was urged to go on record as believing in the loyalty of American citizens of Japanese ancestry (the "Nisei"). The Nisei should be invited to volunteer (and then should be accepted) for patriotic service in the Red Cross and civilian defense. The Nisei should be encouraged to take control of their alien parents' property. Once investigated, the Nisei should be allowed to take jobs in defense plants. Carter and Munson also urged the government to work closely with the Japanese American Citizens League, which had indicated its willingness to serve as a loyal liaison with the Japanese American community.
The goals of the Carter-Munson plan were many, but they included the discouragement of vigilante violence against Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens. The hope was that if FDR came out quickly and loudly in support of people of Japanese ancestry, and involved them quickly in activities that would permit their loyalty and patriotism to shine through, others would not see them as a threat.
The Carter-Munson plan was submitted to Roosevelt before Christmas. By mid-January, it was completely forgotten--superseded by other pressures that I'll detail in a moment. And here's the important point: the Carter-Munson plan was the only plan for dealing with Japanese Americans that took their security into account in any way. And it never got off the ground.
Why didn't it get off the ground? For four main reasons. First, by late January 1942, General John DeWitt (the commanding officer of the West Coast Defense Command) and his advisor Karl Bendetsen had become persuaded that mass action to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast was necessary for military reasons. Their viewpoint was fed largely by outrageous rumors of Japanese American subversion, none of which ever panned out.
Second, by mid-January, a rabidly racist press along the Coast had begun campaigning for the eviction of all "Japs" from the area--not for their protection, but because they could not be trusted.
Third, white farmers in California began lobbying ferociously for the removal of all people of Japanese ancestry--not to protect them, and not even really for national security reasons, but to drive the very successful Japanese farming industry out of business.
And fourth, their lobbying, and the voices of the editorialists, succeeded in pushing most of the congressional delegations of the West Coast states to demand mass exclusion.
As Professor Greg Robinson says in his authoritative treatment of the subject, "By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans" (Harvard U. Press, 2001), "the binding factor among these disparate social, economic, and military forces was racial animosity toward Japanese Americans." (p. 90)
Through late January and early February, Attorney General Francis Biddle and his staff fought with the military to prevent mass action against Japanese Americans. But it was too late. On February 11, 1942, Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent FDR a memo asking whether he'd be willing to support "mov[ing] Japanese citizens as well as aliens from restricted areas." Getting no response, Stimson phoned FDR on February 15 to ask for a meeting on the memo. FDR said he was too busy for a meeting, but in "very vigourous" tones told Stimson that the military should do whatever they thought best. FDR predicted that "there would probably be some repercussions but it has got to be dictated by military necessity."
On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the military carte blanche to do what they wished with Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast.
So there you have it. A concern for protecting Japanese Americans had nothing whatsoever to do with the decision to force Japanese Americans behind barbed wire. Nothing.
My sources for this account include Greg Robinson's book, Peter Irons's "Justice at War," and "Personal Justice Denied," the report of Congress's Commission on the Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians. This was the fact-finding Commission that Congress created in the early 1980s to investigate the internment. Their report, condemning the internment, led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President Reagan, which apologized to surviving internees for the internment, and authorized the payment to each of them of a token $20,000 redress payment. Howard Coble spoke and voted against this bill, by the way.
I hope that Representative Coble will take this opportunity to admit his mistake and apologize.

The First Amendment angle on Coble's comments is covered here, and it includes a lengthy quote from Professor Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent blogging on Coblegate is to be found at TalkLeft, Lean Left, The Mountaintop, a clever sheep, and Orcinus.

Coblegate update. Coble's digging in his heels. He says he'll only apologize if somebody proves to him that the safety of Japanese Americans was not one of Roosevelt's purposes. This is ignorant on its face, as anybody who's looked into the matter even for a moment would know that Roosevelt had no real hand in the development of the internment plan, and gave the matter only fleeting attention when it finally came across his desk.

But I'll try to give Coble what he says he wants later in the day. My prediction: no apology, even when he's shown the truth about the internment. Or one of those bogus "I'm sorry that you misconstrued what I said" politician-type apologies.

Rep. Howard Coble's remarks about the Japanese American internment continue to draw rebukes today. And people are not missing the link between Coble's comments and Trent Lott's, either. Tom Daschle condemned the remarks today, saying that "it's offensive and inexcusable that one of the darkest episodes in American history would be cited approvingly by a Republican member of Congress, particularly one whom the Leadership has appointed to head a sensitive homeland security panel."

You can say that again.

Dennis Hastert and George Bush, where are you?

Chris Matthews is broadcasting tonight from the campus of North Carolina Central University, and he will have North Carolian Senator (and presidential candidate) John Edwards as a guest. I'd like to hear a sharp question about the Coble/Myrick statements, and a clear and unequivocal response.

More shame for North Carolina. Not to be outdone by Howard Coble, another North Carolina Member of Congress, Sue Myrick, was asked during a post-speech Q-and-A last week about dangers to our communities. Her response: "You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, `You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.' Every little town you go into, you know?"

Ah, yes--the 7-Eleven/al Qaeda connection. Hmmmm. 7-Eleven? That's just two short of, ahem, 9-Eleven. Coincidence? I think not.

Ms. Myrick, if you were concerned about your statement being misconstrued, could you please share with us the proper construction? I'm not seeing it...

Mr. Hastert? Mr. Bush? Where are you?

Coblegate update. The spin has begun: Coble was just trying to say that 60 years ago our society wasn't "multicultural."

Huh?

That's not spin. In fact, it's not even wobble.

Pathetic Earthlings asks, a propos Howard Coble's support for the internment, "Where's Ralph Carr when you need him?" Indeed. People don't generally know this, but the actual responsibility for the day-to-day conditions of the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II lay much more with the political leaders of the Mountain West than it did with the federal government. The initial federal plan was to put the West Coast's Japanese Americans in open-gated communities much like Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But the governors of the Western states absolutely refused, insisting that the only condition on which they'd support the federal plan was if the Japanese were kept behind barbed wire and under military guard in "concentration camps." (That was the expression everybody used at the time. Obviously it has a different connotation today.) Faced with this powerful opposition, the Roosevelt Administration caved, and acceded to the demand for concentration camps.

Governor Ralph Carr of Colorado was the only governor who parted company with the others. He stuck his neck out and said Colorado would welcome Japanese Americans if that was what was needed. In an election year, no less--an election year in which, just to Carr's north, Wyoming's governor Nels Smith was running newspaper ads bragging on how he had "kept the Japs out of Wyoming." Carr was turned out of office.

Coblegate Update. The program director at WKZL radio in Greensboro, North Carolina, is saying that the flap about Rep. Howard Coble's inane remarks on his radio station yesterday morning are "an attempt by somebody to blow something out (of proportion)."

No, Mr. Program Director. The Japanese American internment was the (horrifyingly successful) attempt by somebody to blow something out of proportion. When the chair of an important congressional subcommittee on national security proudly endorses a regime of racist repression--which is what the internment was--that's a big deal.

Coblegate Update. People are starting to link Howard Coble's (R-NC) inane comments of yesterday defending the Japanese American internment to Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential run. And well they should. Does Coble--the Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security--accurately represent the Republican majority's understanding of "homeland security?"

Dennis Hastert and George W. Bush: where are you?

Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), who explained today that 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed into internment camps during World War II for their own protection, did not come to his bizarre views of the internment recently. Fifteen years ago he rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to speak and vote against the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered an apology and a token redress payment of $20,000 to the surviving internees.

Folks, this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over how well Tom Ridge's new department is balancing national security with individual liberties.

If he's not already doing so, Dennis Hastert should be looking for a new Chairman for Judiciary's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Put this revisionism about the Japanese American internment together with Trent Lott's fond reminiscences of Strom Thurmond's run for the presidency, and the Bush brief on the Michigan affirmative action case, and the renomination of Judge Pickering, and I think you've got a civil rights case against the Republican Party that might just stick at the next election.

North Carolina congressman Howard Coble has gone public with his support for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, dredging up the old nonsense that Japanese Americans were placed in camps for their own protection. And this isn't just any congressman--this is the chair of a subcommittee on homeland security. It is just staggering to me that a person in a position of this sort could be so ignorant of the real story. I'll blog more on this later, but wanted to get it up quickly.