Posted on 09/05/2004 6:47:31 PM PDT by quidnunc
Sixteen years ago, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, proclaiming it "a great day for America." It provided $1.65 billion in restitution to 82,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry who had been subjected to evacuation, relocation and internment during World War II.
Although it was almost universally hailed at the time, the decision was one of Reagan's biggest blunders. In a rare capitulation to political correctness, Reagan ignored the advice of his own military and legal experts who opposed wartime reparations for ethnic Japanese evacuees and internees. The road to reparations was paved with injustice, intellectual dishonesty and incompetence. The panel created by Congress to assess whether the evacuation and relocation of West Coast ethnic Japanese were militarily necessary didn't include anyone with a military or intelligence background. The 500-page report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians devoted just 10 pages to intelligence.
Worse, the commission failed to acknowledge the existence of long- declassified MAGIC cables — which revealed Japan's extensive espionage activities on the West Coast — until after it had published its famous indictment that wartime relocation and internment were the result of "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership." The commission's legal counsel hastily dismissed MAGIC's importance in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to approve Executive Order 9066 and the West Coast evacuation.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I'm not a Canadian, and what's more I'm old enougfh to remember WW II well.
I have no idea what percentage of the Japanese were actually interned and opposed to just being removed from the exclusion zone.
What caused FDR to decide on exclusion from the West Coast was the fact that in every country which the Japanese conquered an occupation government immediately emerged from among the Japanese expatriates there.
To him that indicated a very thorough penetration of the Japanese diaspora by Japanese intelligence.
I understand his thoughts and the reasons for it. Check out the above link though. There were not 120,000 "hard cases". Imagine your government doing this to you. I have friends who lost everything. The fact the policy was reversed in two years tells you they realized it was a big mistake.
You are right about this. They were American citizens, and their assets were taken from them and sold.
This is slippery slope stuff.
I broke a nail.
Hard times call for hard measures.
We had to protect out vulnerable defense industries on the West Coast without tipping Japan off to the fact that we had broken many of their codes.
Our access to Japanese codes was paramount and exclusion from the West Coast was reckoned to be the only polict that would not tip off the japanese.
The British knew that the Germans were going to mount a massive bombing raid against Covenrty, but they didn't dare tip the townspeople off because to do so would have revealed that they had broken the German cosed.
As a result, Coventry was bombed into rubble with a terrible loss of life.
I sympathize with those forcibly removed from the West Coast, but a lot of Americans made even bigger sacrifices during WW II.
Thank you.
I've come across that link before and noticed it isn't very specific on how "citizen of the United States" is defined.
Those born in Japan who immigrated to the US could not, by law, become United States citizens (until the law was changed in 1965). However, their children born in the US (called Nisei) were automatically US citizens. What complicated matters is that Japanese law mandated that any child born to a Japanese father was automatically a Japanese citizen, regardless of birth place.
People with dual citizenship were indeed United States citizens, but they were also citizens of Japan, a nation with which we were at war. So a loyalty oath (one way or the other) from a dual citizen was understandably expected.
Probably so! *LOL*
Fair enough, friend.
Ultimately it comes to this: we can have this discussion today because we won the war. If we had not won the war a few of us would be around and probably be wondering why the hell our leaders at the time didn't take harsher measures to protect us against internal sabotage and espionage.
Nice end note....
Michelle couldn't be more correct.
I agree. Resident aliens are one thing but American citizens are quite another. Never should perfectly innocent American citizens ever be put in concentration camps without due process. I grew up with Japanese and I can tell you some stories that will make you cry. And yes I know how brutal they were, My dad fought them on Iwo Jima. I have absolutely Zero (no pun intended) sympathy for WW2 Japan and their warlords. They were treated much to kindly after their surrender. Many Japanese war criminals went unpunished and that's a crime in itself. Bur that's another story. I like Michelle Malkin and I agree with her on almost every issue, but she is dead wrong on this.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.