Justice Antonin Scalia says World War II-style internment camps could happen again

washingtonexaminer.com ^ | 2/4/14 | Joel Gehrke

[ColdOne]

Justice Antonin Scalia predicts that the Supreme Court will eventually authorize another a wartime abuse of civil rights such as the internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

"You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again," Scalia told the University of Hawaii law school while discussing Korematsu v. United States, the ruling in which the court gave its imprimatur to the internment camps.

[BuckeyeTexan]

My goodness, peeps.

The proper word is “interned” - with an ‘n’. To “inter” - without an ‘n’ - means to bury a dead body.

Japanese Americans were interned not interred.

[Pelham]

I didn’t see anyone mention the ‘MAGIC’ intercepts.

We had broken both the Japanese Diplomatic and Naval codes and from this we knew that there were a number of effective spies working our military bases and defense plants along the Pacific coast.

If we had rounded up those spies Japan would have figured out how we did it and this would have prompted them to change their codes. Those codes were invaluable, we used them to set up Japan at the battle of Midway and we couldn’t risk losing them.

The internment of Japanese Americans was a cover that allowed the spies to be rounded up without alerting Japan. This was described in a book by David Lowman who was the NSA officer responsible for declassifying the Magic intercepts, “Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast During Ww II “.

[DoughtyOne]

I had not heard that before. Very very interesting. That sure puts a new light on it doesn’t it.

You’re hit at Pearl Harbor, you don’t know exactly what comes next, possibly more attacks, the West Coast.

Then you have the codes, to convince the enemy you don’t have.

I’ll have to check that out.

[Pelham]

I remember hearing George Putman interview someone who was involved in all of this- I can’t recall if it was Lowman or someone else- but they made a very convincing case. And Lowman was certainly in a position to know what is in the Magic intercepts.

It fits the facts. Only Japanese Americans along the Pacific coast were interned. Had this been the racist endeavor we often hear it described to be, all Japanese Americans would have been interned, but that isn’t what happened.

[wastedyears]

Us

Because we don’t agree with them.

Soon

[itsahoot]

[BuckeyeTexan]

Very interesting. I’ll have to read that one. Thanks.

[DoughtyOne]

I agree with your logic. This is and example of one of those little bits of information that the Left conveniently leaves out of just about every story.

I appreciate the mention.

I miss George. The guy was doing his best right up until just about the end.

[wastedyears]

It’s the government, they don’t have to justify anything to anybody.

[FreedomPoster]

It’s a very interesting book, I read it in he last couple years. It also documents how our Left completely swept the information about active spy rings and such completely under the rug when reparations were being discussed in the 1980s.

[FreedomPoster]

See my previous, I also recommend it.

Also, the book documents how a lot of 1st generation Japanese would get sent back for education in Japan, an education that included a large dose of Japanese militarism, such that there was a real question about their loyalties. While this and the other things revealed in the book do not justify all that was done, it makes the whole issue much more complex. Trying to simplify it down by saying “it was all because racist white farmers wanted their land”, as some are doing here, ignores the very real issues that MAGIC reveals.

[DoodleDawg]

BTW, only those who were connected to the big shots in Japan (like the Emperor) were interned...

Something like 110,000 were interned. You're saying they were all big shots?

...and only temporarily.

Till early 1945.

[muir_redwoods]

It’s your flag so I’m assuming its your admission that you’re just spouting bull. Appreciate the belated honesty.

[2ndDivisionVet]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[JimRed]

A whole bunch of Americans might lose their senses of humor after another such event and otherwise just start cleaning house.

WADR, if it didn't happen after 9-11, when a million dead Muslims would have been a good start, it's not likely to happen at all.

[Notary Sojac]

There was reasonable suspicion that the people interned might have had split allegiances

I will call complete BS until "reasonable suspicion" is adequately documented.

What we did to American citizens of Japanese descent was vile, and conservatism is done no favor by those who defend it.

[Wallace T.]

Germans and Italians are white and, unless they spoke their ancestral language, are not particularly distinguishable from other white Americans. German-Americans had been part of the pre-Revolutionary population of America and constituted the largest single ethnic group in this country, unless you lumped the English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish into a single "British" category. With the exception of recent immigrants, they expressed little interest in the politics of Germany. While the Italian-American population had mostly immigrated to this country between 1880 and 1920, they evidenced little interest in the political affairs of their former homeland, very much unlike the Irish-Americans and, with the rise of Zionism, Jewish-Americans.

Japanese-Americans, like the Italian-Americans, were mostly relatively recent immigrants. However, they were clearly distinguishable from white Americans even when speaking good English. Very much unlike the Italian-Americans, they assiduously maintained cultural and familial ties with their homeland.

None of these facts justified internment. Even J. Edgar Hoover, whom no one would regard as a civil libertarian, had misgivings about this action.

[houeto]

NSA will use to fill the soon-to-be-created TEA Party Concentration Camps.

By many accounts, they are already built and ready to 'receive'.

[EODGUY]

My guess is the first people on the list will be veterans, Christians, gun owners and those of us who still believe in our Constitution.

EODGUY

[Thane_Banquo]

The purpose of the IRS’s harassment of the TEA Party was to create lists for the prisoners that the NSA will use to fill the soon-to-be-created TEA Party Concentration Camps.

I suspect that anyone attempting to put TEA Party supporters into concentration camps will come down with a severe case of sudden kinetic lead poisoning. So far, the most important piece of any such strategy--universal gun confiscation--has failed.