Posted on 07/29/2002 2:20:09 PM PDT by RCW2001
July 29
— CHICAGO (Reuters) - A group of American survivors of brutal World War II Japanese prison camps in the Philippines filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday accusing the U.S. government of intentionally sacrificing them in 1941 to give the United States justification to enter the war.
The lawsuit on behalf of 598 plaintiffs, including survivors of Japanese prison camps and their descendants, demands unspecified compensation from the government, according to Northwestern University law professor Anthony D'Amato, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
D'Amato said he believes he can get around a statute of limitations on such old claims because relevant documents only recently have surfaced.
There was no immediate comment on the lawsuit by the U.S. government.
Filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, the lawsuit asks for the release of transcripts of conversations between President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in which they may have discussed America's strategy for entering the war. Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, sealed the transcripts in perpetuity.
D'Amato said he believes Roosevelt and Churchill together agreed to raise obstacles to their citizens wanting to leave the Philippines, such as holding on to their passports, to leave them in the path of the invading Japanese.
At first, the Americans were there in order to deter a Japanese invasion, but they later were stranded as "bait," D'Amato said.
Meanwhile, many other Americans were being withdrawn from around East Asia in anticipation of a Japanese attack, he said.
"I speculate about what went on in those (Roosevelt-Churchill) conversations, but the defendant is hiding all this material," D'Amato said. "I would like it stipulated, unless the government refutes it, that the presumption is true."
Just eight hours after the Japanese launched the surprise Dec. 7, 1941, attack on the U.S. fleet anchored in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, an armada of U.S. planes was destroyed on the ground at a Filipino base.
As many as 12,000 Americans living in the Philippines subsequently were rounded up by the Japanese, many spending the war in brutal Japanese prison camps where starvation and disease claimed many lives.
D'Amato said the genesis of the suit was a contact he received from American camp survivor Marcia Fee Achenbach, who was 4 years old when her prison camp was liberated by American soldiers.
He said Achenbach, now a plaintiff in the case, has dug up documentation that the U.S. government issued orders not to issue passports to American citizens, and that a ban preventing citizens without passports from re-entering the United States was lifted only late in 1941.
Believe FDR was a traitor
or
believe those who were imprisoned
or
.
I don't know that you can include this plaintiff with the "greatest generation" - she was only 4 years old in 1945.
D'Amato said the genesis of the suit was a contact he received from American camp survivor Marcia Fee Achenbach, who was 4 years old when her prison camp was liberated by American soldiers. He said Achenbach, now a plaintiff in the case,
Then this doesn't bother you at all?
Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, sealed the transcripts in perpetuity.
Then this doesn't bother you at all?
Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, sealed the transcripts in perpetuity.
It bothers me that this thing is being foisted on us by a Trial Liar.
Suppose they go to trial (or even discovery) and there's nothing to this. Then who pays?
If there is something to this, then what? What could compensate these people or their (shades of reparations) descendants, how much would it take?
Frankly, I'm more concerned about the sealed evidence in the Clinton impeachment.
Generally (especially initially) the people obsessed with Roosevelt-as-Antichrist conspiracy theories knowing about Pearl Harbor but not telling anyone and whatnot were the same people who worshipped McArthur as a God.
Yet this was after McArthur was fully aware of the Pearl attack, and it was entirely his responsibility.
Regarding the initial story, they're suing the US and not Japan because they think they have a better chance of winning. But it makes absolutely no sense. Japan attacking the Phillipines, by itself, is plenty enough justification for war. And ironically, I've never heard, and in histories have read almost nothing, about US Civilians in the Phillipines being held captive by the Japanese. It seems clear to me that this was almost totally unused in US propaganda.
Really? And just who should be punished? And how?
The Reparations Railroad, that's what this is.
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