REPARATIONS to Japanese-Americans for WW2 campout

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discuss...

President Ronald Reagan signs the August 10, 1988 bill for reparations to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II. He is flanked by Congressman Robert T. Matsui and other key sponsors of the bill.

http://www.picturehistory.com/images.../prod_4285.jpg

On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which authorized the military to exclude any person from designated military areas.

I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remaining, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order.³

This order gave the military free reign to designate military areas and to remove any persons considered a danger. On March 2, 1942, Lt. General John L. DeWitt, West Coast commander U.S. Army, issued Public Proclamation No. 1 which designated the entire West coast a restricted military area. The Army issued the first Civilian Exclusion Order for the Japanese on Bainbridge Island on march 24, 1942. Though theoretically Executive Order 9066 could be used to remove German and Italian Americans only the Japanese community was forced to undergo mass evacuation and imprisonment. After all it just wouldn't be right to imprison Joe DiMaggio's Italian immigrant parents.

By June 1942 more than 110,000 Japanese (more than 70% of them American citizens) had been forced from their homes into temporary assembly centers. These assembly centers such as Camp Harmony were ramshackle affairs built at racetracks and fairgrounds. From the assembly centers the Japanese were moved to ten concentration camps scattered in the more inhospitable desert regions of the West.

http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibi...bit/intro.html

Reparations for internment were just a curtsy to political correctness
by Michelle Malkin (Sunday, September 5, 2004)

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.

Several commission members expressed strident anti-relocation sentiments before and during the panel's 20-day hearings. The few witnesses who were invited to testify in defense of the evacuation and relocation were berated, ridiculed and cut off by commission members. Audience members booed and hissed reparations opponents.

The reparations law created a special entitlement for evacuees and internees of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, dual citizens, permanent resident aliens and even those who renounced their American citizenship and returned to Japan. Eligible recipients included West Coast residents who evacuated on their own after Pearl Harbor but before Executive Order 9066 was signed; 4,300 students who left relocation centers or tens of thousands who left camps to live and work outside the West Coast; and 5,918 babies born in the relocation centers during the war.

Also eligible were 450 Aleut residents evacuated from their home islands by the United States when the Japanese attacked and invaded the Aleutian Islands at Kiska and Attu in June 1942. They received $12,000 each despite the commission's acknowledgment that "the evacuation of the Aleuts was a rational wartime measure taken to safeguard them."

Japanese permanent resident aliens who were interned at Justice Department camps received compensation as well. Their German and Italian counterparts, however, received nothing. According to Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics, nearly half of all enemy aliens held in Justice Department internment camps were of European ancestry.

In October 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to hear an appeal by retired U.S. Air Force major Arthur Jacobs, U.S.-born son of a German internee, who lived with his family at the Crystal City, Texas, internment camp alongside Japanese internees. Jacobs had argued pointedly that the reparations law unconstitutionally discriminated against non-Japanese internees in violation of the Equal Protection clause. A lower court had dismissed his argument, citing the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians' conclusion that ethnic Japanese evacuees and internees were singled out exclusively because of their race and without any military justification.

Perhaps the worst effect of the reparations law has been its effect on current homeland security policies. Civil liberties absolutists have invoked the "racist" World War II evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese to attack virtually every homeland security initiative, large and small, aimed at protecting the United States from murderous Islamic extremists. When every detention of a Middle Eastern illegal alien is tantamount to the "unjustified" internment of ethnic Japanese, there is no room for rationality. This absolutist resistance to wartime threat profiling, based on falsified fears of repeating the "mistakes" of World War II, reduces the security of our nation.

Michelle Malkin is author of the new book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror." She will speak about her book at UC Berkeley (145 Dwinelle Hall) on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGKI8I2DA1.DTL

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