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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (660083)	11/14/2004 2:22:39 PM
From: E	Respond to of 769670

My point from the beginning has been that we should never be judgmental about decisions made in long-ago times No it wasn't! You're just pretending. Look at the criteria you now present for the conditions under which you'd support internment camps for American Muslims. They didn't apply to the Japanese! You have said in the present, 60 years later, that it was the right thing to do. You have even said that the internments are why the Japanese turned out to be so loyal: they'd have been traitors, except that we had the good sense to lock them up! You have just deceptively cited refusals to take loyalty oaths by a small percentage of Japanese implying that that had something to do with their internment. You are wrong. They had already been imprisoned, for nothing whatever, when, as a protest, 4% of them refused, as a protest. You talk about judging after the fact. At the time, the Justice Department, the FBI, and Army intelligence all opposed imprisoning our Japanese citizens. Do you decline to "judge" Westbrook Pegler, a major columnist of the time, who wrote, "The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the Last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus," and proposed that for any American POW mistreated, a Japanese-American citizen be taken out of the camps and executed? I judge him. Many judged him at the time! And many, many Americans,judged the imprisonments then. You would have supported them, I think you sense, and so your defense of that disgusting episode. You've changed your tune, though. That's a good thing. You would learn a little something by reading this: crf-usa.org Here's one excerpt. "Working with others in the War Department, General DeWitt developed a plan to remove all the Issei and Nisei from their homes in the Western states and lock them in prison camps. The Justice Department, FBI, and Army intelligence all concluded that such a drastic action was not necessary. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, accepted General DeWitt’s recommendation. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. This gave General DeWitt authority to order the mass evacuation of Issei and Nisei from the West Coast and other military areas. This order affected about 120,000 citizens and non-citizens of Japanese origin. The stated purpose of removing this entire ethnic group was for “protection against espionage and against sabotage.” Congress made it a crime to refuse to leave a military area when ordered to do so. Starting on March 2, 1942, General DeWitt issued orders requiring all persons of Japanese ancestry in eight Western states to report to temporary assembly centers. When they reported, the government transported them to permanent “relocation centers,” the guarded prison camps where they would remain for up to four years. When ordered to evacuate, Issei and Nisei families usually had only a few days to sell their homes, businesses, vehicles, and other property. Even so, almost all cooperated with General DeWitt’s orders, believing that by doing so they proved their loyalty. Although more than 60 percent of those ordered to evacuate were U.S. citizens, none had a hearing or trial before the government locked them up in relocation camps. Once in the camps, however, the government asked them to sign a loyalty oath to the United States. Most did, but about 4 percent refused, protesting how they had been treated. The government classified these individuals as “disloyal.”"

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (660083)	11/14/2004 2:35:42 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

BTW, you failed to respond to my earlier question about how it served our national security (when we swept our Japanese-American citizens into prison camps) not to safeguard their homes and businesses and farms? We simply allowed their personal property to be plundered and destroyed. We didn't care if farms that it had taken three generations of stoop-labor by hardworking families to acquire went into default when the mortgages couldn't be paid, and got bought for pennies on the dollar by lucky neighbors happy enough for the windfall. Did that help to keep us safe? You are so full of the milk of human kindness that you don't "judge." It's quite heart-warming. Can you think of a reason it might be good idea to "judge" egregious and undeserved treatment of human beings that took place in the past? I can see a reason a person would want in the present to rationalize such behaviors in the past. Here it is: that person knows deep down he or she would have gone along with the atrocity at issue.

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (660083)	11/14/2004 6:34:33 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

"Two months before Pearl Harbor the United States State Department sent a special investigator, Curtis B. Munson, to report on the disposition of the Japanese American communities on the West Coast and Hawaii. Munson’s final confidential report to the President and the Secretary of State remained a secret until 1946. According to Munson Japanese Americans possessed an extraordinary degree of loyalty to the United States and immigrant Japanese were of no danger to our nation. Munson’s findings were corroborated by the FBI and Navy Intelligence who had kept the Japanese American population under secret surveillance for a number of years. These reports were all kept secret from the American public." yale.edu