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Fred Korematsu. File Photo.

Landmark APA Legal Team Demands Commissioner’s Ouster

Lawyers decry reference to Korematsu case

By Andrew Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

A team of veteran Asian Pacific American civil rights lawyers has joined at least two other civil rights groups nationwide in calling for the removal of a U.S. civil rights commissioner over comments he made about Arab Americans and detention camps.

In a letter to President George W. Bush on July 25, the team of eight lawyers — who argued successfully to overturn the landmark legal case Korematsu v. the United States in 1983 — demanded the removal of Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow, a Cleveland attorney who said last month that if another terrorist attack by Arabs were to occur on U.S. soil, the American public would clamor for internment camps similar to those that detained Japanese Americans during World War II.

“I think we will have a return to Korematsu,” Kirsanow said at a July 19 commission hearing in Detroit, referring to the overturned 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the government’s use of internment camps.

On July 22, 2002, two civil rights organizations called for Peter N. Kirsanow’s (above) removal by President Bush. They cited remarks Kirsanow made that people might demand internment camps for Arab Americans if terrorists strike the U.S. again. Photo by The Associated Press.

“By only citing the original, now discredited, Korematsu decision, Mr. Kirsanow … is suggesting that there is legal justification for the mass imprisonment of an ethnic group in this country,” their letter said. “This is precisely why Mr. Korematsu re-opened his case in 1983, so that such travesties would never occur again.”

In the Korematsu case, Oakland, Calif., native Fred Korematsu was convicted of refusing to abide by internment orders that deemed Japanese Americans a threat to national security because of their race. At the time of his arrest, a newspaper headline even incorrectly described him as a “Jap Spy.”

For his “extraordinary stand” against injustice, Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award, from President Bill Clinton in 1998. Two other cases, also involving Japanese Americans who defied the internment order, were similarly overturned.

“Mr. Kirsanow either did not know about, or simply failed to explain, the denouement of the Korematsu case or [the other cases],” the lawyers’ letter stated, adding Kirsanow’s “inflammatory rhetoric … now threatens to victimize innocent Arab Americans.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee have also called on Bush to “repudiate and disavow” Kirsanow’s remarks, and to remove him from the commission.

Bush has not responded to the requests.

In his defense, Kirsanow said he has never supported internment and that his remarks were taken out of context.

Dale Minami. File Photo.

But Minami of the Korematsu legal team said such comments by a public official would result only in “inflaming the public needlessly and recklessly.”

“From the context of his own personal philosophy, [Kirsanow’s comments are] consistent with essentially advocating the internment,” Minami said, as past efforts by Kirsanow — a Bush appointee and chair of the board of directors of the conservative Center for New Black Leadership — show he is “anti-civil rights and anti-affirmative action.”

“Even if he can disclaim that, what he has done is raise the level of hysteria in this country, and that is irresponsible,” Minami said.

Kirsanow’s comments at the July hearing came after Lansing, Mich., attorney Roland Hwang brought up the Japanese American internment, saying the country needs to prevent that from happening again.

Kirsanow told attendees, “If there’s another terrorist attack and it’s from a certain ethnic community or certain ethnicities that the terrorists are from, you can forget about civil rights in this country.”

He later added, “Not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops and more profiling.”

National outcry over Kirsanow’s remarks led the commission’s chair, Mary Frances Berry, to issue a statement reading, “Whatever views may have been expressed recently by any member of the commission to the contrary … combating terrorism should never become a war against Arab Americans or Muslims, or any group based on religion or national origin.”

The July hearing was not the first controversial incident for Kirsanow regarding the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Late last year, Bush appointed Kirsanow to serve on the commission, but Berry disputed whether the seat held by then-Commissioner Victoria Wilson was open. After a legal fight about the length of commissioner terms, Kirsanow was seated in May.

The commission, established under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, can only investigate civil rights complaints and publicize their findings.

Though the panel has no enforcement power, “In the grand scheme of things, I think you have to fight injustice wherever it happens,” Minami told AsianWeek from his San Francisco office. “Even without the power to take action … what they say does influence public opinion.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Andrew Chow at achow@asianweek.com.