Internment: More Than Just a Government Mistake
February 28, 2003
This week commemorates the 61st anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, the presidential decree that imprisoned more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in World War II concentration camps.
According to the popular version of history, the mistake of interning Japanese Americans en masse without due process was due to racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership during a time of national crisis. Justice triumphed over time, the story goes, the government realized its error in judgment, issued an official apology and made token reparations to the survivors.
But contrary to the narrative which validates our nation’s commitment to constitutional principles over time, a more careful analysis suggests that the internment of Japanese Americans was not simply an error in judgment, but rather an accepted practice which has been frequently considered for use by our government during times of perceived crisis. In this view, the government has shown itself to be continuously willing to suspend the constitutional rights of the minority in the interests of national security, and it has learned nothing from the sacrifices and injuries done to the Japanese American community.
In 1950, just a few years after the closing of the last Japanese American internment camp, Congress passed the Internal Security Act (McCarran Act) by an overwhelming 89 percent vote, over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, who feared the act “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights.”
Title II of the McCarran Act authorized the president and the attorney general, in times of emergency, to “apprehend and by order detain … each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or of sabotage.” This indefinite detention would end only once the emergency was over or a presidential panel approved the detainee’s release. Notably, in such hearings, the detainee would have to defend himself or herself against charges without being able to see any evidence or call any witnesses which the attorney general deemed harmful to national security.
Though the emergency detention provisions were never invoked, Congress thought it sufficiently feasible to make six separate appropriations between 1952 and 1957 to construct internment camps in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Tule Lake, Calif. The right of the government to intern U.S. citizens would remain the law of the land for more than two decades until it was repealed in 1971, largely due to the efforts of Japanese American legislators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga. However, during the law’s lifespan, the government is known to have considered at different times proposals to intern Chinese Americans, Communists, Vietnam War protesters and other perceived political dissidents.
For the past decade, the targets for internment have clearly been the Arab and Muslim American communities. In 1991, even as the first round of Japanese American reparations checks were being mailed, the Justice Department was already drafting plans to intern Arab Americans during the Gulf War. Shortly after the tragedy of Sept. 11, pollsters found that a vast majority of Americans favored restrictions on civil liberties, with 29 percent favoring the internment of “suspect groups.” In July 2002, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights raised the possibility of interning people “from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center.” Most recently, Rep. Howard Coble has said that interning Japanese American was the right thing to do, commenting on a call for interning Arab Americans.
The USA PATRIOT Act, Homeland Security Act, INS special registration laws and soon-to-be PATRIOT II act have already severely curtailed our civil liberties, similar to the experiences of Japanese Americans just prior to their exclusion and internment. The requirement to register with the government, the rise in deportations and exclusions targeted at particular ethnic communities, the military detention of civilians and the rise in use of secret evidence are nothing new. This is what happened to the Japanese Americans shortly before they were interned.
Similarly, internment is a tool available for use should the government find that internment’s benefits outweigh its costs. Whether we are in a new period of racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and lack of political leadership, or if internment is the official policy of the government in response to national crisis, an internment cannot be far behind if we continue to remain silent in the face of this assault on civil liberties.
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