Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Defending ignorance

Is That Legal is reporting that North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble has refused to meet with three of his colleagues (all Asian-Americans) regarding his remarks claiming that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified.

[Is That Legal -- which correctly points out that "The silence of the Republican leadership has been deafening. And disturbing" --
remains the center of information in the blogoshere regarding this dust-up. Be sure to check out his documents related to the internment decision.]

Now it's becoming clear why Coble is digging in his heels: We learn via Yellowworld that in 1988 Coble not only voted against reparations for Japanese-Americans, but led the floor fight in the House against the measure, saying: "I do not believe that this Government can make restitution for every wrong committed by it during a time of global war."

As it happens, Coble was not the only North Carolina Republican who opposed the reparations measure. Leading the fight against it in the Senate was none other than the just-retired Jesse Helms. Helms, who argued strenuously that the internment was justified because of the intercepted "Magic" cables which revealed plans for a Japanese intelligence network on the Coast, offered an amendment to "provide that no funds shall be appropriated under this title until the government of Japan has fairly compensated the families of men and women killed as a result of the ... bombing of Pearl Harbor." (Of course, this argument manages to repeat the original mistake, that is, confusing American citizens with Japanese nationals.)

Helms' argument regarding the prewar "Magic" intelligence, as noted earlier, is receiving fresh life in the right-wing side of the blogosphere, as conservatives apparently are eager to defend Coble's woeful and willful ignorance. But the "Magic" cables, as I mentioned, have ultimately proven irrelevant, in no small part because they actually did play a role in the early phases of the internment.

Quoting John Hersey from his essay, " 'A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions' " (from the book Manzanar):
With great speed and efficiency, beginning the very night of the attack, the Justice Department arrested certain marked enemy aliens of all three belligerent nations. Within three days, 857 Germans, 147 Italians, and 1,291 Japanese (367 of them rounded up in Hawaii, 924 on the continent) had been rounded up. The arrests were made on the basis of remarkably thorough -- though in some cases inaccurate -- prior information that had been compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Service. With respect to the Japanese, it was evidently of enormous help that United States cryptologists has, a year earlier, in an intiative called Magic, broken all the Japanese diplomatic codes and ciphers. Intercepted Magic messages had designated certain Japanese patriotic organizations in the United States as potential sources of intelligence for the enemy, and many of the Japanese aliens arrested in the first sweeps were leaders of those groups.

Indeed, this -- and the fact that he knew the evidence of Japanese-American espionage and sabotage was nonexistent -- was a large part of why J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment. According to Hoover, all of the potential spies had in fact already been identified and arrested by the FBI.

Recall too that, as Personal Justice Denied points out, the "Magic" cables, in devising ways to create this intelligence network, actually recommended that members of the Nikkei community be used for espionage only as a final resort, because they would be highly likely to raise suspicions and wind up getting caught and perhaps betraying the network. The cables instead suggested recruiting whites to perform the espionage.

And that's pretty much what happened. By war's end, exactly ten people had been convicted of spying of for Japan. All of them were Caucasians.

Using Helms' argument, then, we apparently should have been rounding up every white person on the Pacific Coast and interning them first. After all, we couldn't have been able to separate the would-be spies from the innocent, right?

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