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National viewThe shame of deferenceGeorgeWillWashington Post Writer 's GroupTwo of the three most infamous Supreme Court decisions were erased by events. The Civil War and postwar constitutional amendments effectively overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that blacks could never have rights that whites must respect. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld legally enforced segregation, was undone by court decisions and legislation.Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the president’s wartime power to sweep Americans of disfavored racial groups into concentration camps, elicited a 1988 congressional apology. Now Peter Irons, founder of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project at the University of California,San Diego, is campaigning for a Supreme Court “repudiation” of the Korematsu decision and other Japanese internmentrulings.A repudiation would be unprecedented, but an essay that Irons is circulating among constitutional law professors whose support he seeks is timely reading in today's context of anti-constitutional presidencies, particularly regarding war powers.On Feb. 19. 1942. President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the military to prescribe military areas ... from which any or all persons may be excluded. So 110,(MX) Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them bom here, were sent to camps in desolate Western locations. Supposedly, this was a precaution against espionage and sabotage. Actually, it rested entirely on the racial animus of Gen. John DeWitt. head of the Western Defense Command.Using government records. Irons demonstrates that because senior officials, including Solicitor General Charles Fahy. committed numerous and knowing acts of governmental misconduct, the court based its decision on records and arguments that were fabricated and fraudulent.” Officials altered and destroyed evidence that would have revealed the racist motives for the internments. And to preserve the pretext of a military necessity for the concentration camps, officials suppressed reports on the lack of evidence of disloyalty or espionage by Japanese-Americans.The 1943 Final Report” on Japanese “evacuation, prepared under DeWitt’s direction and signed by him, said a Japanese invasion was probable, that “racial characteristics” of Japanese-Americans predisposed them to assist the invasion, and that it was impossible to distinguish loyal from disloyal Japanese-Amer-ican citizens, if there were any: The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second- and third-generation Japanese bom on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.When War Department officials objected to such assertions and demanded revisions. DeWitt ordered all copies and records of the original report destroyed, but one copy escaped DeWitt’s cover-up. The court, however, never saw it, remaining unaware of the racist basis of the theory of internment’s military necessity-Also kept from the court was a report, prepared for the Chief of Naval Operations and made available to DeWitt, estimating potentially disloyal Japanese as just 3 percent of the Japanese-American population, and declaring that these were “already fairly well known to naval intelligence and could be quickly apprehended, if necessary. The suppressed reports conclusion: The entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because ofSee WILL on Page HA
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Alamogordo Daily News
Alamogordo, New Mexico, US
Fri, May 03, 2013
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USA 01 Jul 2019
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