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Beyond Manzanar:
      Background Information / Links to other websites

These websites, both private and public, have more information on issues relevant to the Manzanar Project. We cannot however take any responsibility for their opinions, their contents, or any of their copyright violations.

Index:

Links to articles in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

We condemn all terrorist attacks on innocent people. But scapegoating innocent, uninvolved people just because they come from the same ethnic group, and attacking them physically and legally in group retaliation for acts done by a few extremists, will only serve to justify the claims of the terrorists. Instead, we must work together with the communities under suspicion, supporting and sustaining the moderate and democratic voices within them rather than embittering them with displays of American racism and bigotry.

In World War II Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not interned and therefore willingly volunteered in large numbers to join the US Military, anxious to show their loyalty to the US. On the contrary, the mainland Japanese Americans, larger by far in numbers but held prisoner with their families in desolate internment camps, were understandably bitter about being asked to defend a country that dispossed them and locked them up solely for being of Japanese ancestry. The 442nd all Japanese American Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated in World War II, even helping to free the Dachau sub-camps in Germany as their own families languished behind barbed wire in American internment camps. (See Chang, Thelma. "I Can Never Forget: Men of the 100th/442nd," Sigi Productions, 1991)

June 28, 2004 Supreme Court rulings on detentions without trial:

  • "Supreme Court Backs Civil Liberties in Terror Cases", Fred Barbash, Washington Post
    On June 28, 2004, in two crucial decisions on the scope of presidential wartime powers, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's claim that it can hold suspected terrorists or "enemy combatants" on American soil without access to the courts.

  • "Resisting arrest", by Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor
    (Click through an add to get a day pass for the salon website)
    In October, 2003, Fred Korematsu joined a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that the extended executive detentions of "enemy combatants" are unconstitutional. His words bore the moral weight of authority of a man who had taken the internment of his own ethnic group to the Supreme Court in the 1940s. He lost then, but the internment was subsequently declared "not justified" when in the 1980s a document was found "from one of the Justice Department lawyers to the Solicitor General of the United States saying we are telling lies to the Supreme Court."

Personal reactions to 911 from the two of us:

Other articles on the Internet:


Japanese American issues and culture:

The Internment:

  • In 1984 the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that the military justification for the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2 was "not justified." In fact it was a lie, perpetrated by the government and the military at high levels up to and including President Roosevelt.

    As then Representative Norman Mineta (now Secretary of Transportation in the George W. Bush administration) remarked as he introduced H.R. 442, The Civil Liberties Act of 1985, "... documents recently discovered under the Freedom of Information act revealed that government attorneys suppressed key evidence and authoritative reports from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the F.B.I., the Federal Communications Commission, and Army intelligence which flatly contradicted the government claim that Japanese Americans were a threat to security. ." http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/Congressional%20Records/19850219.html#n13

    The court ruling applies to this specific instance only and left standing the principle of mass internment of an entire group without due process "in cases of military necessity" - and no legal action was taken against the people or institutions that ordered the internment under false pretenses. Ethnic groups whose countries of origin are considered rogue states by the American government can legally be interned without trial.

    For more information see:

    Robinson, Greg. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001

    Personal Justice Denied - Report of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 1996.

    For the text of the ruling see: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/pp/korematsu_II.htm.


Further sources of information:

Manzanar:

Japanese culture:


Iranian American issues and culture:

Politics:

Culture: