A military court convicted and sentenced Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, this past week in connection with terrorist activities.

Hamdan was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, but he was acquitted of the conspiracy charge.

The court believed he didn’t know about plans for the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States, but by driving and hiding bin Laden, he provided support for terrorism. The sentence, coupled with time served, could mean that Hamdan would be released by December this year, as he has been held at Guantanamo Bay by our government since 2003.

While this trial might not be the end of the legal road for Hamdan, it does represent an important milestone in the nation’s war on terror. It’s a milestone, however, that the nation passed before, long ago.

In this country, we don’t lock away people indefinitely without due process, trial and conviction.

If someone is suspected of a crime, we investigate, gather evidence, arrest, charge, try, convict or acquit, and sentence or release.

For too long the nation has held people in limbo at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or in secret prisons overseas.

This trial, before a six-member military panel, was seen by some as outside the bounds of our accepted and tested legal system, and it was. However, it did permit the hearing of evidence, permitted the accused to mount a defense, and it still provides the means to appeal to civilian courts and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court.

A concern is the length of time that it took to reach this juncture, and the fact that the Bush administration contends that the court’s sentence doesn’t make any difference — it can still hold Hamdan indefinitely as an enemy combatant as long as the war on terror continues.

Past wars have caused other presidents to take steps that were later regretted. The internment of Japanese Americans is one example.

We also will regret holding people without charge, or without trial, then continuing to hold them regardless of trial outcome.

As a nation, we must put more faith in the rule of law. Unlawful acts should be prosecuted, but we should not prosecute suspected acts that cannot be proven because of a lack evidence and thoughts that don’t lead to acts.

Judicial standards carved out over more than 200 years are worth protecting, not abandoning in moments of panic. [Link]

Scores of Japanese Americans gathered at San Jose City College on Saturday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the day many of them never thought they'd live to see: the signing of legislation by President Ronald Reagan officially apologizing for interning them during World War II.

It may seem today that the apology was a given, but it took many years of lobbying politicians and convincing some of their fellow Japanese Americans who thought the ugly chapter was "best left in the dustbin of history," said Norman Mineta, an influential U.S. congressman at the time who later became U.S. secretary of commerce and then secretary of transportation.

"It happened because there was a group of people who demanded it must happen and because tens of thousands of our fellow citizens agreed that it must," said Mineta, who was interned in Wyoming as a boy. "It will always mean more to me than I can ever adequately express."

Mineta was one of 120,000 Japanese - some born in Japan and others born in the United States - who were forced from their homes by the U.S. government and into internment camps after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Japanese American families lost their homes and businesses and were not given the right to challenge their internment in court. [Link]

Sunday, August 10, marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. government's apology to Japanese Americans for internment during World War Two. More than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and live in detention camps after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942.

It took more than 40 years for the U.S. government to apologize for its wrongdoing, but Japanese Americans say the American Civil Liberties Act is a symbol of America's progress.

Although internees admit it is difficult to share their experiences, survivors say future generations need to know what happened to make sure America doesn't repeat past mistakes.

Japanese Americans say its important to remember their struggle, but more important for all ethnicities to protect their rights. They say racial profiling would be an insult to to the interment experience. [Link]

More than 100 local Muslims will take part in a pilgrimage north to the Manzanar World War II internment camp today to raise awareness about threats to civil rights during times of war.

For many, the trip is both a celebration of civil rights strides made in the last 60 years as well as a reminder of the dark pages in history written by prejudice and fear, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ayloush is a U.S. citizen who was born in Lebanon and now lives in Corona. He journeyed to Manzanar, at the foot of the Sierras, last year with his children.

"I can honestly say it was one of the most shocking experiences of my life. It really awakened me," Ayloush said.

Staring down at the tiny graves of children who died at the internment camp, Ayloush said he was struck by the need to defend civil liberties during times of peril such as World War II or the current war on terror.

"You could almost hear the sounds of the people who were there," he said. "The freedoms we enjoy today came at a very heavy price by those who came before us."

Ayloush sees key similarities and differences between the experiences of Japanese-Americans during World War II and American Muslims during today's war on terror.

Just like innocent Japanese-Americans were the target of prejudice and suspicion after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Muslims in this country have been subject to widespread suspicions since the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

Muslims experienced immigration delays, were profiled at airports, and were subject to electronic surveillance, and 83,000 Muslim men were required to report to federal agents, he said.

Ayloush said he has been the victim of harassment at airports as well as electronic spying. Last year, he made headlines when he and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government to find out whether federal agents were monitoring him as a leader in the Muslim community.

"Muslims have to go to the airport two or three hours early," he said. "You're stopped. You're searched. They take your laptop. They copy your business cards."

Ayloush said these experiences along with the pilgrimage to Manzanar drive him to crusade for civil rights protections.

"Civil liberties are best tested during hard times," he said. "It's easy to say we are a nation of civil liberties when things are easy." [Link]

A federal lands bill headed to the president will give national park status to the site on Bainbridge Island where 227 Japanese-Americans reported before being sent to internment camps in 1942.

Congressman Jay Inslee championed this effort the last couple years. Today he got his victory when the House of Representatives passed a package of bills dealing with federal properties that included his. (This package also included creation of the Wild Sky Wilderness)

According to Inslee's office, the designation will be given to the former Eagledale Ferry Dock.

"This memorial proclaims that we should never again sacrifice liberty at the altar of fear," Inslee said in a press release issued after the vote. [Link]

At an upcoming gala, the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Association will honor Nisei (American-born) USC students who were impacted by the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.

The recognition will take place at the group's annual scholarship and awards gala on Friday, April 25, at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel.

As a result of the interment, some USC students in the era were denied degrees or access to academic records.

Martha Harris, USC senior vice president for university relations, will present the honors at the gala on behalf of USC President Steven B. Sample.

"The experience of these students is a stark reminder to us about the need for tolerance, understanding and respect," Harris said. "We look forward to welcoming these students back to the Trojan Family, and honoring their endurance and accomplishment." [Link]

Ethnic groups, such as Muslim Americans, historically targeted

The abuse of Japanese, German and Italian American civil rights during World War II is being repeated against ethnic groups associated with the Sept. 11 attacks, according to advocates who spoke Saturday during a traveling exhibit called "Inalienable: Immigrant Rights."

At least 50 attended Saturday's event at the Oakland Museum, organized by the Enemy Alien Files Consortium & Partners — a collaboration of several German, Japanese and Italian American rights and history groups. Enemy Alien Files describes the traveling exhibit as an opportunity to hold "multicultural, intergenerational dialogues on challenges to civil liberties during wartime."

Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are being profiled as "potentially dangerous persons" because of their ethnicity and religion, echoing theexperiences of World War II when nearly 1 million members of the Japanese, Italian and German communities were targeted because of their ancestry, organizers said.

"It already has happened again, and it's going to keep happening if we don't do something about it," said Rose Viscuso Scudero, whose family was once confined to their rural Clayton home because of their Italian descent.

As part of the U.S. government's World War II enemy alien program, Italian, German and Japanese communities in the U.S. were restricted geographically, forced to carry ID papers, had to observe curfews and were imprisoned arbitrarily without a hearing or their families knowing their whereabouts.

"I never thought, being born in America, (that) I would be treated like an enemy alien," Scudero said. "People are still condemning us for who we are."

The enemy alien program was separate from the internment of 120,000 U.S. citizens and resident immigrants of Japanese descent during World War II.

Another 6,000 people of Japanese, Italian and German ancestry in 13 Latin American countries — including citizens — were arbitrarily rounded up and forcibly sent to the United States to be interned in camps. The Enemy Alien Files Consortium contends that some were used in exchange for U.S. hostages held by Germany and Japan.

Saturday's event was intended to expose a hidden chapter in the country's history and give a human face to government policies and activities that are recurring today, said Grace Shimizu, a member of the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project.

The experiences of all the affected communities — past and present — are part of the history of this country, Shimizu added, referring to a rash of anti-Muslim sentiment that erupted in the wake of Sept. 11, including the detention of an estimated 2,000 men believed to be Muslims by local and state authorities.

In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department announced plans to map the city's Muslim community in order to identify potential extremists, according to the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. The plan was discarded a week later under harsh criticism.

"I am so sick of being afraid of people who are supposed to keep me safe," said Helema Buzayan, a University of California, Davis, student who was detained by police for questioning without a warrant following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Advocates said Latinos also are being caught up in post-Sept. 11 anti-immigrant profiling and policies such as arbitrary detention, as well as being mistaken for Arabs and Muslims.

Arrests, incarcerations, deportations and separations from homes are control methods the U.S. utilized in many parts of the world, said Yuri Kochiyama, a former internee whose Japanese immigrant father was arrested by the FBI after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

"We must not forget what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II," Kochiyama said. "And we must be vigilant to protect rights of Middle East immigrants who are being attacked today." [Link]

Our founders would have been mystified by the idea that the Supreme Court gets in the way during wartime. In fact, anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history would reject it. In times of armed conflict, the court has upheld almost everything our presidents have done, including acts as extreme as the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. If you are the president, it's not easy to lose a case in front of the Supreme Court during an armed conflict; you have to try hard to pull it off.

Yet, since the president announced his Guantanamo trial scheme in November 2001, and even as he has spent dozens of millions of dollars on it, his plan has not produced a single conviction at trial, and the administration has managed to lose three times in three years.

Moments after the Supreme Court sided with Hamdan in that third decision, which rejected the radical claim that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the war on terror, I rejected the predictable conclusion that "Bush lost." Instead, I stood on the steps of Gilbert's courthouse and said America had prevailed. A fourth-grade-educated Yemeni, accused of conspiring with one of the world's most evil men, brought his case against the world's most powerful man. He took his claim all the way to the Supreme Court. And he won. In few other countries could such a thing even be possible.

President Bush had an opportunity in 2006 to use the court's decision to America's advantage, by showcasing our strength as a people: In America, we let the court announce our leaders' mistakes in boldface print. Instead, the president decided to try, once again, to cut the Supreme Court out. That's why Guantanamo is back in Washington today—while Salim Hamdan is facing a tribunal that exists to avoid the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.

When Chief Justice Hughes laid the cornerstone of the new Supreme Court building in 1929, he proclaimed, "The republic endures, and this is the symbol of its faith." Whatever else might be said about the Guantanamo courtroom, it will never symbolize America or what it is about. [Link]

Canadians tend to see themselves as a generally tolerant, fair, and unbiased people. But if one of the treasures that we value as British Columbians and Canadians includes our constitutional rights, then we owe it to ourselves to visit places that illustrate how fragile those rights can sometimes be in moments of crisis.

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre is Canada's only interpretive centre that is dedicated to the memory of the uprooting and internment of more than 22,000 Canadians of Japanese heritage -- one of the worst violations of human rights in B.C. and Canadian history.

In 1942, in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war against Japan, the Canadian government passed an Order in Council authorizing the removal of "enemy aliens" within a 160-km radius of the B.C. coast. It didn't matter that the vast majority of these people were Canadian citizens and that most had been born in Canada. They were given 24 hours to pack a maximum of 68 kg of possessions (34 kg for children) before being displaced. Women, children and older people were sent to internment camps. Able-bodied men were forced into road-construction camps. Those who complained or violated a curfew were sent to prisoner of war facilities in Ontario. Meanwhile, their confiscated homes, furniture, cars and boats were sold off to pay for the cost of their internment.

As if this were not enough, at the end of the war, the government gave Japanese Canadians the choice of being "repatriated" to Japan and losing their Canadian citizenship, or moving to Eastern Canada. It was not until 1949 that they were allowed to return to the West Coast. By this time, for most Japanese Canadians, there was nothing to return to.

Those who believe that something like this could never happen again need only think of the Maher Arar case in which Canadian government agencies were complicit in the U.S. detention and forced removal of a Canadian citizen to Syria where he was tortured for nearly a year. Though in his case, it took only four years for the Canadian government to admit culpability and offer compensation, Japanese-Canadians were forced to wait 46 years for limited redress and an official apology. [Link]

George and Kim Semba were teenagers when they were hauled from their Washington state homes in 1942 and interned in the Idaho desert for their bloodlines, their last names, the shapes of their eyes.

Carried by trains, windows draped so passengers couldn't see where they were going, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans like the Sembas were trapped behind barbed wire during World War II at what became known as the Hunt Camp - a concentration camp in all but name.

After the war, the camp fell apart, returned to dust and sagebrush, and little was said about it. That's changing. The site became a historical monument by executive order in 2001. Since 2002, plans have been in the making to rebuild a portion of the camp, now called the Minidoka Internment National Monument, to its original condition.

Local historians, residents, even several American presidents say reconstructing the site is essential to remembering, to ensuring a place like the Hunt Camp never again exists on American soil. But not everyone agrees - including the Sembas, who were surprised to learn that several Idaho lawmakers introduced this spring a bill in Washington, D.C., to expand the camp.

For some of us, learning from history means looking it in the face. For others, the pain simply cuts too deep to revisit our pasts.

"I just want to forget about that place," said Kim Semba. Now, she returns to the site only to show curious friends the place she suffered so much misery. She never enjoys the visits - trips that spark painful memories of cramped living conditions, armed guards, white Idaho children on the other side of the barbed wire who hollered "Jap" whenever Kim came near.

A push to remember

Others insist on commemorating the site. The National Park Service, which now manages the camp, wants to nearly double the size of the monument and either move or reconstruct original buildings on the property. The NPS hosted 28 public meetings about the expansion since 2005, said monument superintendent Neil King, and most of the feedback has been positive. Even from former internees, many of whom flock to the site each year for an annual pilgrimage.

In March, Idaho Sens. Larry Craig and Mike Crapo and Rep. Mike Simpson introduced legislation to expand the monument to include Bainbridge Island, Wash., where the first Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to internment camps such as Hunt Camp.

Earlier this month, the College of Southern Idaho hosted a civil rights symposium centered on the memorial's history. And most recently, the memorial was named one of America's most endangered historic places - because of a proposed animal feedlot nearby - by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in an effort to boost interest in the camp.

However painful, it's necessary to acknowledge history, said Russ Tremayne, a professor of history at the College of Southern Idaho.

"The monument is like a cemetery," he said. "It's historically significant." And despite the Sembas' reluctance to embrace the camp, "these are their stories," Tremayne said. "This is something that they've buried. But history doesn't get buried. Historians might, but history never does."

A push to forget

So why all the attention now, after the camp sat unnoticed for decades, crumbling back into dust?

"If you look at the dark, ugly depths of our history, those take a long time to come out," King said. "We're just now sort of bringing it out of the closet."

The Sembas would prefer that door stay closed. Rebuilding the camp will do little to quell racism, they said; it may even incite it. George and Kim, now both in their 80s, have lived a lifetime and are yet to understand why they were treated so poorly - why they're sometimes still treated poorly.

"We were American citizens," George said. "We'd never even been to Japan."

George's former high school buddies stopped talking to him after Pearl Harbor. Just one friend ever bothered to send him a letter after the war. After being released from the camp with only the clothes on their backs, the Sembas were migrant laborers, making less than a dollar an hour stooping in Idaho farm fields. They saved their money, and eventually bought a farm south of Twin Falls where they worked until they retired to town several years ago.

Even now, after so many years, the Sembas said racism is still palpable. "There are some people that understand," George said. "But there are still people who are sometimes mean to us."

Perhaps it's to shield themselves from a lifetime of discrimination that the Sembas now shy away from the Hunt Camp. They're tired of talking to reporters about it. Tired of taking visiting friends to the site. Tired of thinking about a time and place that defined their lives, perhaps for the worse.

"That place is terrible," said Kim. "There's nothing there for anyone." [Link]

It's approaching six years since the 9/11 attacks but, as two recent sets of judicial rulings illustrate, America is still at odds with itself over its war on terrorism -- and how to treat captives.

Is the globe America's battlefield? Is al Qaeda ideology and the war on terrorism like Soviet communism and the Cold War, meaning an American president can someday declare victory?

Or, in the view of U.S. law, is it more like the drug war -- with no end in sight -- picking off alleged criminals one by one?

And, most critically, there is still no consensus about whether to treat U.S.-held captives as alleged criminals afforded a presumption of innocence or as enemy combatants allowed no recourse in federal court.

In other words, when does the Bush administration get to treat those it brands as ''terrorists'' as criminals? When are they warriors?

Legal scholars say the federal judiciary has traditionally deferred to presidential authority in time of war. And that has more or less been the case since the Sept. 11 attacks. But the latest rulings suggest that the pendulum may be swinging back to the courts.

Last week, a conservative federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., decided 2-1 that the clock ran out on the president's designation of Ali al Marri, 42, as an enemy combatant. He has been in a military brig in South Carolina since June 2003.

Marri and his family arrived in the United States Sept. 10, 2001, ostensibly to attend graduate school in Peoria, Ill. But the Bush administration claims he is an al Qaeda ''sleeper agent'' who met Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

'Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing in the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them `enemy combatants,' '' wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz in a 77-page decision.

The Justice Department said it would appeal to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, one of the most conservative circuits in the country. Unless the U.S. transfers him to a civilian proceeding, releases him or deports him, one side or the other is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former Bush administration deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo, an architect of the policy, said the matter of how to handle detainees designated enemy combatants should have been already settled.

Twice the Supreme Court sought to give certain rights to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as a result of the war on terror. And twice, Yoo said, Congress and President Bush overruled them, with the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, which stripped non-U.S. citizens designated by Bush as enemy combatants of the right to challenge their detention in federal court through habeas corpus.

'BIZARRE' OPINION

He called the appellate court decision an ''outlier'' by judges who don't agree that America is engaged in a global war on terrorism. He expects the full Fourth Circuit to overrule them.

The judiciary defers to the executive and Congress in a time of war, he said, and as he sees it, America is at war with al Qaeda, not battling a criminal enterprise.

''It's completely bizarre. Under this opinion, none of the 9/11 hijackers were enemy combatants,'' Yoo said by phone from Berkeley Law School in California, where he is a professor.

Suppose the passengers aboard the fourth airliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field in 2001 had wrestled control of the plane from the hijackers and landed it safely? he asked.

``According to this opinion, the hijackers on that plane could not be enemy combatants. They would have to be given lawyers, Miranda warnings and a jury trial.''

Precisely, say opponents of enemy combatant policy who argue the executive branch got it wrong by assuming the power to have the military detain -- indefinitely, without charge or trial. In the instance of Marri, in fact, without any review.

A Defense Department spokesman said as long as the court appeal was under way, the Pentagon would not be staging a so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunal in which U.S. military officers, not judges, simulate a battlefield status hearing to determine if there is reason to hold him.

That very process was at the heart of a dispute that saw not one, but two, U.S. military judges dismiss charges against a Canadian and Yemeni at Guantánamo.

Neither Navy Capt. Keith Allred nor Army Col. Peter Brownback III, the judges, dispute that they are at war. In fact, their roles presiding at the military commissions are conditioned on the assumption. But they said the Pentagon's own processes had -- so far -- failed to distinguish between captives who were legitimately on the battlefield, and therefore ''lawful enemy combatants,'' and those who either fought unfairly or didn't have the right to be there -- ``unlawful enemy combatants.''

The overarching issue reflects an evolving process across the years on how to categorize and hold captives, and a continuing debate on whether they are to be treated as criminals or combatants, said constitutional law scholar Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine University.

LAW TAKING SHAPE

Before 9/11, he said, there was no law that would govern a war on terrorism that ranged across the globe. ''It was largely undeveloped and unstructured before we confronted it, and it's only beginning to take shape now,'' he said.

That's why it's no coincidence, he said, that the Supreme Court this year left to lower courts to grapple with the latest challenges to the war tribunals and habeas corpus stripping provisions.

Tradition and precedent has allowed the president vast powers in times of war.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and used military tribunals -- only drawing a Supreme Court rebuke in 1866, once the war was over. During World War II, the justices upheld Franklin Roosevelt's executive order authorizing the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans -- and it took until 1988 for Congress and a president, Ronald Reagan, to apologize. [Link]

Last night, the U.S. Senate passed legislation authored by Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) to examine the treatment of German Americans, Italian Americans and other European Americans during World War II as well as Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The legislation passed as an amendment to the Immigration Reform Bill. Senator Feingold made the following statement on the legislation’s passage today:

“I am pleased that the Senate overwhelmingly voted for an official government study of how German Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish refugees were treated by our government during World War II. I first introduced this legislation in 2001 after hearing from a group of German Americans in Wisconsin who were concerned that this sad chapter in our nation’s history had gone unnoticed for too long. It was only decades after World War II that they felt comfortable coming forward to ask for this acknowledgement. I thought it was only appropriate for a country that prides itself on equality and justice to acknowledge and learn from its mistakes.

“Americans are rightly proud of our victory in World War II, but while there has been study of the internment and relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, few people know about our government’s failure to protect the basic rights of German and Italian Americans. We also must understand why, as the United States heroically battled fascism, our government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, delivering many of them to their deaths at the hands of the Nazi regime. By passing my legislation, we can learn from these tragedies while some of the people who survived these injustices are still with us.” [Link]

The score is tied as the runner leads off third base, the batter tenses and the pitcher gets ready to deliver. The crowd in the small-town ballpark holds its collective breath as the battle between two local rivals comes down to the last inning and the last pitch.

A little earlier, the lovers, who had been separated by her father, share a tender, hidden moment under the grandstand.

Except ... this is 1944, the game is between the local community’s ballclub and a team of Japanese Americans interned in a nearby relocation camp in rural Utah, and there’s a lot more at stake than a game of baseball.

American Pastime, a new movie released last week on DVD (Warner Home Video, $19.98, not rated) and enjoying a limited theatrical run in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Fresno, Salt Lake City and Tokyo, is set in Utah’s Topaz internment camp during World War II. Beginning early in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent—of whom about 75 percent were U.S. citizens—were forcibly removed from their homes and locked up in camps in isolated parts of the country.

To help themselves survive, many of the internees played their favorite sport—baseball....

Baseball was important to the internees, says [Kerry Yo] Nakagawa, “because it raised the spirits of the people and brought normalcy to a very abnormal condition and situation.”

For Nakano, although “baseball was a way that could let an audience into the movie,” he “wanted it to work on a level where a general audience would be able to understand the story....”

Both Nakano and [writer-director Desmond] Nakagawa have high hopes that their film will help educate all Americans—particularly young people—about the internment camps yet also reveal parallels to contemporary American society.

“I think our film really resonates today,” says Nakagawa. “We now have Arab Americans, Sikh Americans, Muslim Americans really feeling the racial profiling and hatred after 9/11. And currently, Mexican Americans are having to deal with xenophobia. ... We hoped that we would have learned the lessons of the past and therefore wouldn’t repeat them.” [Link]

Justice Stephen Breyer on Saturday stressed the role of the Supreme Court in protecting civil liberties in an age of terrorism.

At a public appearance in Brussels, Belgium, the justice said the high court made a mistake in World War II when it said the relocation of Japanese-Americans in internment camps was constitutional.

Believing a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was possible, President Roosevelt set the program in motion.

"We should have a tough law protecting civil liberties; and if the president thinks that it has to be broken, save the country, he'll break it," Breyer said. "I used to rather sympathize with that point of view, but I don't anymore."

Breyer did not mention President Bush or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the site of a U.S. prison where nearly 400 detainees have been held indefinitely, some for five years.

In its 6-3 decision in 1944, the Supreme Court said it is permissible to curtail civil rights of a racial group when there is a pressing public necessity.

Breyer related the history of the internment of the Japanese-Americans from personal knowledge. Breyer, who was born in San Francisco in 1938, said he was 6 years old when his mother pointed and said, "That's where they held the Japanese."

Also appearing with Breyer was Georgetown law professor Viet Dinh, who drafted the original Patriot Act in 2001 while serving in the Justice Department shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dinh said public acceptance of tough law enforcement measures is changing.

As the threat of terrorism "dissipates in the public imagination and importance in the public debate, obviously the public acceptance of measures and restrictions wane and that's when we start thinking about the rules of the road for the long haul," said Dinh.

Breyer and Dinh participated at the Brussels Forum, an annual trans-Atlantic security conference. [Link]

Six decades of hidden anger and pain will go public this weekend at the largest gathering yet to publicize the World War II incarceration in the United States of almost 15,000 residents with ties to Germany and Italy.

While the forced detention during World War II of Japanese living in the United States is now widely known, neglected on the pages of history books is the imprisonment in the 1940s of thousands of Germans and Italians living in America in bleak camps in California, North Dakota and Texas, among other states.

Today, men and women who as children lived in the camps, or whose parents were incarcerated there, will gather in San Mateo to launch a fresh bid to move this forgotten chapter in U.S. history from obscurity and onto the stage of public debate.

"Americans needs to decide what they think about this program," said Karen Ebel, a conference panelist and daughter of 87-year-old Max Ebel, a German American interned at age 22. "This happened to European people, and it can happen to just about anyone, depending the circumstances in the world." The three-hour conference, funded with a $10,000 state grant, is called "The Hidden Stories of World War II." It opens with poignant testimonials about the camps from the six panelists, five with direct experience of the camps.

Linking that 1940s social upheaval with current times, panelists will discuss what they view as history repeating itself with treatment of U.S. residents of Arabian descent, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks....

The "Hidden Stories of World War II" conference is free and open to the public. It will be from 1 to 4 p.m. today at the San Mateo Public Library, 55 W. Third. Ave., San Mateo. Performances of the "Freedom Lost" plays, which are also free, begin at 7:30 p.m. today in the Little Theater at Hillsdale High School, 3115 Del Monte St., San Mateo. Call (650) 522-7800 for information on the conference and (650) 558-2699 for information about the plays. [Link]

Japanese-Americans hope country doesn't forget

A Japanese-American internment camp in central Utah that confined some 8,000 people during World War II will join the ranks of some of the most historic sites in America.

The Interior Department announced Wednesday that the Topaz Camp, near Delta about 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, will be recognized as a National Historic Landmark, a designation granted to fewer than 2,500 U.S. locations.

The camp, now mostly a windswept field, was used during the war to confine Japanese-Americans and recent immigrants as racial fears increased; nine other camps also held those of Japanese descent during the war, and five of those have earned a similar historic designation.

To Grace Oshita, who was taken from her San Francisco home at 17 and spent three years at the rural Utah camp, the recognition as a national landmark is an important distinction she hopes will help future generations recall the infamous policy.

"A mistake like that if you know about it, it might not happen again," says Oshita, now 82 and living in Salt Lake City. "But so many don't know what we went through." [Link]

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief to be filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“Their interest is in avoiding the repetition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history,” the brief states.

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

But the brief being filed today is a rare case of members of a third generation stepping up to defend legal protections that were lost to their grandparents, and that their parents devoted their lives to reclaiming.

“I feel that racial profiling is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable,” Ms. Yasui, 53, wrote in an e-mail message from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she works as a writer and graphic designer. “That my grandmother was treated by the U.S. government as a ‘dangerous enemy alien’ was a travesty. And it killed my grandfather.”

Prof. Eric L. Muller, a legal historian at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said he contacted Ms. Yasui and the others after reading about the decision by the federal judge, John Gleeson. Both sides in the case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft— a lead plaintiff is Ibrahim Turkmen — appealed parts of the decision by Judge Gleeson. He let the Muslims’ lawsuit continue, mainly on their claims of unlawful detention conditions, but dismissed key elements of their discrimination claims.

Asked to comment, the Justice Department would not discuss the Turkmen case, but its appeal argues in part that government officials “were confronted with unprecedented law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks,” and that “there were no clear judicial precedents in this extraordinary context.”

Professor Muller said he drafted the brief on behalf of the three grandchildren to try to persuade the Second Circuit to reject what he considers the needless breadth of Judge Gleeson’s opinion. “Judge Gleeson’s decision paints with such a broad brush, there isn’t really any stopping point,” he said.

The judge held that under immigration law, “the executive is free to single out ‘nationals of a particular country.’ ” And because so little was known about the 9/11 hijackers, he ruled, singling out Arab Muslims for detention to investigate possible ties to terrorism, though “crude,” was not “so irrational or outrageous as to warrant judicial intrusion into an area in which courts have little experience and less expertise.”

The brief counters that the ruling “overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a ‘fundamental injustice’ warranting an apology and the payment of reparations.”

And, it adds, the district court’s deference to the government “ignores the tragic consequences of such deference” for 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. [Link]

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Portland native Kennie Namba was ordered to a Japanese-American internment camp in California. He opened the discussion. Namba said the perception of Japanese-Americans "changed considerably" after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was forced into an internment camp where, from behind barbed wire, he watched sentries with machine guns pacing atop a platform ready to shoot prisoners who attempted to escape.

Despite being classified by the U.S. government as an "enemy alien," Namba succeeded in volunteering for the U.S. Army and subsequently serving in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which remains today the most decorated unit in American history. During the war, Namba earned six medals, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Despite his service and the conclusion of the war, Namba remained subject to discrimination in his home country. Peering solemnly over his bifocals, Namba remembered going grocery shopping with his wife, reaching the register only to be told by the owner that the store did not serve Japanese. "That really got me," Namba said. "What in the hell did we fight the war for?"

Namba said he remains perplexed by the discrimination he encounters even today. He finds great importance in sharing his life story with others in Oregon and around the nation, especially with other Japanese-Americans.

"We are as good as anyone else in our community," Namba said, "and I want Japanese-Americans to think that way and feel that way." [Link]

Art Shibayama is an American who served in the Army during the Korean War. Like many veterans, Cpl. Shibayama was not born in the United States. He was born in Lima, Peru, to Japanese Peruvian parents. Until 1942, Shibayama, his two brothers and three sisters lived comfortably with their parents and grandparents, all of whom had thriving businesses. However, after America entered World War II, his family was forcibly removed from Peru, transported to the United States and held in a government-run internment camp in Crystal City, Tex.

Like many Japanese American families, Shibayama's family lost everything they owned. But the greater injustice occurred when his grandparents were sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. Their family never saw them again.

Shibayama and his family were among the estimated 2,300 people of Japanese descent from 13 Latin American countries who were taken from their homes and forcibly transported to the Crystal City camp during World War II. The U.S. government orchestrated and financed the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans for use in prisoner-of-war exchanges with Japan. Eight hundred people were sent across the Pacific, while the remaining Japanese Latin Americans were held in camps without due process until after the war ended.

Further study of the events surrounding the deportation and incarceration of Japanese Latin Americans is merited and necessary. While most Americans are aware of the internment of Japanese Americans, few know about U.S. government activities in other countries that were fueled by prejudice against people of Japanese ancestry.

That is why we have introduced H.R. 662, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act. We should review U.S. military and State Department directives requiring the relocation, detention and deportation of Japanese Latin Americans to Axis countries. Then we should recommend appropriate remedies. It is the right thing to do to affirm our commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

This year marks the 26th anniversary of the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, whose findings led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It provided an official apology and financial redress to most of the Japanese Americans who were subjected to wrongdoing and confined in camps during World War II. Those loyal Americans were vindicated by the fact that not a single documented case of sabotage or espionage was committed by a Japanese American during that time. This act was the culmination of a half-century of struggle to bring justice to those who were denied it. But work to rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our nation's history remains unfinished.

U.S. involvement in the expulsion and internment of people of Japanese descent who lived in various Latin American countries is thoroughly recorded in government files. These civilians were robbed of their freedom -- their civil and human rights thrown by the wayside -- as they were kidnapped from nations not directly involved in World War II. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians acknowledged these federal actions in detaining and interning civilians of enemy or foreign nationality, particularly those of Japanese ancestry, but the commission failed to fully examine and report on the historical documents that exist in distant archives.

Today, the Day of Remembrance, marks the anniversary of the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 -- the document that made it possible to intern thousands of Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Though it is important that we remember what took place, it is more critical that we act, for justice delayed is justice denied. And for the dwindling number of surviving internees who became Americans, such as Cpl. Art Shibayama, justice has been delayed far too long. They deserve our attention, our respect and the official recognition of a country that is willing to heal and to make amends. [Link]