Some of the critics of these sessions have compared them to the harassment that Japanese-Americans endured after Pearl Harbor, culminating in the travesty of their internment in concentration camps. Muller correctly points out that this comparison is not quite apt; the bulk of the questioning has been aimed at Iraqi nationals, and most of the questioning is reasonable and normal. After all, the FBI would be falling down on the job if it weren't collecting intelligence on Iraqi nationals.
However, TalkLeft and Atrios have both pointed out that the interviews have in fact included some American citizens. More to the point, the Iraqi community clearly perceives them as a kind of harassment, especially because of the accusatory nature of much of the questioning. And this does indeed raise the specter of the Japanese-American internment.
I fall somewhere in between. Interviewing and even detaining nationals of an enemy nation has always been a legitimate exercise of authority during wartime. And the FBI's stated purpose -- to counter terrorism, curb hate crimes and track down illegal immigrants -- is clearly appropriate. Civil libertarians need to back off and allow law enforcement to do its work without waving the bloody shirt of the internment camps at every corner. After all, the mass detention of Japanese nationals immediately after Pearl Harbor has never been contested, was widely accepted at the time, and was not one of the acts for which Congress later made reparations.
On the other hand, this does not mean these detentions were not problematic. Indeed, the way they were handled was a separate travesty that became inextricably bound up with the internment itself. The history around them should be considered a cautionary fable for our times too.
Within the first few days after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents swept through the Japanese-American communities of the Pacific Coast and arrested some 1,268 Japanese men, nearly all of them first-generation Issei who, because of the legal prohibition that existed then against Asian naturalization, were still Japanese nationals, though many of them had been stateside for over a generation. (It should be noted that this situation differs quite a bit from that facing today's Iraqis.)
These arrests were made possible because as early as 1936, President Roosevelt had foreseen the possibility of war with Japan and had ordered preparations begun for handling the possibility of sabotage or espionage from Japanese Americans; as I pointed out earlier, FDR was a believer in the "Yellow Peril" conspiracy theories and was clearly inclined to view the Japanese as potential traitors. Apprised of contacts between Japanese living in Hawaii and Japanese merchant ships that docked at Oahu, FDR ordered that any immigrants who had such contacts should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble. He thus set into motion the wheels of the nation's intelligence-gathering agencies -- initially the Office of Naval Intelligence, which wound up gathering some of this data through diplomatic-cable intercepts, and then the FBI -- and later expanded this surveillance to the mainland in 1939. By 1941 federal authorities had built dossiers on more than 2,000 potential suspects.
These men were identified by three categories:
- A: "Known dangerous" suspects, people who were influential within their respective communities or who, because of their work were considered likely members of a "fifth column" of enemy spies.
B: "Potentially dangerous" people who were suspected of disloyalty but who had not been investigated yet.
C: Suspects who had demonstrated pro-Japanese leanings or engaged in pro-Japanese propaganda. Under this category, mere participation in local community associations could land a person in the FBI's dossiers.
These arrests, of course, had considerable ramifications inside the Nikkei communities. Since nearly every leading figure was in detention, the remaining members were awash at sea, fearful of what was about to befall them, and utterly without any kind of voice or representation. FBI and other documents released later made it clear that this was very much part of the intent of the arrests -- to render any remaining community essentially headless.
And of course, they had the effect of completely terrorizing the Nikkei communities. In Bellevue, for example, three community leaders -- one of them actually a Nisei citizen -- were arrested. Since the arrests affected only three Bellevue families, and since the authorities had hinted darkly that these three, like the others being held, might have participated in Japan-sponsored sabotage and espionage, their imprisonment made only a ripple in Bellevue, at least among the community at large. But among the Japanese, it cast a black pall over everyone.
"Yes, they got picked up right away, and then everything got even more panicky," recalls Mitsuko Hashiguchi, who grew up on her parents' Bellevue farm and had taken charge of it in 1940. She says the arrests had everyone in the community looking over their shoulders, or waiting for a knock at the door to come at night: "Who's gonna be picked up next?"
This was only one of the ways that officials harassed the remaining Nikkei communities. Next came the curfew, which required every Japanese person to be inside their home by 8 p.m. Then came firings from school-district jobs, bus drivers refusing to pick up Japanese schoolchildren, and the unending barrage of verbal attacks against anyone of Japanese descent.
Finally, these arrests also formed the cornerstone of the utter destruction of rural Nikkei communities that resulted from the internment (which phenomenon is the main subject of my forthcoming book, Strawberry Days). The land losses suffered by the persons arrested formed the start of what would become a pattern along the West Coast.
Take, for example, the case of Minoru Yasui, who had come to the United States in 1903, and become one of the pillars of the then-young Hood River, Oregon, orcharding community. By 1942 his business interests were worth an estimated half-million dollars. These assets were frozen by the Treasury Department when he was arrested.
Held at Fort Missoula, Mont., Yasui (like all the detainees) went before a detention hearing board in the spring of 1942 to determine his status (a number of those who had been arrested were in fact determined to have been inappropriately arrested and were released to join their families at the internment camps). Even though Yasui was co-owner of a thousand acres of farm and orchard land, member of the Rotary and the Apple Growers Association, a leader of the local Methodist Church, yet when he went before the board, only his past associations with Japanese civic organizations, including the award he received from the Emperor for promoting American-Japanese relations, were considered relevant.
"The proceedings were a complete farce," later recalled his son, Minoru, himself a Nisei activist whose challenge of the curfew laws in Portland would eventually wind its way before the U.S. Supreme Court, and who attended his father's hearings. "The most incredible thing was when they produced childlike drawings of the Panama Canal showing detailed drawings of how the locks worked. The hearing officer took these out and asked, 'Mr. Yasui, what are these?' Dad looked at the drawings and diagrams and said, 'They look like drawings of the Panama Canal.' They were so labeled, with names of the children. Then the officer asked my father to explain why they were in our home. 'If they were in my home,' my father replied, 'it seems to me that they were drawings done by my children for their schoolwork.'
"The officer then asked, 'Didn't you have these maps and diagrams so you could direct the blowing up of the canal locks?' My father said, 'Oh no! These are just the schoolwork of my children.' The officer said, 'No, we think you've cleverly disguised your nefarious intent and are using your children merely as a cover. We believe you had intent to damage the Panama Canal.' To which my father vehemently replied, 'No, no, no!' And then the officer said pointedly, 'Prove that you didn't intend to blow up the Panama Canal!' " Masuo Yasui was remanded to the custody of federal authorities and kept in Army prison camps until the spring of 1946. When he finally returned home, he had lost everything, and wound up retiring in relative poverty in Portland.
The lesson behind all this history is that these kinds of detentions and interrogations may have an official legitimacy, but they hold the potential for a world of abuse that can be extremely damaging to the target communities. Already in its handling of Muslims after 9/11, the government has engaged in questionable practices that not only concern Muslims but have raised the hackles of Japanese-Americans, including the disappearances of Muslim men after showing up at INS offices to register. And as Jeralyn at TalkLeft has documented, the recent FBI interviews have at least in some cases been conducted with such a heavy hand as to raise questions about whether they are being used, once again, to harass the Iraqi community.
These interviews are not problematic in themselves. But the FBI's conduct so far should raise some serious red flags.
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