Ms. Malkin's facts

Semi-responding to her critics, Michelle Malkin complains about a CBS anchor named Julie Chen, who administered the following "cheap shot" during a press conference with President Bush:

I wanted to ask you about protecting all Americans, as well. There are many Arab Americans and Muslims in this country who find themselves unfairly scrutinized by law enforcement and by society at large. Just yesterday we had arrests in Albany, New York. Immediately afterwards, some neighbors in the community said they feared that the law would come for them unfairly next. We have a new book out today that suggests perhaps we should reconsider internment camps. How do we balance the need to pursue and detain some individuals from not well-known communities, while at the same time keeping innocent people from being painted by the broad brush of suspicion?

Just a reminder: The book's title is In Defense of Internment. It clearly calls for a reassessment of the meaning of the World War II internment, evacuation and "relocation" process.

Does anyone else see a "cheap shot" there? Hm. Me neither.

In any event, as you can see, Michelle promptly fired off a letter to Julie Chen -- who among other slots at CBS, is the host of the game show "Big Brother" -- outlining her thinking. Evidently, Michelle believes that writing a defense of the Japanese American internment and linking it to post-9/11 racial profiling should not lead anyone to conclude that she was suggesting that internment is an appropriate response in the current "war on terror". Heavens no. She's only laying down the dots. God forbid anyone would connect them.

Well, in any event, before firing off her nasty letter, Michelle forgot to perform one of those good ol' Journalism 101 functions: Double-check your source.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Because this is the kind of approach to basic standards of factuality we've come to expect from Malkin.

Malkin was clearly working from the White House transcript, which as it turns out, misidentified the questioner.

Had Malkin taken the time to, say, review the tape or double-check by placing a quick phone call with UNITY officials, she'd have discovered that the questioner was none other than CBS's Joie Chen.

Now Malkin has two more letters to write: An apology to Julie Chen. And a nastygram to Joie Chen. Though she might want to forget the latter, since A) Chen's question was eminently reasonable and fairly put, and B) the more she continues with this "but I didn't mean to defend internment!" (or: "I'm just defending internment then, I'm not defending it now!") line, the more ridiculous Malkin makes herself appear (a real feat in itself).

But hey -- that hasn't stopped her yet.

Racism and the 'relocation centers'

A little background

I have a little bit of professional background with Michelle Malkin. Back in 1994, I was working at the Bellevue Journal American as the editorial-page assistant, having an extended background in copy editing prior to that (I was just coming off a 3-year stint as the paper's news editor).

The JA was -- in keeping with the Republican-dominated Eastside -- a pretty conservative paper, and Michelle was one of our stable of columnists. We had picked her up from the L.A. Daily News, and were one of the few daily papers to do so. I had the job of editing Michelle's column, and occasionally had to phone her up with questions about factual issues.

Back then, she was really pretty responsive to such queries. If I happened to spot a factual problem with her piece, she was quite good about correcting it before we went to print. And if issues arose later (as they sometimes did with her work), she was reasonably straightforward, if occasionally evasive.

In any event, her stint with us evidently helped serve as a springboard for her being hired (by Mindy Cameron, a longtime friend and colleague) as a full-time columnist for the Seattle Times in 1996. She made a name for herself as a bit of a controversialist over the next three years. As her tenure progressed, there were increasing concerns raised over the professionalism and accuracy.

In early February of 1999, Malkin was really on a roll. First came a column attacking the state's Democratic attorney general for allegedly allowing drug criminals to get off scot-free. Then came another column attacking a local news-talk TV program for its failure to handle her in the high manner to which she was accustomed.

The former inspired, in short order, a letter from the state Attorney General's office pointing out that Malkin failed to even contact that office before attacking it (which those of us in the business knew constituted a Journalism 101 violation of basic ethics). It also pointed out several major errors of fact.

The latter column brought a lively response from her intended victim at the news-talk show, also pointing out the Malkin's version of "facts" are not always aligned with reality.

Malkin's journalistic standards (or lack thereof) clearly were a problem, and were remarked upon widely, especially in area newsrooms. I have no idea whether it affected her status at the Times, but Malkin announced in August she was moving on (though the paper continued running her occasional columns filed from her new home in Washington, D.C.).

She got in her own departing licks a little while after that. In the wake of the WTO riots that November, Malkin penned a singularly nasty column telling the city it deserved everything it got. As numerous respondents pointed out, Malkin couldn't even get her facts straight again -- but she sure was good at playing the vengeful loser.

[For an excellent and quite thorough examination of Malkin's career after leaving Seattle, be sure to check out Matt Stoller's lengthy exegesis about Malkin and the people who are behind her.]

Bad roots, bad fruit

In any event, it really is not any surprise to see Malkin once again hoist on the petard of the bad journalism that is the inevitable product of the ideologue -- having written an entire book attempting to defend one of the great historical blots on America's past, a book so misbegotten it should permanently stain her career.

Malkin, in keeping with her history here, has produced an ideological work that discards basic standards of truthfulness, accuracy and fairness -- not to mention basic decency -- all in the pursuit of "proving" a thesis whose factual basis is nearly nonexistent. And in the process, she's attempting not just to revise but to falsify history, just like David Irving and the Holocaust deniers, or Steve Wilkins and the slavery deniers. It is a contemptible enterprise.

In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is not just a deeply flawed book, it is a deeply dishonest one. As Tim Wu (posting at Lawrence Lessig's blog) observes, this text is a case of Orwellian "Blackwhite":

... or "a willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this." In its advanced form it leads to "the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

Michelle Malkin, a journalist, has released a book that is does just this: it defends the eviction and incarceration of more than 70,000 American citizens during World War II. Her book "In Defense of Internment," takes the position that the Government was right to round up the Japanese then, and Arab-Americans now. The mainstream position that the internment was wrong (expressed in Ronald Reagan's apology), Malkin attributes to a "conspiracy."

It is true that, on rare occasion, something everything takes for granted is wrong, like, say, the Bohr model of the Atom. But more often, moral sense is restored by rebuttal --- we remember that black is, in fact, black, and regain our senses. This time sense is restored by this week's must-read Volokh Conspiracy which features two historians who destroy the book in every aspect. Malkin, it turns out, is more Ahmad Chalabi than Albert Einstein.

The first of those two historians is Eric Muller of Is That Legal? and the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II, who was guest-blogging at Volokh. He wound up producing seven posts of his own material there:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Joining Muller in the fusillade was Greg Robinson, a highly regarded historian and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, who contributed four posts' worth of rebuttal as well:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Over at his own blog, Muller continued the argument, responding to Malkin's tepid rejoinders at her blog. These exchanges produced five more posts from Muller:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

And two more from Robinson:

Part 6
Part 7

These posts generally cover most of the flaws in Malkin's text -- as well as her responses to the criticism -- thoroughly and accurately. Indeed, they were so thorough that, having read Malkin's book, there isn't a great deal to add. Certainly, it isn't necessary; Muller and Robinson's critique is devastating and nearly complete. My comments, as such, are only intended to be complementary.

My only difference with their responses (and it is a slight one) lies in how civilized and polite both of them were in responding to Malkin. My own experience in reading Malkin's tome was one of continuously rising outrage at the utter mendaciousness and viciousness of spirit it reveals in the author and those who chose to publish this tract. I have no inclination to remain so constrained.

Undoubtedly, my response is due to having come to know, on a personal level, many of the 25 or so Nisei internees -- and the dozen of their Caucasian contemporaries -- I interviewed in the process of compiling and writing Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of a Japanese American Community (due out next spring from Palgrave/Macmillan). I consider many of them my friends (though in the 14 years since I began interviewing them, many of them have passed away), and I still feel somewhat keenly the monstrousness of the injustice they endured. For a self-aggrandizing hack like Malkin to trivialize it as an "inconvenience" -- as she does throughout her text -- frankly makes my blood boil. The callousness of her dishonesty puts her beneath contempt. There is a moral component to Malkin's misbegotten enterprise that cannot and should not be overlooked.

The trifecta

The giveaway, really, comes on the book's flyleaf, which announces:

Everything you've been taught about the World War II 'internment camps' is wrong:

-- They were not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria

-- They did not target only those of Japanese descent

-- They were not Nazi-style death camps.

Malkin largely reproduces this argument in the Introduction, and she deploys it throughout; yet a relatively simple examination of these three core points makes clear the fundamental dishonesty of her argument. Malkin -- as is her wont -- examines only a narrow spectrum of facts, embroiders them with speculation and non-facts, and presents them as reality.

Malkin's handling of "facts" throughout her text follows this trend. She refers, for instance, to "thousands of Nisei in the Japanese army," when in fact the American-born Japanese to which she refers actually were Kibei, or returned nationals. She emphasizes frequently that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who opposed the internment, "was not privy to the MAGIC cables" -- and falsely reports that Hoover "occasionally received MAGIC-derived information about Japan's espionage networks attributed to 'highly reliable sources.'" In point of fact, as Greg Robinson points out, Hoover actually received regular, detailed summaries of the MAGIC intelligence and was aware not only of their contents but their source. She also neglects to note that the Office of Naval Intelligence -- which gathered the entirety of the MAGIC cables -- also opposed the internment.

The second point of the three above ("They did not target only those of Japanese descent") is a crystalline example of Malkin's approach to "factuality". She's quite right in pointing out that Italian and German nationals were also placed in internment camps during the war. What is omitted from this point is the fact that only Japanese American citizens were rounded up en masse in what Malkin generically refers to as the "internment" -- which was not the case, of course, for Italian American or German American citizens. But this omission points to an underlying confusion between American citizens and foreign nationals which so proliferates Malkin's text that one must reach the conclusion that it is intentional.

'Ethnic Japanese'

The core of Malkin's thesis, in fact, relies on a rhetorical trick that is rooted in precisely this confusion -- namely, her frequent use of the phrase "ethnic Japanese" to describe her subjects. As Greg Robinson has already observed, this phrase is so broad that allows Malkin to lump American-born citizens in with Japanese-born spies. Which is precisely what she does: After repeatedly referring to American-born Nisei as "ethnic Japanese", she uses the same phrase to describe Japanese spies and operatives working from inside consulates. "Ethnic Japanese" is Malkin's handy umbrella term for erasing the differences between enemy nationals and American citizens. (I haven't been able to count up every use, but my guesstimate is that the phrase appears in her text roughly 100 times.)

This was, of course, exactly the confusion that prevailed in 1942 and which was deliberately spread by racists and hatemongers in arguing for incarcerating Nisei citizens, summed up in the popular phrase, "A Jap's a Jap."

You can see how Malkin dishonestly manipulates the term, for instance, her attempt to rebut the point I raised previously regarding the contents of the MAGIC cables -- namely, that the cables consistently showed that Japan actually distrusted the Nisei and preferred, for a number of reasons, to recruit Caucasians and blacks to do their spy work:

The MAGIC messages do indeed provide definitive evidence that Japan sought or used ethnic non-Japanese for espionage activities -- a fact that was well known to U.S. intelligence agencies at the time. But MAGIC also showed diplomats discussing Nisei and Issei agents by name, asserting that "absolutely reliable" ethnic Japanese agents [ed.: these were spies from Japan working for the consulate] were monitoring shipments of war materiel and airplanes in Southern California, and reporting that "our second generation draftees in the U.S. Army" were collecting intelligence on matters pertaining to the U.S. military. There was no mention of "absolutely reliable" white or black agents; nor was there any mention of white or black agents in the U.S. military.

This is, of course, a lot of thrashing about logically in hopes of evading the main point, which is that if we were to follow Malkin's logic and use ethnic profiling for those most likely to be committing espionage and sabotage for Japan, based on the MAGIC cables, Caucasians and blacks would have been the first groups chosen. Malkin never does get around to addressing this issue.

This is, by extension, one of the main logical flaws in Malkin's larger argument in favor of racial profiling. The reality is that -- as I've argued previously (several times) -- over the past 10 years, there have been many more acts of real terrorism planned and committed on American soil by white fundamentalist Christians than by radical Islamists of Arab extraction. If we're going to commit to racial profiling based on known terrorist threats, then whites, once again, would be the first logical choice.

Trashing the scholars

This flaw characterizes the entirety of Malkin's approach to history: Whatever evidence that exists which might undermine or even militate against her conclusions is hastily and summarily discarded. This includes nearly the entirety of the past half-century's scholarly work regarding the internment, which Malkin airily disregards as the product of a liberal acadame. So, rather than engage their evidence, Malkin simply dismisses a whole host of serious historians with the kind of smear-laden rhetoric we've grown accustomed to from the likes of Fox News (where Malkin, of course, is a contributing pundit).

Tetsuden Kashima is dismissed as using "recycled" and "crafty" arguments. Malkin complains that Kashima only devotes a brief section to the MAGIC cables; but ignores the fact that Kashima's work is based on a thorough review of all the available prewar intelligence, of which MAGIC was only a small and relatively insignificant part. She dismisses Greg Robinson on similarly shaky grounds. Eric Muller is relegated to a footnote, and likewise ignored because he evidently was too sympathetic to Nisei draft resisters.

Even historical figures who provided counter-evidence are trashed. Hoover is accused of being motivated by turf consciousness. Curtis Munson, who conducted a prewar investigation of the Japanese American communities and mostly exonerated them, is smeared as a "blowhard."

Perhaps her worst treatment is reserved for a real lion among historians of the internment, Roger Daniels, whose works are widely considered landmarks in Asian American studies. Malkin attacks Daniels in the process of trying to prove that critics of the internment -- a la the third of the bullet points on her flyleaf -- regularly compare the Japanese American "relocation centers" to Nazi death camps. She cites (on p. 96 and on her Web site) a passage from Daniels' Prisoners Without Trial as proof of this:

The American camps were not death camps, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and by troops whose guns were pointed at the inmates. Almost all the 1,862 Japanese Americans who died in them died of natural causes, and they were outnumbered by the 5,918 American citizens who were born in the concentration camps. But the few Japanese Americans who were killed "accidentally" by their American guards were just as dead as the millions of Jews and others who were killed deliberately by their German, Soviet, or Japanese guards.

Daniels' meaning -- Malkin's purposeful misreading notwithstanding -- could not be more clear: No, the Japanese camps were not death camps. But they were not all that different from the Nazi camps, either.

They were, in fact, concentration camps, no matter how much Malkin may dislike the term. The American government herded entire populations of people by the thousands into barbed-wire enclosures with the guns pointed inward, and forced them to dwell in degrading and miserable circumstances -- tarpaper shacks with no privacy, unclean living conditions, horrendous climates in godforsaken locales -- for years on end.

The Nazi camps are properly called "death camps," because that was their purpose. A "concentration camp," in contrast, is primarily for the purpose of incarcerating large numbers of people. That certainly describes the Japanese American camps as well. If confusion exists, it's mostly in the minds of sloppy thinkers like Malkin.

More to the point, there is not a single serious scholar extant who argues anywhere that the Japanese American camps "were Nazi-style death camps." Malkin can't cite any, either, resorting instead to cites like Daniels' above. She later explained this at her Web site thus:

No, I did not quote anyone making a specific comparison of “Manzanar to Auschwitz” or "Manzanar to Buchenwald." The analogizers are a little more slippery than that. Those who use modern "concentration camp" rhetoric when discussing the evacuation/relocation/internment measures meekly disavow a direct moral equivalence between relocation camps and death camps, but then proceed to indulge in the offensive moral equivalence that they say they reject.

Of course, she fails to find any instances in which such equivalence appears -- the Daniels cite being her foremost example. And as anyone can see, his meaning cannot be more straightforward: the fact that they were not death camps does not exonerate the government morally.

Of course, Malkin's whole purpose is exactly such exoneration. But the best she can hope for is vindication by propaganda; for her entire method is to narrowly select evidence and embroider it, while distorting and ignoring serious scholarship. It will never be taken seriously outside the realm of blinkered conservative-movement dogmatists -- a bloc of the population, unfortunately, that appears to be growing.

It's about racism

But Daniels is right. The American concentration camps, relatively benign as they were, represent the darkest side of the national psyche. Because it is ultimately impossible to explain the existence of the camps without coming face to face with racism and bigotry in its ugliest guises.

And it is in dealing with this aspect of the matter that Malkin's work -- in attempting to claim that the internment was "not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria" -- is at its shoddiest, both scholastically and morally.

I have posted on several occasions -- notably here here
and here -- on the many cultural antecedents that led to the internment, particularly the half-century's worth of anti-Japanese agitation that laid the foundation for white Americans' paranoid attitudes toward Japanese Americans, including the belief that they were innately loyal to Japan and were secretly in cahoots with a plot to invade the Pacific Coast. I've also discussed the wartime hysteria that was unmistakably a direct product of this bigotry (as well as how it's manifesting itself again today).

The event that truly seals the case for racism as an ineluctable and decisive factor in the internment, in fact, is one that Eric Muller explores in depth with Free to Die For Your Country: the decision by the Western governors (notably Idaho's Chase Clark) to refuse to accept the "relocation centers" in their territories unless the government could guarantee that the camp residents would remain confined within the camps and under armed guard at all times. Their pronouncements in this matter, of course, were rife with the whole litany of "Yellow Peril" stereotypes and the white-supremacist beliefs that were commonplace back then (insisting, for instance, that the Japanese and whites could never successfully intermingle socially or sexually).

Prior to that point, War Relocation Authority officials held out the vague hope that the "relocation centers" could truly be just that -- a stopping-off point for Japanese Americans en route to new lives elsewhere in the interior. Instead, the decision transformed the enterprise into one of forced and prolonged confinement, and transformed the term "relocation center" into bureaucratese for "concentration camp."

And of course, that same bigotry was a constant throughout the entire internment experience, including the return at war's end. Malkin makes a great show of explaining how the conditions at the camps were "uncomfortable" but in the end only an "inconvenience."

Yet what she omits from this picture is another harsh reality: the camps were only run humanely because of wisdom and restraint by the people running them (especially WRA directors Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer). Outside the camps, there was considerable political agitation precisely because conditions in the camps weren't harsh enough. If many Americans had had their way, we'd have had little ground for boasting that the conditions in our camps were superior.

I describe this in Chapter 6 of Strawberry Days. Among other things, the chapter previously features an anecdote about one of my interviewees -- a 442nd Battallion veteran named Joe Matsuzawa -- visiting some friends in rural Bellevue in his uniform. (Matsuzawa, who died only two years ago, was in between actions, having been part of the Lost Battalion rescue in the Vosges; he was to return to action in the Po Valley campaign in Italy.) Evidently his visit raised eyebrows around town, and wound up playing a role in a mini-panic ("The Japs are coming back!") that followed in Bellevue.

It's an amusing story, really, but there was a serious side to all this:

The absence of the Japanese from their longtime communities during the war had not necessarily made hearts grow fonder for them. Indeed, though the frequency of the hysteria was certainly lessened by the fact the Japanese were no longer present and visible, the war-born hatred of all things "Jap" had transformed them into demon-things in the popular mind, and the dearth of daily, real-life examples to the contrary only made things worse.

Headlines reporting on the war front regularly referred to the enemy "Japs" -- as did headlines reporting on events in the WRA's relocation centers. Consistent with popular sentiments prior to the war and during the evacuation debate, letters to the editor as well as political pronouncements made no differentiation between the citizens who once had been their neighbors and the foreign enemies their sons were fighting.

Washington's congressional delegation had a particular propensity in this regard. In addition to the damage already wrought by Democratic Senator Mon Wallgren, who had chaired one of the early congressional committees recommending evacuation in 1942, then-Rep. Henry Jackson, a respected Everett Democrat, took up the anti-Japanese cause with particular relish for the war's duration. Not only was he an enthusiast of the evacuation, he was a stern advocate of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast—both during and after the war. He was often seconded in this regard by his Seattle colleague, then-Rep. Warren Magnuson, who had a habit of raising groundless alarms about an imminent invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Japanese.

But it was otherwise anonymous men like Joe Matsuzawa who spurred Jackson to headline-grabbing action. In May 1943, Jackson began protesting in Congress against the Army's policy of allowing Japanese-American soldiers to visit the Pacific Coast on furlough; apparently, wearing an American uniform wasn't assurance enough of Nisei loyalty. Jackson sponsored a resolution calling for a complete investigation of "the Japanese situation," and his congressional colleagues were critical of the use of any Japanese-Americans in combat. Rep. John Costello of California sounded the familiar refrain that "you can't tell a good Jap from a bad Jap."

Jackson penned a speech that he never delivered on the subject, but it was clear he was opposed to Japanese-Americans ever returning to his home district:

What is to be the eventual disposition of the Japanese alien and native ... is the second aspect of this problem of the Pacific. Are we to return them to their former homes and businesses on the Pacific Coast to face the active antagonism of their neighbors? Shall they again, as happened in World War I, compete economically for jobs and businesses with returning war veterans?

The House Committee On Un-American Activities chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies also joined in on the action, partly at the urging of Jackson and others. A New Jersey Republican named J. Parnell Thomas flew out to Los Angeles and, without visiting a camp, declared that the WRA was pampering the internees. Thomas also demanded the agency halt its policy of "releasing disloyal Japs" -- that is, end its policy of relocating evacuees in jobs outside the camps.

The Dies Committee hearings provided a steady stream of scandalous headlines for a few months, bolstered by the reports of the unrest at Manzanar and Tule Lake. The most sensational of these reports involved a former motor-pool driver named Harold H. Townsend -- described in press reports as "a former official of the Poston, Ariz., relocation center" -- who told the credulous congressmen that Japanese subversives were secretly conducting Army training drills inside the relocation centers so that evacuees could spring to the aid of an invading Japanese army when it attacked the coast. What the reports also neglected to mention -- besides the lack of a shred of evidence -- was that not only had Townsend been present at the violence in Poston, but had been fired for panicking and fleeing the scene.

Dies himself held press conferences demanding that the WRA bring back all the Japanese it had relocated out of the camps and keep them interned for the duration of the war, claiming he had evidence that race riots in Detroit the week before had been the secret handiwork of an officer in the Japanese Army. Subsequent headlines detailed more wild allegations, including tales of elderly Issei secretly plotting a kamikaze attack on local forests, setting the West ablaze; caches of food being buried in the desert in a plot to aid the invading Japanese; and claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.s (which may have been true, since much of the camps' food source was the farms that were operated at each of the camps by evacuees). Dies wrapped up his exploration of the "Japanese question" later that summer by reiterating its demands the WRA alter its policies -- but besides making headlines in the press, these pronouncements had little apparent effect on the changes that were already in motion at the WRA. And the Dies Committee would soon be more stridently focused on the looming "Red Menace."

The interest groups chimed in as well. The American Legion joined in on the rising anti-Japanese sentiments with its denunciation of the WRA’s policy of "coddling the Japs," and longtime anti-Asian groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West (whose demeanor historically suggested vigilantism) became active in agitating alongside newer groups like the Pearl Harbor League. Some of these groups distributed signs proclaiming: "We don't want any Japs back here -- EVER!" These signs gained prominence in places like Kent, in the heart of what had been a thriving Japanese community in the White River Valley; the town's mayor, a barber, displayed the warning prominently in his shop, and earned a Time magazine appearance for it, pointing at the sign.

One of Michelle Malkin's major themes -- her chief claim on the flyleaf -- is that racism was an insignificant factor in the decisions that led to the internment. (Her trump card is the MAGIC cables, the significance of which Robinson thoroughly debunks; but even then it seems to have eluded her that racism might have played a role in how government officials interpreted that intelligence.) And as you can see, there is an abundance -- an overabundance, really -- of evidence that racism played a decisive role in the internment drama at nearly every step of its unfolding.

How does Malkin deal with this evidence? By ignoring it, of course.

As Muller points out:

What does Michelle offer to discredit the copiously documented influences of nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria on the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends?

Nothing. Literally not one single thing. Not a sentence.

Greg Robinson likewise sums up her response to this criticism:

[I]n response to my point that Malkin does not address the role of the long history of anti-Japanese American racism on the West Coast in events, she responds dismissively:

"As I explain above and in the book, there have been hundreds of books and dissertations on this topic. Why repeat what has already been said hundreds of times?"

It is ridiculous to say, as the author does, that because there is a preponderance of evidence of hysteria racial hostility towards Japanese Americans on the West Coast -- and that the pressure from West Coast political figures and commercial groups in Washington pushed the Executive branch in important ways -- that this need not be factored into the decision. It is for this reason that I stated, and I repeat, that Malkin's work is based in bad faith.

The case against 'racial profiling'

If Malkin hoped, in the end, to justify racial profiling by "debunking" the broadly accepted history of the internment, she failed miserably. Indeed, the internment episode remains stark evidence of the utter failure of racial profiling as a policy. The internment of Japanese Americans was, as I've noted previously, an unfathomable waste that is unlikely to have prevented a single case of sabotage or espionage:

It demonstrably undermined the war effort, and proved not to be worth a penny of the billions of taxpayer dollars it wasted.

In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars the actual enterprise itself cost -- rounding up 120,000 people by rail car and shipping them first to "assembly centers"; building ten "relocation centers" in remote locales, and then shipping the evacuees into them; maintaining and administering the centers for another three years, which included overseeing programs to help internees find work outside the camps; feeding the entire population of internees during this time; and then helping them to relocate near their former homes once the camps closed -- there were millions more in initial reparations costs, and then hundreds of millions more in the later reparations approved by Congress in the 1980s.

At the same time, the Japanese population on the Pacific Coast actually was responsible for the production of nearly half of all the fresh produce that was grown for consumption on the Coast (the Japanese also shipped out a great deal of produce to the Midwest and East). Indeed, Nikkei farms held virtual monopolies in a number of crops, including peas, green beans and strawberries, and a nearly 80 percent of the lettuce market.

When these farmers were rounded up and interned, a handful of enterprising whites decided to try running their farms with the hope of making a killing from the crops. But labor was so short that not one of these enterprises lasted beyond about five weeks, and none of them had a successful harvest. Nearly all of these farms lay fallow for the next four years. This major loss of production of fresh vegetables clearly harmed the national war effort, and played an important role in triggering the rationing that came during the war years.

Would racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs really gain us anything, security-wise, in the long run? And would any of it be worth the price?

Michelle Malkin would have us think it would. Her case, though, is built on faulty method, faulty logic, faulty "facts", and an obviously faulty moral compass. Her book is best left shunned, untouched, and eventually, ignored.

Unfortunately, it will not be, at least as far as the "conservative movement" is concerned. Even if utterly discredited, Malkin's meme will continue to recirculate among the Fox News right, as well as more extremist elements. At some point it will become "received wisdom" as a talking point for right-wing pundits and radio talk-show hosts.

It is all, of course, yet another step -- following, you might say, in the footsteps of Ann Coulter's defense of McCarthyism in her screed Treason -- in the growing radicalization of the American mainstream right. I've written about this trend previously, and I hope to return to the subject again soon.

Double standard

Quoth the Perfesser:

I feel certain that if President Bush were being denounced by an equivalent number of people who served with him, we'd be hearing a lot more about it.

Problem is, Bush can't seem to find anyone who even remembers serving with him for the last two years he was in the Guard -- let alone denounces him.

Not, of course, that we're hearing about that.

Home to roost

Why is it unsurprising that the latest racist embarrassment in the coming election involves another Republican?

Racism still wins votes in Tennessee

This case involves a 60-year-old real-estate agent named James L. Hart, who claims Republican affiliation, even though the party officially disavows him. He's running for Congress in a district that is safely Democratic; running as an independent in 2002, he garnered only 2.6 percent of the vote.

Here's his platform:

Hart calls himself an "intellectual outlaw."

Hart supports the pseudoscience of eugenics, once used to sterilize people to purify the white race.

If eugenics was practiced, "unfit" people would not have children, thus, making the world a better place. Thirty-three states passed eugenic laws sterilizing about 65,000 people.

As a result, Nazi doctors -- under the auspices of the Third Reich and using America's eugenics example -- wrote eugenic-based textbooks. The terrible textbooks justified sterilization programs for a superior race and millions were killed.

Hitler praised eugenics. Hart does, too.

"Why does Detroit look like it was hit by a nuclear bomb and Hiroshima look like it was on the side that won the war? Everyone knows the answer but is afraid to say so," said Hart. "The reason for Detroit's decline is there are less-favored races in Detroit and more-favored races in Japan.

"The poverty gene of less-favored races, which are spread by welfare and immigration, are destroying our cities no less than if they were hit by a nuclear bomb . . . unless we stop welfare and immigration polices, the U.S. will look like one big Detroit. I will save our cities . . . If an individual demonstrates the ability to produce and contribute to society, he or she would be encouraged to have more children. People on welfare would not."

Hart refers to "less-favored races of sub-Saharan Africa, which Hollywood continues to call black."

Of course, mainstream Republicans are shocked -- Shocked! -- to find that racism is going on in here.

State GOP officials have denounced Hart and urged voters to support his Democratic opponent. So far, we've heard nothing from national Republicans, but it'd be safe to assume they would maintain the same pose. A few conservative commentators in the blogosphere have also weighed in, claiming that "Hart is no more a Republican than Lyndon LaRouche is a Democrat."

This may be somewhat true -- Hart's positions on eugenics and race only dimly, at worst, resemble any recognizable mainstream Republican position. The problem, however, is that Republican voters have put Hart in this position. As the article goes on to explain:

Now, before you spit out your morning coffee and yell, "Who the hell voted for this idiot?"

Well, thousands did.

Bertrand, a former military officer who served in Iraq, received GOP support but not their votes: Hart had 7,913 votes compared to Bertrand's 1,654.

There's a reason that Hart is running as a Republican: He knows the Republican base will cast its votes for him. And he knows that because the GOP, in the South especially, has pandered to sentiments like his without openly embracing them.

One of the places this was pointed out, incidentally, was at American Renaissance, the hate group run by "academic racist" Jared Taylor:

This is so typical of conservative whites--we are scared to death to stand up for what we really believe in. We talk privately about being against one thing or another, but out in public we go along with the "liberal" talk.

It would be much simpler if the GOP made any kind of genuine effort to denounce and discredit the racists who have taken up residence in their ranks. But at best, the party provides only lip service and token gestures.

In the meantime, it continues to play footsie with the neo-Confederate movement. It trades in radical memes that originate on the extremist "Patriot" and even neo-Nazi right. Guys like Jared Taylor show up on nationally broadcast mainstream conservative talk shows and are treated as though they were themselves mainstream authorities.

The Republican base is willing to vote for people like James L. Hart because it constantly receiving signals like these from the "conservative movement" (and only feeble counter-signals, if any at all).

Playing with rotten meat brings the vultures home to roost.

Good Christian hate

Another disturbing hate crime, this time in Texas, involves a University of Texas student and three other young men who evidently wielded scripture even as he was inflicting violent harm on a gay man:

Jacobs said the suspects met the victim at Oilcan Harry's, a gay bar in Austin's Warehouse District, and accompanied him back to his home at about 2 a.m.

Once there, the four men allegedly forced the victim to sodomize himself with an object at knifepoint while they used homosexual slurs and denounced gay marriage. She also said the men made references to Old Testament verses dealing with homosexuality while they beat the victim with their fists. About two hours later, she said, the suspects robbed the man and left his home. She said the victim suffered minor cuts from the knife but was not stabbed.

Worth noting: The chief perpetrator in this case is a man named Darrell Gay. This sounds reminiscent of the Danny Overstreet killing in 2000, where a man named Ronald Gay walked into a Roanoke, Va., gay bar and began firing randomly.

Gay, as it turned out, told authorities he was largely motivated because he felt deep humiliation over what he considered the hijacking of the meaning of his surname by the homosexual community. He also liked to call himself a "Christian soldier."

Shades of Kristallnacht

There was a particularly creepy hate crime recently in San Francisco, according to this report from the San Francisco Examiner, in which some 50 or so businesses with signs for a Jewish candidate for the city's Board of Supervisors in their windows had swastikas scrawled on them:

The target of the anti-Semitic vandalism spree was David Heller, president of the Geary Boulevard Merchant Association and first-time candidate for supervisor in District 1.

Upon arriving to work Monday morning, Heller was inundated with messages from business owners whose windows had been defaced with swastikas over the weekend. In each reported incident, the campaign sign, which features Heller's picture, was taped to the inside of the store window and the vandal used a black marker to superimpose a swastika and a Star of David symbol in front of Heller's face on the outside of the glass.

While the Heller campaign has suggested that as many as 50 windows may have been vandalized, some were quickly cleaned off. As of Tuesday, police were looking into 11 incidents along Geary Boulevard and another 11 between 12th and 30th avenues, in which the property owners called police and evidence of the hate crimes were gathered.

The vandalism was particularly disturbing for Heller, who is Jewish and whose four grandparents were killed by Nazis in Poland during World War II. Heller's own parents left Poland for Israel in 1937, and Heller said the neo-Nazi smear represented the first time he could remember being the target of anti-Semitism.

That a crime like this would crop up in a traditionally "enlightened" district like Richmond is especially disturbing.

Just like the Klan

I happened to have the TV on in my hotel room tuned to the exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Paul Krugman on Tim Russert's CNBC show.

What was especially striking about it (and isn't really clear in the transcript) is the way O'Reilly behaved during the whole interview. O'Reilly is big on insisting on placing his remarks "in context," and the context here was significant. He didn't argue: he bellowed, he jabbed his finger, he threatened and intimidated. Krugman looked a little shaken, and frankly, I don't blame him. This wasn't debate -- it was an exercise in verbal thuggery. And the "fair minded" Russert just sat there and watched.

In keeping with this MO, O'Reilly at no point made what could be called a logical argument, engaging instead in what can best be described as a combination of two of the chief logical fallacies, the ad hominem and the appeal to authority. O'Reilly basically berated Krugman for having obtained perfectly accurate information from David Brock's Media Matters -- as though a source's partisanship somehow negated the factual correctness of what it reported. And in this instance, it didn't.

O'Reilly refused to respond to the substance of Krugman's critique or even acknowledge the accuracy of the quotes in question. Instead, he called Media Matters a "liberal hate group" -- the conservative movement's latest Newspeak coinage. Considering that "hate group" as a term refers almost strictly to groups that malign, attack and otherwise engage in efforts to exclude and eliminate entire classes of their fellow citizens from the fruits of American citizenship, usually based on immutable characteristics, Media Matters doesn't even come close to fitting the description. (In contrast to, say, certain cable networks that employ hosts who write books comparing liberals to terrorists as one of the three great evils threatening America.)

This culminated in O'Reilly comparing Media Matters to the Klan. As Pandagon and Atrios have already noted, this is an absurd comparison on its face -- and a deeply troubling one at its core.

Jesse already has remarked on the differences between the two organizations. But it goes beyond mere appearances.

The Ku Klux Klan has existed through multiple incarnations for over 150 years in America. The first of these was, according to Robert Paxton, the first historical emanation of fascism, the Reconstruction Klan. Here is its record, according to Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America:

Richard Maxwell Brown's comprehensive study of vigilante violence in America estimates that in the four years 1868-71 there were more than four hundred Klan lynchings in the South, Union general Phil Sheridan calculated that 3,500 whites and blacks were killed between 1865 and 1875, Ida Wells-Barnett, writing in the 1890s, put the number of Negroes killed by whites since 1865 at 10,000, with only three white men executed for crimes against blacks in that period. … Author Dorothy Sterling, who combed through man thousands of documents and oral histories in her preparation of a noted compendium on the Reconstruction era, cited 20,000 as the number killed by the Klan just in the four years 1868-71.

The Klan revived in 1916 after years of dormancy and was responsible for a broad range of lynchings, "race riots" and anti-black purges in the South over the ensuing 15 years or so. It was at the forefront of the so-called "lynching era" (1880-1930), when some 3,400 black people were summarily and brutally killed. And it has continued to be associated even today with an array of hate crimes and heinous acts of terrorism against various minorities.

I'm sure Bill O'Reilly considers his hurt feelings comparable to the deaths of about 25,000 black people. But not many of the rest of us do.

Of course, O'Reilly's analogy is absurd on its face. But it's important to observe what is achieved by putting it out there.

Not only does O'Reilly smear one of his political nemeses -- he soft-pedals what real hate groups stand for. When he compares Media Matters to the Klan, he's not only telling his audience that the former is full of hateful vitriol that poisons the public well, he tells them that the Klan is a reasonably legitimate organization that mostly is engaged in mere political partisanship.

And that makes O'Reilly appear not only ridiculous, but genuinely dangerous.

Busy, busy

Just got back from my 30-year high school reunion in Idaho Falls, Idaho (Skyline, class of '74). This was the first time I've attended any of these functions, and I was surprised by how pleasant and, in a strange way, moving the whole event was.

It was fun to see old friends, but I was most of all touched by some of the quieter stories people had to tell about their lives in the intervening years: the tragedies, the difficulties, the small triumphs. The common story, really, was that we all found a way to persevere, which is a very human story. And this was as true as the formerly "popular" kids as those of us who dwelt more on the edges.

Anyway, sorry for the absence. I thought I'd have Internet access, but it didn't manage to materialize. I should have known better.

Monday's a really busy day. I'll be interviewed this afternoon, between 2 and 3 p.m. PDT, on Seattle's KIRO-AM, on the Dori Monson show. They seem not to have a live Webcast, but hopefully a portion of the show will be featured on their highlights. In the meantime, looks like only Seattle-area listeners can tune in.

Then, of course, I'll give a talk and sign books tonight at Elliott Bay Book Company. Hoping to see some familiar faces tonight, and looking forward to meeting some new ones.

More on MAGIC

I've been somewhat remiss in failing to cite Tetsuden Kashima's definitive text, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, which I mentioned earlier in my post responding to Michelle Malkin's text on the Japanese-American internment. In fact, let me recommend it strongly to all my readers as a potent antidote to Malkin's nonsense.

Kashima, as I explained, thoroughly examines the evidence regarding the long-term plans for internment that ultimately led to the incarceration of 122,000 Nikkei during World War II. Unlike Malkin's agenda-driven work, Kashima examines the entire array of prewar planning, including the Special Defense Unit's prewar investigations and classifications of potential suspects and Office of Naval Intelligence work -- as well as the MAGIC cables, about which he writes (pp. 38-39):

American cryptoanalysts had successfully decoded one of the highest-level Japanese foreign office diplomatic codes by fall 1940. This project, named Magic, was so sensitive that only a handful of people in the U.S. government knew of its existence, and fewer still were privy to the information derived from it. The distribution of the information was limited to nine: the secretary of war, the army chief of staff, the director of military intelligence, the secretary of the navy, the chief of naval operations, the chief of the navy's war plans division, the director of naval operations, the secretary of state, and President Roosevelt.

A few of these messages dealt with intelligence agents. Few Japanese names are mentioned: one is "Iwasaki," who "had been in touch with William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts, a fascist organization in the United States." Iwasaki was apparently an agent sent by Japan who returned home prior to December 7; he was not a permanent resident Issei.

There is no indication among all the messages of any plan to organize sabotage activities. The messages emphasize the gathering of information from available sources such as publications and journals. Of the nineteen suspects convicted of committing acts of espionage in the United States in the years before and during World War II, none had a recognizably Japanese name.

Malkin makes much of FDR's keen interest in the MAGIC cables, but there's nothing extraordinary in this, given what we know about FDR's predilection for 'Yellow Peril' and related theories (an unsurprising fact, incidentally, given that many liberals, including much of the labor movement up through the 1920s, were intimately involved in anti-Asian racial agitation).

It's important to understand that the evacuation and incarceration of citizens was a plan cooked up not by FDR but under the purview of War Secretary Henry Stimson and his Assistant Secretary John McCloy, primarily at the behest of a trio of officers: Lt. Gen John L. DeWitt (head of the Western Command), Lt. Col. Karl Bendetsen (the "architect" of the internment), and Provost General Allen Gullion, who for some time had been looking to establish a precedent regarding military control of civilian populations in non-combat situations. It was this coterie that largely made the internment a reality; the only cabinet officer who stood up to them was Attorney General Francis Biddle, who argued consistently against it. However, FDR overruled him and agreed to the Bendetsen/DeWitt plan. Of all these men, only FDR and Stimson had access to the MAGIC cables.

Moreover, as I previously noted, and as Kashima thoroughly documents, the MAGIC cables were hardly the only intelligence influencing FDR's decisions. Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that they played any significant role in FDR's decisions -- except, perhaps, to buttress his well-established prejudices.

Kashima has more on this, particularly details on the Curtis Munson intelligence report (mentioned previously) that concluded that "We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war." Kashima concludes (p. 41):

The president and his cabinet thus had reports on the "Japanese situation" from a trained navy intelligence officer and a trusted civilian investigator months before war was declared. Both Ringle's and Munson's reports exonerated the majority of the Japanese American population of constituting a threat to national security. Yet, this had little effect in sparing them the onus of being labeled a suspect group. President Roosevelt made no such effort to keep watch on Americans of German and Italian ancestry. Greg Robinson [By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Harvard University Press, 2001] argues convincingly that Roosevelt's anti-Japanese views from the early 1930s carried over to persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States and resulted in his making no distinction between the Issei and the Nisei. For this reason, "during the prewar years the President consistently regarded Japanese Americans as adjuncts of Japan and therefore as potential enemies, despite their American birth or decades-long residence in the United States."

FDR indeed was fascinated by the MAGIC cables, and evidently read them avidly. But this does not, as Malkin suggests, exonerate him of the charge of racism in his decision to incarcerate 120,000 people in concentration camps.

[UPDATE: Eric Muller has obtained a copy of the text and is now reviewing it at Volokh Conspiracy, where he's guest-blogging. And be sure to check out Greg Robinson's withering response.]

Michelle Malkin's revisionism

Is Michelle Malkin "gutsy" and "fearless" and "courageous"?

Sure. The same way David Irving is "gutsy" and "fearless" and "courageous."

Malkin has a new book out titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror that seemingly cannot be described by various conservatives (and, of course, her own Web site) without lots of fortitudinous encomia. I haven't yet read it, but a survey of her own material and the promotional work -- and not to mention that it's published by the right-wing Regnery Press, a publishing house with origins in McCarthyism and other extreme right-wing activities -- suggests the book is seems more tailored to attract a readership through controversy than to seriously address the Japanese-American internment and the issues raised by it.

But then, Malkin is not playing the historian here, but the propagandist. Her agenda is pretty clear, laid out in the promotional blurb:

Malkin is not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps -- but she brings a bracing dose of desperately needed common sense and fearlessness to the ongoing debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security. Says Malkin: "A nation paralyzed in wartime by political correctness is a nation in peril." She provides conclusive proof that wartime presidents can't afford to indulge pandering nonsense from those who would make our security secondary to anything: a nation can't stand for anything unless it is still standing.

I'm still awaiting my copy of it, but it's reasonable to assume we can glean the essence of its contents from the Town Hall.com (where Malkin is a columnist) review:

But the most important factor in the decision to relocate and eventually intern the Japanese was an espionage network discovered in the western United States. As part of MAGIC, a top-secret project, over 5,000 cables were decrypted by the finest code-breakers in the government -- just a sliver of the communication estimated overall. These messages revealed a clear, extensive, pro-Axis mole system in key industrial and military areas in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. In addition, investigators found detailed maps of Oahu in the cockpits of downed Japanese fighter planes in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Empire relied on internal agents in the Philippines and other territories it conquered as well.

This information was released in 1977, and though it was just as damning as the Venona papers released eighteen years later, it has been greatly ignored by current-day historians. Malkin apparently wants to reverse that neglect: she includes the documents that have been declassified in her appendix, which makes up half the book. Her point-by-point deconstruction of the racist-paranoid school on internment is also well-footnoted, and full of credible and well-respected sources. Detractors will have a hard time shooting her out of the sky on the basis of her non-academic credentials.

Well, my credentials are almost entirely non-academic as well. But it's clear that if this is indeed Malkin's thesis, it can be shot down quite readily by simply applying a well-rounded dose of facts and the complete evidence.

As an amateur historian, Malkin would have been well advised to take a real survey of the historical material available on this subject, because there is a wealth of work that would have readily refuted many of her most basic tenets. (The bibliographic page at the Densho project would have been a good place to start.) Meanwhile, it's worth noting that the only previously published text that she appears to cite as support for her thesis regarding the MAGIC cables is a self-published conspiracy tome by David Lowman that clearly did not pass peer review at any respected house. With Regnery, Malkin evidently didn't have to try.

I'll run a full review of the book after I read it. But in the meantime, there's an abundance of material available that gives us the full flavor of the book, including her Web site, as well as an op-ed column (currently unavailable online) that ran this morning in the King County Journal (my former employer, sort of), titled "Rethinking the Japanese-American internment." Some key excerpts:

Contrary to historical conventional wisdom, the internment of Japanese, German, Italian and other enemy aliens, and the relocation of and evacuation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, were not the product of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry. With Japanese submarines roaming free off the coastline, the U.S. government's national security concerns -- in particular, the threat of espionage -- were real and urgent.

More than any other source of intelligence, it was the so-called "MAGIC" messages -- Japan's diplomatic communications that were surreptitiously intercepted and decoded by American signal intelligence officers -- that influenced top decision-makers within the Roosevelt administration.

It's clear that this is Malkin's central thesis. And the problem is that it's simply, demonstrably false.

Longtime readers will recall that I discussed these and related topics a lot last year, mostly revolving around Howard Coble's nonsensical defense of the internment. You'll forgive me, I hope, if I wind up reiterating myself here, but the core facts are difficult to refute, and bear repeating.

Personal Justice Denied: The Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, addresses the MAGIC cables quite thoroughly (pp. 471-475):

In fact, review of the "Magic" cables does not alter the Commission's position. Rather, it confirms the views expressed by the Commission. Personal Justice Denied devoted several pages to analyzing the American intelligence views of Japan's espionage, sabotage, and fifth column capabilities on the West Coast in late 1941 and 1942. Several relevant points were made in that discussion. First, the intelligence sources reviewed assumed that Japan had a modest number of intelligence agents and perhaps potential saboteurs on the West Coast in 1942. Second, people familiar with the intelligence activities of Japan believed that the Japanese intelligence network employed many who were not ethnic Japanese. Third, the intelligence experts believed that any threat of sabotage, espionage or fifth-column activity was limited and controllable and did not justify mass exclusion of the ethnic Japanese from the West Coast. Nothing in the 'Magic' cables contradicts these basic points.

What the "Magic" cables show is an effort by Japan to develop an intelligence capability in the United States made up of both non-ethnic Japanese and ethnic Japanese. In fact, in sending instructions about who should be used in such an effort, the cables emphasize groups other than the Issei and Nisei [because they would be less likely to raise suspicions] ...

Among the more than 4,000 "Magic" cables in 1941, only a very small number reflect the collection of intelligence which was not clearly public information or data obtainable by legal observation ...

Next, there is no indication in the "Magic" cables of a sabotage or fifth column organization. The likelihood of sabotage and fifth column aid in case of an attack were, of course, major arguments advanced in support of the exclusion. ...

One reason that the documents were not located and reviewed is that there is no clear evidence that they played any part in the decision to issue Executive Order 9066 or to pursue the policy of exclusion and detention of the West Coast Japanese. ...

The report then cites the congressional testimony of internment architect John McCloy, the Assistant War Secretary, who indicated no known intelligence or evidence about sabotage or espionage actually played a role in the decision: "Whether it was espionage or not, I can't say. But this wasn't such a motivating factor with us ... There were suspicions and rumors but that's as far as I can go."

Malkin's op-ed piece cites later testimony by McCloy to the effect that "'MAGIC' was instrumental in shaping the policies of the administration's homeland security policies." Yet this claim is dubious at best; McCloy's own earlier testimony further indicates he was unaware of the MAGIC cables; and it is likewise clear that FDR signed off on the internment not so much by his own initiative but by that of McCloy and his cohorts. Though FDR was aware of the MAGIC cables, there is nothing in any of the documents regarding his discussions with others within the chain of command that they influenced his thinking at all. Instead, it's clear the primary rationalization for the internment came from Lt. Gen. John DeWitt's finding of "military necessity" -- which was built upon an amazing paucity of evidence and a large mountain of racist stereotypes.

"The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese subjects, ready to fight, and if necessary, to die for Japan in a war against the nation of their parents," DeWitt argued in the "military necessity" memorandum.

DeWitt's reasoning also had a distinctly Kafkaesque quality: "There are indications that these [Japanese] are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken."

As the commission's report states, the MAGIC cables had already played a role in the early steps taken by authorities in the wake of Pearl Harbor. 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.

Malkin goes on to cite a number of the MAGIC cables referring to efforts to recruit ethnic Japanese. These are accurate insofar as they go, but they ignore the most salient fact: 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.

An example was this cable:

We are doing everything in our power to establish outside contacts in connection with our efforts to gather intelligence material. In this regard, we have decided to make use of white persons and Negroes, through Japanese persons whom we can't trust completely.

That's largely what happened. By war's end, exactly seven American citizens had been convicted of spying of for Japan. All of them were Caucasians. The only Japanese spies caught were nationals, all of them in the employ of consulates.

Finally, even if everything Malkin said were accurate (and obviously it isn't), then at some point she must answer the most basic question of all: Does wartime justify the suspension of the basic American right to a presumption of innocence?

Because even if the MAGIC cables were the primary source of the motivation to intern the Nikkei, they at best showed that only a tiny portion of that community were a sabotage/espionage risk. That would mean the United States incarcerated 70,000 citizens based on the presumption that a few of them were guilty of spying.

Perhaps the most noxious part of Malkin's argument, however, is the contention that the internment, evacuation and relocation "were not the result of irrational hatred and conspiratorial bigotry." This is nothing short of a simple falsification of history.

As I've explored in depth before, the Japanese-American internment, viewed in the longer context of the preceding half-century, was the culmination of an extended and relentless campaign of undiluted racism aimed at driving the Japanese from the American national fabric. As Eric Muller previously observed:

I have never been much taken by the politically correct notion that it was entirely irrational to fear disloyalty among some Japanese aliens and even some Japanese American citizens. What I have maintained is that the scope of the government's program, the enormity of its deprivations--that is, the essence of the tragedy of the Japanese American internment--can be explained only by reference to racism.

In other words, it is entirely possible that, in early February of 1942, FDR had a valid reason to worry about the presence in the USA of some disloyal people of Japanese ancestry. But that fact doesn't even begin to explain the policy that the administration chose to implement.

Recall, too, that (as Monkey Media Report demonstrated) FDR himself was an avid subscriber to the patently racist "Yellow Peril" conspiracy theories that provided the grist for so much of the anti-Japanese mill.

Moreover, it is abundantly clear that the racist stereotypes to which not only FDR but most of the rest of the nation subscribed were in fact prerequisites for the internment. Americans believed that Japanese-Americans would betray them because racist propaganda had been assuring them of this for the preceding half-century. This was especially clear in the nature of the hysteria that swept the Pacific Coast after Pearl Harbor, which (as I recently described) was not only unusually vicious, but constantly referenced these well-established beliefs in a nonexistent conspiracy.

Central to these beliefs was the notion that the immigrant Japanese (the majority of whom were engaged in agriculture) were secretly "shock troops" sent by the Emperor to serve as a "fifth column" on American shores; they supposedly only awaited the signal to spring into action at the right moment to act as a linchpin of the long-planned invasion of the Pacific Coast.

Of course, in retrospect, we know now that no invasion of the coast was ever contemplated by Japan; their entire purpose was to establish hegemony in the Asian Pacific. But the reality is that even at the time, the military was fully aware that no invasion was even remotely likely. Nor even was a full-scale attack, a la Pearl Harbor, even feasible. At the worst, scattered raids were primarily the threat faced by the Pacific Coast.

Indeed, federal authorities already had made the assessment that the Japanese living in America posed no threat to the security of the nation. Some months before the war arrived, President Roosevelt had secured the services of Chicago businessman Curtis Munson in coordinating an intelligence report on Japanese in the United States. Munson's report, delivered on Nov. 7, 1941, couldn't have been more clear: "There will be no armed uprising of Japanese [in the United States] ... For the most part the Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war."

Military strategists at the War Department were well aware that the Pacific Coast was under no serious threat of being invaded or under any kind of sustained attack. General Mark Clark, then the deputy chief of staff of Army Ground Forces, and Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, both ridiculed the notion of any kind of serious Japanese attack on the Pacific Coast when they testified that spring before a Senate committee, though Clark (who had spent several years as an officer at Fort Lewis, Washington) did admit that the possibility of an occasional air raid or a sustained attack on the Aleutian Islands "was not a fantastic idea."

Secondarily, DeWitt’s clamorous appeals for devoting badly needed troops for the defense of the West Coast were dismissed by War Department officials who knew better; to the planners there, preparing an offensive army for operations in Europe and the Pacific, such requests were self-indulgent wastes of their time.

However, the justification of the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, at least in the popular mind, was not because of fears of mere sabotage, but because of fears of invasion, to which DeWitt in his proclamations made frequent reference.

It is important to understand that, as Tetsuden Kashima explores thoroughly in his definitive text, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, the incarceration of the Nikkei in World War II was not simply the result of hysteria. In fact, as he demonstrates, it had been planned and well in the bureaucratic works for quite some time, beginning as early as the late 1920s.

However, allowing the military to incarcerate citizens en masse -- which in the end was the underlying bureaucratic purpose of the episode -- obviously raised real civil-liberties issues. And these almost certainly would have been raised immediately had anyone suggested evacuating and placing in concentration camps the nation's Italian-American or German-American populations.

The Nikkei, however, offered a unique opportunity in this regard, particularly since they represented a relatively smaller ethnic population -- one which was, moreover, popularly reviled and almost completely marginalized. The hysteria was already latent in the cultural landscape, and government officials and politicians at all levels -- local, state and federal -- readily whipped it higher at nearly every opportunity.

The race-driven hysteria, in essence, did not in itself cause the internment -- but it was the linchpin in convincing the public to proceed with it. And indeed, the public not only approved, it demanded it.

The result was a horrific episode in our history, a permanent black mark, and in the end a tremendous waste of the nation's resources and energies. As I've remarked previously:

The overwhelming weight of the postwar evidence is that the internment prevented very little, if any, sabotage or espionage. Moreover, even beyond its transparent unjustness, the damage to the integrity of the Constitution, and the dangerous precedents it set, the internment of the Japanese Americans was an unfathomable waste. It demonstrably undermined the war effort, and proved not to be worth a penny of the billions of taxpayer dollars it wasted.

In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars the actual enterprise itself cost -- rounding up 120,000 people by rail car and shipping them first to "assembly centers"; building ten "relocation centers" in remote locales, and then shipping the evacuees into them; maintaining and administering the centers for another three years, which included overseeing programs to help internees find work outside the camps; feeding the entire population of internees during this time; and then helping them to relocate near their former homes once the camps closed -- there were $37 million more in initial reparations costs in 1948, and then $1.2 billion more in the later reparations approved by Congress in 1988.

At the same time, the Japanese on the Pacific Coast, who occupied some 7,000 farms in the "Military Exclusion Zone," actually were responsible for the production of nearly half of all the fresh produce that was grown for consumption on the Coast (the Japanese also shipped out a great deal of produce to the Midwest and East). Indeed, Nikkei farms held virtual monopolies in a number of crops, including peppers, snap beans, celery and strawberries, and a large portion of the lettuce market.

When these farmers were rounded up and interned, a handful of enterprising whites decided to try running their farms with the hope of making a killing from the crops. But labor was so short that not one of these enterprises lasted beyond about five weeks, and none of them had a successful harvest. Nearly all of these farms lay fallow for the next four years. This major loss of production of fresh vegetables clearly harmed the war effort on the home front, and played a significant role in triggering the rationing that came during the war years.

Evidently, this is what Michelle Malkin thinks is worth defending in the context of the "war on terror." But the Japanese American episode in fact only demonstrates, in detail and blazing color, what a real waste "racial profiling" really is.
___

Incidentally, Malkin is speaking this weekend in the Seattle area at Cedar Park Church in Bothell, sponsored by the right-wing radio station KVI-AM. The church, it's worth noting, was recently in the local news for its campaign to sign up 60,000 voters with the clear intent of getting them to vote Republican.

You can also check out Malkin's Web site for her supporting documents and a roundup of "subversives." You'll note what's missing, including any indication she has even attempted to survey the contravening literature.

Strangely enough, Malkin appears to be a relatively recent convert to her position vis a vis the internment. In a previous column, she had this to say:

There is no denying that what happened to Japanese-American internees was abhorrent and wrong.

You know, she was right the first time.
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[Looks like Eric Muller is on the case too. I'll look forward to his review.]

[Thanks to Alice Ito at Densho for the heads-up.]

The early reviews

A couple of reviews of Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America came out this weekend. Notably, the Seattle Times led its weekend book section with this review:

'Death on the Fourth of July': Violent intolerance, American style

It was, as you can see, a thoroughly positive and really very flattering review. Thanks to Tim McNulty and the Times' Books Editor, Mary Ann Gwinn.

Decidedly not as flattering was the review from Michael McGregor in the Oregonian. Of course, any author has to be understand that he's not going to connect with everyone, and certainly not every critic, so I'll leave it at that and let everyone judge for themselves. However, I will say that if he wanted another Hundred Little Hitlers, he's barking up the wrong author.

Also, an earlier, largely positive review appeared last month in The Olympian from Barbara McMichael (it also appeared in The Bremerton Sun).

In the meantime, readers may want to note my schedule for book-related appearances so far:

-- Friday, Aug. 7, Idaho Falls, Idaho: Barnes & Noble, 2385 East 17th Street.

-- 7:30 p.m. Aug. 9 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600).

-- 7 p.m. Aug. 18 at Seattle's University Book Store (206-634-3400).

-- 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at Tacoma's Wheelock Library, sponsored by the Tacoma Branch of the University Book Store (253-591-5640).

I'm planning to make appearances in Portland, Eugene, San Francisco and San Diego as well. I'll announce details when they're firm.

Playing politics with terror

It's bad enough that John Ashcroft's Justice Department treats domestic terrorism like an afterthought. What's outrageous is that it now appears to have raised the threat of such terrorism -- groundlessly -- to put a cloud over the Democratic National Convention.

And in the meantime, evidence continues to mount that the FBI's actual handling of domestic terrorism is dangerously inadequate.

I previously mentioned that the press reaction to the FBI's warnings that right-wing extremists might target media vehicles in Boston last week was strangely muted. But what wasn't immediately apparent was the likelihood that the reports themselves actually constituted a kind of disinformation.

Now questions are being raised about the warnings, and the reasons for the FBI circulating them in the first place. The most significant of these is from the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok, who was interviewed at length by Glynn Wilson about these warnings:

"We have had no indication whatsoever, not an inkling, that there is any kind of violent action planned by the radical right in Boston," Potok said. "We follow these groups quite closely."

How did the story -- that right-wing extremists planned to attack media vehicles -- get circulated in the first place?

Special Agent Gail A. Marcinkiewicz, Public Affairs Coordinator for the Boston FBI office, said the report on a "radical domestic terrorist group" planning an attack on media trucks in Boston was an "unconfirmed" report.

Unconfirmed reports are not usually released to the public, she said. But in this case, according to FBI guidelines on releasing information, the media was the so-called "victim." The policy is to warn potential victims even in unconfirmed cases, and since the media got the information, it was inevitably released to the public, she said.

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that news organizations internally were deeply concerned about the warnings and took various measures to reduce their exposure to the threats. According to James Ridgeway in Village Voice, Fox News went so far as to paint over all the logos on their trucks.

Strangely enough, while the warnings clearly were taken seriously, the news organizations themselves failed to investigate their grounding or question the FBI's sources. Instead, their response was oddly muted altogether, only briefly mentioning the threats and continuing to behave on-air as though they didn't exist.

And yet there were many reasons in fact to question the warnings:

Actions like the one the FBI announced in Boston do not usually come from groups like this, neo-Nazi groups that ultimately contemplate genocide as their path to power, Potok said.

"Actions like this come almost exclusively from individuals. These things are not planned in smoky rooms by hate group leaders and their lieutenants," he said. "It doesn't happen that way."

Of course, I've discussed several times the problems with the current administration's handling of domestic terrorism, particularly within the larger context of the so-called "war on terror." What's become clear is that domestic terrorism has been shoved to a back burner by Ashcroft & Co. because it interferes too directly with the administration's larger agenda -- it undercuts the administration's position that terrorism is primarily a state-supported activity that deserves a mostly military response, and moreover, many of the most serious right-wing extremists come from the same Christian fundamentalist bloc that constitutes the GOP's electoral base.

Much of that assessment is possible from a simple review of the FBI's behavior in handling key domestic-terrorism cases so far, notably that of cyanide-bomb maker William Krar.

Now comes a New York Times report that makes the same charge from within the agency:

So in early 2002, when Mr. German got word that a group of Americans might be plotting support for an overseas Islamic terrorist group, he proposed to his bosses what he thought was an obvious plan: go undercover and infiltrate the group.

But Mr. German says F.B.I. officials sat on his request, botched the investigation, falsified documents to discredit their own sources, then froze him out and made him a "pariah." He left the bureau in mid-June after 16 years and is now going public for the first time - the latest in a string of F.B.I. whistle-blowers who claim they were retaliated against after voicing concerns about how management problems had impeded terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"What's so frustrating for me," Mr. German said in an interview, a copy of the Sept. 11 commission report at his side, "is that what I hear the F.B.I. saying every day on TV when I get home, about how it's remaking itself to fight terrorism, is not the reality of what I saw every day in the field."

I've had some personal experience with Mike German. He is a tall, athletic blonde man who looks like the straight arrow he is but whose features let him pass readily as a white supremacist; moreover, he's well versed in the culture and highly skilled at passing off his undercover persona.

He played a key role in a trial I covered in 1996, involving the Washington State Militia. Readers of In God's Country may recall the story: The WSM, which liked to pass itself off as a civic-minded public-interest group, also had members in leadership positions who, behind closed doors, liked to talk about blowing things up and attacking the FBI. They went so far as to hold private bomb-building classes for members. German infiltrated them by posing as an underground arms dealer, and helped them set up an "office" that allowed the FBI to record their every meeting and discussion.

When it became clear that some of their members were on the verge of violent action, the FBI decided to spring the trap:

By July 1996, mere months after their big meeting in Mount Vernon, the WSM's members had come a long way from talking about forming a big friendly neighborhood-watchdog group and manning the sandbags during floods. Now they were building bombs.

The militiamen had bought a warehouse space for stashing supplies and holding training sessions. Those sessions had quickly turned to a favorite topic: pipe bombs. By the middle of that summer, they were building the devices. Indeed, they seemed obsessed with them; it was all they talked about, just about everything they trained for.

There was one important change-up, though. When the class on July 27 had finished learning new ways to build pipe bombs, it turned its attention to learning how to get out of handcuffs. Or so the students thought.

It was a hot summer day, and the converted warehouse was still warm and stuffy for the late-afternoon gathering. But the eight participants all dutifully gathered to hear more about bomb-building techniques from the group's instructor, John Kirk.

Kirk was not merely a member of the militia. He called himself a Freeman; he had filed "sovereign citizen" papers and had served as a juror when a group of Seattle Patriots organized its own common-law court. The leader of his Seattle-based Freemen group, William Smith, was a longtime friend of LeRoy Schweitzer and, like the Montanan, was considered a guru of "constitutional law" among Patriots throughout the Northwest. Smith was one of the participants that afternoon. The four Freemen had driven up together from Seattle to Bellingham for the class. There was the usual small talk, and then Kirk dove right in, spending the better part of a half-hour outlining techniques for building a short, squat pipe bomb comprised mostly of cap ends.

There was a kind of excitement that ran through the group that afternoon, a product of the danger lurking behind what they were learning. It was all preparation for the eventuality of the United Nations invasion, the conflict they all were certain was coming.

When Kirk was done, "Rock" spoke up. Everyone knew Rock as the young, bearded ex-skinhead who was in the military-surplus business and was providing the money for the bombs to be built. He was kind of quiet-spoken, but everyone trusted him, and some were hoping he'd move up as a leader for the group -- something the militiamen had been lacking lately.

Rock, excited like the rest of the group, said it was his turn now to show the group his own special skill: how to get out of handcuffs without a key. The militiamen's eyes lit up. Now, that was a skill worth having.

Rock pulled out a boxful of handcuffs and handed a pair out to everybody. When everyone had one cuff clipped onto one arm, Rock went around the room and clipped the second one behind each of the students' backs.

Then he stepped to the front of the class and gave the group its final lesson -- namely, that they'd been had.

"You are all under arrest," Rock announced, holding up his FBI badge. He walked over to the warehouse's single door and opened it, and in walked a cluster of more FBI agents, some with guns drawn. The militiamen were all too stunned to resist. Classtime, once again, was over.

German, as this instance demonstrated, was also rather inventive in coming up with ways to arrest his subjects with a minimum of risk. He was also, as anyone who worked with him would eagerly inform you, a real "straight shooter" when it came to his work, someone scrupulous about avoiding entrapment but skilled at drawing real threats out of the woodwork.

Unfortunately, straight shooters seem not a welcome commodity under the current regime, as the NYT story goes on to explain:

Mr. German, in his letter to lawmakers, cited "a continuing failure in the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism program," which he said was "not the result of a lack of intelligence, but a lack of action."

Officials said Mr. German also complained internally about a second case in the Portland, Ore., area in 2002 in which he said he was blocked from going undercover to pursue a domestic terrorism lead. That case was also thought to center on a militia group suspected of plotting violence.

In the Tampa case, officials said Mr. German complained that F.B.I. officials had mishandled evidence concerning a suspected domestic terrorist group and failed to act for months on his request in early 2002 to conduct an undercover operation. That failure, he said, allowed the investigation to "die on the vine."

While Mr. German would not confirm the location of the investigation, he said in an interview at the office of his Washington lawyer, Lynne Bernabei, that his problems intensified after he complained about the management of the case in September 2002. He said F.B.I. officials whom he would not name backdated documents in the case, falsified evidence and falsely discredited witnesses in an apparent effort to justify their approach to the investigation. He cited institutional inertia, even after Sept. 11.

"Trying to get approval for an operation like this is a bureaucratic nightmare at the F.B.I.," he said.

Mr. German said that beginning in late 2002, he took his concerns to his supervisors at the F.B.I. and to officials at headquarters in Washington, including Mr. Mueller himself, in an e-mail message that he said went unanswered. He also went to the Justice Department's inspector general and, frustrated by what he saw as a languishing investigation, brought his concerns this spring to several members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission.

In the meantime, Mr. German said, his career at the F.B.I. stalled, despite what he said was an "unblemished" record and an award for his work in the Los Angeles skinhead case.

Soon after raising his complaints about the 2002 terrorism investigation, he was removed from the case. And, he said, F.B.I. officials wrongly accused him of conducting unauthorized travel, stopped using him to train agents in "proactive techniques" and shut him out of important domestic terrorism assignments.

German's case is only the latest piece in a clearly emerging portrait of an administration once again so enamored of its "official story" that it fails to respond adequately to a serious threat and creates a culture in which information about such threats is officially suppressed.

There's probably nothing more disturbing than realizing that the people who are supposed to be making us safe are more preoccupied with playing political games.

This is the administration that now wants us to believe that, once again, international terrorists are planning to attack financial institutions? Why should we believe them?

And the fact that it's increasingly difficult to do so is a truly terrifying thought.

[Cross-posted at The American Street.]