The Japanese- (and German- and Italian-) American internment in WWII

On Jan. 14, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, which required Americans of Japanese, German and Italian descent to register with the U.S. Department of Justice. This was a precursor to the imprisonment of people who had committed no crime, based solely on their ancestry.

Those who registered were photographed and fingerprinted and issued a Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality card. They were required to have the card with them at all times; their movements were restricted; and they were subjected to curfew regulations. They were also required to surrender any cameras and shortwave radios they owned.

Round-up and internment in concentration camps began one month later with the issuance of Executive Order 9066.

Almost everyone has heard of the Japanese-American internment. Almost all the Japanese-Americans on the West coast — some 120,000 in all — were forced to abandon their homes and businesses, incarcerated and transferred to prison camps in California, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Arkansas. These included Americans of Japanese descent who had fought for the U.S. in World War I, and some who had enlisted to fight in World War II.

The mass incarceration was carried out despite an Office of Naval Intelligence study’s conclusion that the vast majority of Japanese-Americans posed no threat to national security and that the few who did had already been identified and were in custody or under surveillance.

German- and Italian-Americans were likewise incarcerated under order No. 9066, but to a lesser degree than the Japanese. About 11,500 Germans and 1,881 Italians were interned across the country. But it wasn’t enough for the U.S. government to illegally imprison Germans living in the United States. America trolled Latin American countries, scarfed up German nationals living peacefully across Central and South America, and plopped them into U.S. prison camps.

Most of those imprisoned were held for the duration of the war. After their release, they returned to find their homes and businesses ransacked, destroyed or stolen from them. A number of Japanese farmers returned to California only to discover white Americans had taken over their farms and refused to give them back.

The authority created out of thin air by FDR to mass incarcerate innocent people without trial and in violation of the 5^th Amendment was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The solicitor general withheld the report from the Office of Naval Intelligence from the court, in violation of law. Some of the Japanese were later paid reparations, but the Germans and Italians were not.

The government has claimed the same authority to imprison Americans without trial under the (un)Patriot Act and the unlawful detention act found in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

All that stands between liberty lovers — or anyone else, for that matter – and similar treatment is the whim of a president who, thanks to FDR and SCOTUS, has the “authority” to place anyone in concentration camps in America for reasons of “national security,” or any reason he may conjure up in his tyrannical mind.

The post The Japanese- (and German- and Italian-) American internment in WWII appeared first on Personal Liberty®.

from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/the-japanese-and-german-and-italian-american-internment-in-wwii/

from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/the-japanese-and-german-and-italian-american-internment-in-wwii/