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02/22/2004 Archived Entry: "An internment camp survivor speaks up."
An internment camp survivor speaks up.
I disagree with Nat Hentoff more than I agree with him, but this article shades the 'enemy combatant' debate through the eyes of someone who was literally there the last time the US did something like this. Interesting.
Fred Korematsu, an American Citizen imprisoned in a Utah internment camp during the Second World War, received the presidential medal of freedom in 1998 from President Clinton for eventually and successfully resisting the flagrantly unconstitutional imprisonment.By order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944), Fred Korematsu had been deprived in 1942 of all his due process rights solely because he was a Japanese American. So were 120,000 other individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. It was one of the most shameful travesties of justice in Supreme Court history.
It wasn't until 1988 that Congress passed a law apologizing for this wholly unlawful mass imprisonment. Each surviving victim of the presidential order and of the Supreme Court's turning the rule of law upside down was awarded the meager sum of $20,000 by way of redress.
In 1942, when he was 22 years old, Fred Korematsu—working as a welder in a California shipyard—had refused to be put into an internment camp. He was arrested and locked up. It was that conviction that the Supreme Court upheld in the 1944 Korematsu v. United States case, deciding that in wartime, the government could indeed put him away without a hearing and without any judicial determination that he had done anything wrong. It is this king-like authority that George W. Bush now claims over those he designates as "enemy combatants."
It wasn't until 1983 that San Francisco Federal District Judge Marilyn Patel overturned that 1944 Korematsu conviction. Among the lawyers filing that successful 1983 appeal were some whose parents had also been imprisoned in those internment camps.
Now, at the age of 84, Fred Korematsu continues to protest against a president, George W. Bush, who also holds both American citizens and noncitizens in legal black holes without the most basic civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
Korematsu has authorized an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States, in his name, on behalf of American citizen Yaser Hamdi, designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush and held for two years in an American navy brig without guaranteed Sixth Amendment access to a lawyer, and without any prospect of a trial at which he can defend himself. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld maintains that Hamdi can be held in this legal black hole for "the duration of hostilities," and that could take generations.
Fred Korematsu's message to the Supreme Court is also on behalf of non-American citizens imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay—Khaled A.F. Al Odah et al. and Shafiq Rasul et al.
Replies: 2 people speak up
Holy crap! As somebody who had Constitutional Law back in the day, it's great to have American history comes alive like that!
Posted by Norbizness @ 02/22/2004 08:52 PM NY
http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html
I'm not surprised.
Posted by Joni @ 02/22/2004 09:19 PM NY
