If U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday had developed his thinking on the internment of Japanese-American citizens just a tad more, we might have a whole new view on civil rights in America.
Scalia, addressing a group of University of Hawaii law students, discussed internment during World War II.
He said that the Supreme Court’s upholding of the internment orders was wrong but feared that in a similar catastrophic emergency, such as another devastating attack on America, the same freedoms and civil rights might again be dismissed.
"That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification but it is the reality," the nation’s longest-serving justice told the students.
The court later took up the case again and the decision was reversed and, much later, an apology and a small payment were made to those Americans forced into relocation camps.
Still, in 1944, Japanese-Americans found no justice in U.S. courts.
What is forgotten or overlooked or dismissed as a historical outlier is what happened to all of Hawaii during World War II.
Yes, the military came and the FBI took away Japanese-American citizens living in Hawaii, but mostly forgotten were the immediate declaration of martial law in Hawaii.
Civil rights were stripped away, the protections of the Bill of Rights dissolved and Hawaii was run by generals and other U.S. Army officers.
By the afternoon of Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Territorial Gov. Joseph Poindexter had signed over control of the Territory of Hawaii to Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the Army’s commander in Hawaii.
Although there were promises from Short that martial law would be lifted "in a reasonably short time," it did not happen until October 1944.
According to a recounting by the Hawaii Judicial History Center, the martial law was all encompassing.
"All authority was turned over to the military, which proceeded to remove persons from militarily sensitive areas, set curfews, regulate night driving, censor newspapers and radio broadcasts, and regulate prices on everything from groceries to prostitutes. Civil courts were closed and the writ of habeas corpus was suspended," the center explained.
U.S. Army records of the event show that the Army had been planning for such a takeover since March 1941.
"The large number of aliens in the Hawaiian Islands is a matter of grave concern to our national government and years of study by civilian, military and naval authorities, of the probable attitude of certain of the island-born Orientals has led to the conclusion that but doubtful reliance can be placed upon their loyalty to the United States in the event of a war with an Oriental power," the report quotes an unnamed "civilian educator" as saying.
Even with the mass evacuations along the West Coast and the forced relocation of thousands of Japanese-Americans, no other place except Hawaii had its civil rights swept away.
It wasn’t until the almost-forgotten Supreme Court case Duncan v. Kahanamoku was heard that the court ruled that the judiciary has an obligation to protect citizens’ constitutional rights even under the conditions of modern warfare.
This sounds chillingly familiar to the justifications now by the National Security Agency that all monitoring and data collection of telephone and Internet traffic is to support the war on terror.
Bringing Hawaii’s violated civil rights into the discussion of how the U.S. today is prying in the name of national defense would make a good reason to say it is time again to protect the Bill of Rights.
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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
