My time here at the Volokh Conspiracy is short. Eugene invited me to guest blog yesterday and today; at midnight I turn into a pumpkin and must return to my home at IsThatLegal. I always appreciate and enjoy the chance to guest-blog over here. I know I've been pretty, uh, prolific this time around, and I appreciate the indulgence of those regular Volokh Conspiracy readers who couldn't give a flip about the Japanese American internment.

I'll close with a final observation about "In Defense of Internment." In Michelle's final chapter (page 150), she details what she sees as the many important similarities between the activities of al Qaeda and its supporters today and the activities of Japanese Americans sixty years ago:

"There are parallels between World War II and the War on Terror, but the antiprofilers don't make the proper comparisons. The Japanese espionage network and the Islamic terrorist network exploited many of the same immigration loopholes and relied on many of the same institutions to enter the country and insinuate themselves into the American mainstream. Members of both networks arrived here on student visas and religious visas. Both used spiritual centers--Buddhist churches for the Japanese, mosques for the Islamists--as central organizing points. Both used native-language newspapers to foment subversive tendencies. Both leaned on extensive ethnic- or religious-based fundraising groups for support--kais for the Japanese, Islamic charities for Middle Eastern terrorists. Both had operatives in the U.S. military. Both aggressively recruited American citizens as spies or saboteurs, especially (but not exclusively) inside their ethnic communities. Both were spearheaded by fanatics with an intense interest in biological and chemical weapons."

(Michelle might also have noted in this passage that American citizens of Muslim faith and Arab ancestry have actually pled guilty to charges of attending al Qaeda training camps (the Lackawanna, NY cases) and seeking to levy war against the United States in Afghanistan (the Portland, OR cases). Those, it would seem, are even clearer instances of threat to the United States by American citizens than the handful of vague references about Kibei and/or Nisei in the MAGIC cables.)

Michelle's purpose in writing the book, you'll recall, was to "offer a defen[se] of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II." (p. xiii) "Even with the benefit of hindsight," she argues on page 80, "it is not at all clear that mass evacuation [of all people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens] was unwarranted." Why? Because information (especially from the MAGIC decrypts) about subversive activities by Japanese Americans (which, she notes, happen to be just like the sorts of subversive activities that Arabs and Muslims are engaging in) provided a "solid rationale for evacuation." (p. 141.)

So here's what I don't get.

On page xxx of the book's Introduction ("A Time To Discriminate"), Michelle tells us to "[m]ake no mistake": she is "not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps."

She's not?

Now that I have covered Malkin's central arguments as fallacious, I would like to step back and look at the work as a whole. I do appreciate the author's willingness to take an unorthodox position, and it is good to put the wartime treatment of the Japanese Americans in perspective—I was not aware that GIs were housed in the stalls at Santa Anita after the Japanese Americans had been confined there. Still, Malkin's book is not a useful work of history, but a polemic that relies for its attraction on sensationalism and overstatement. The author lumps everyone who has ever written on the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans into a single homogenous (and self-interested) group and does not discuss their different arguments, or indeed, their disagreements with each other. Such conspiratorial thinking detracts from the merit of what the author does get right. (A minor but indicative point: in one of the two places where my work BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT is cited, the author refers to me as "Canadian historian Greg Robinson." Since the matter of my nationality has no relevance to the point at hand I can only interpret its inclusion as a subtle attempt at discrediting me as a foreigner—in fact I am a born and bred New Yorker, with undiluted fealty to my native land).

The work also suffers from the author's perceptible shoddiness of method. Many of the author's contentions, and particularly her generalizations about popular perceptions (such as that the government confiscated Japanese American property), are barren of footnotes. In her section on the MAGIC intercepts, the author takes over David Lowman's work to the point of plagiarism. Not only does she cite the same MAGIC cables, she even indulges in the same selective quotation of sources such as Roberta Wohlstetter and John Costello in which Lowman indulged. For example, she cites military historian John Costello (p. 37) as saying that "The rising current of fear on the West Coast and the evidence from the MAGIC intercepts were important factors in the President's decision to sign Executive Order 9066," but fails to add Costello's statement almost immediately after that sentence that Executive Order 9066, "enabled the military to start to round up 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans." Thus the author ignores the fact that Costello regarded the Japanese Americans as victims, not instigators, of the Order.

Indeed, if I have been able to reply so quickly to Malkin's contentions, it is because ALL the information she presents on MAGIC was featured in Lowman's Congressional testimony twenty years ago, and were addressed in detail at that time. (Many of the MAGIC excerpts and testimony as to Japanese spies were old even then—they had first been made public in 1946, during the Congressional Committee investigation into the Pearl Harbor attack). The author also has a tendency to contradict herself. For example, she states that the opinion of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Japanese Americans was not reliable or relied upon, since he had no access to the MAGIC intercepts that she claims demonstrated spying by Japanese Americans. (In fact, Hoover received detailed summaries of MAGIC information from the Office of Naval Intelligence, whose members likewise opposed mass evacuation). On the other hand, she is quick to quote any negative comment on Japanese Americans by the FBI or the ONI. Similarly, she implies on pages 77 and 126 that the push for evacuation came from President Roosevelt, since McCloy told DeWitt that he had specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens. Yet on page 81 she states that FDR was too busy with directing the war effort to think of such matters, and properly delegated all decisions to Stimson.

I suspect that in some part these contradictions and this cutting and pasting come from the fact that book was written very quickly—the author herself says that she wrote it over a single year in her spare time (presumably not very plentiful, given her daily columns and other work in media). However, much of it clearly is a result of the author's procrustean effort to stretch facts to fit an ideologically predetermined thesis. As a result, there are certain basic facts that Malkin dares not even touch. She does not explain why the Canadian government, whose leaders did not have the benefit of the MAGIC cables which "proved" the existence of Nisei espionage networks, nonetheless went through the process of relocating and incarcerating their ethnic Japanese residents. Furthermore, she does not explain why immediate loyalty hearings were not granted to people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or aliens, the way that they were to all other enemy aliens, just as they eventually were to Japanese Americans.

Most of all, the author does not deal at all with the long, extensive, and very well documented history of anti-Japanese-American racism on the West Coast. This absence is so glaring as to constitute bad faith on the part of the author. Malkin tries desperately to get around the question of racism by locating the entire decision in the White House, and in a vacuum. She must be aware that trying to discuss the process of evacuation without mentioning the long campaign by Californians to get rid of the "Japs" or the political pressure on the Administration from West Coast congressmen and commercial groups is unreal--like trying to discuss the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment without bringing in slavery.

The author's case for military necessity--she claims there was a "West Coast under siege"--is fatally flawed, as it reposes on her dramatic account of the shelling by Japanese submarines of a refinery in Goleta, California (pp.7-8), which she called "the first foreign attack on the U.S. mainland attack since the War of 1812." (No, it wasn't, actually; Pancho Villa's raid into Columbus, New Mexico set off panic and a large-scale punitive expedition led by General Pershing; but never mind). In fact, as the author states, this event took place on February 23, 1942, four days after Executive Order 9066 was signed, so it could not have played a factor in any of the decisions.

Not satisfied with describing this single (rather minor) incident, the author tries to disguise the lack of concrete military threat by claiming that this incident "was just one of many long forgotten (or deliberately ignored) attacks"(p.9). Long forgotten? Then where are the incident reports and media accounts at the time, when it was well remembered? Deliberately ignored? By whom? By the Californians who were so panicked over the spectre of a Japanese invasion that they spread wild stories that turned out to be untrue? By the West Coast defense authorities who were ready to make the most compelling case for mass evacuation? The author finishes with stories of Japanese submarines roaming free around Hawaiian waters, and mentions two sinkings of boats in the mid-Pacific. How then was the West Coast under siege? As the author confesses by omission, there were then no sinkings of ships by Japanese subs around the area of the West Coast. And if such sinkings in Hawaiian waters did not change the situation in Hawaii, they should not have been responsible for arbitrary action on the West Coast.

In contrast, there was an urgent military danger on the East Coast. Nazi submarines in the Atlantic were sinking Allied shipping at an alarming rate, and Nazi saboteurs landed on Long Island—the last invasion of the U.S. mainland. However, the Army and the Administration did not take steps to intern all German aliens out a fear of collaboration. As Attorney General Biddle, who was responsible for control of enemy aliens, stated in an unpublished section of his memoirs, "There was more reason than in the West to conclude that shore-to-ship signals were accounting for the very serious submarine sinkings all along the East Coast, which were only sporadic only the West Coast...But the decisions were not made on the logic of events or on the weight of evidence, but on the racial prejudice that seemed to be influencing everyone." (cited in Robinson, BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT, p.112).

Michelle Malkin engages in overkill. Her stated purpose is to prove that the removal and confinement of Japanese American aliens, and particularly of citizens, was based on justifiable fears of espionage and sabotage, rather than racism (and thus to make the case for racial profiling by the Bush Administration). If this were all she wished to argue, she could have stopped with the signing of Executive Order 9066 itself. She could then more easily have made the case that the Army and the Executive felt obliged to act as they did considering the circumstances, though it was a terrible injustice to loyal citizens. After all, how the government's policy played itself out afterwards is logically irrelevant to the initial cause. She would still have been mistaken, in my opinion, about the threat from the Nisei (more on the distinction between the confinement of Issei and Nisei later on) . However, she would have been able to summon up some reputable authority. This was, after all, the retrospective commentary of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the most influential advocate of evacuation, in the memoir he wrote with McGeorge Bundy, ON ACTIVE SERVICE IN PEACE AND WAR. (P. 406). Because of this, Stimson supported compensation for losses suffered by Japanese American aliens and citizens in the evacuation. (On the other hand, Stimson went on to say that, more than the danger of disloyal activity, the anti-Japanese hysteria on the West Coast was so strong that Japanese Americans needed to be moved to protect them from illegal violence, a statement which throws into doubt Ms. Malkin's insistence that racial bigotry played no factor in the evacuation).

In contrast, Malkin's objective is to defend the government's actions throughout, which means that she goes beyond that those involved believed, all in order to denounce a nonexistent conspiracy among her opponents to create "the myth of the concentration camp." (Like Eric Muller, I am dubious about any campaign among scholars to equate the camps with concentration camps of Nazi Germany. As one who had relatives disappear during the Holocaust, I myself would be unlikely to do so).

Malkin thus follows in the paranoid style of Lillian Baker, the most important internment denier, whose gift to posterity, "The Concentration Camp Conspiracy," likewise charges an immense conspiracy on the part of Japanese Americans to defraud the government and distort history. To be fair, Malkin does not go as far as Baker in claiming that the camps were pleasant places or that the guard towers were for the inmates' protection. Still, her central premise is that the government acted justly in establishing camps to which Japanese Americans were "free to move elsewhere (initially)" "free to leave" and " free to enter". This is a serious distortion. Let us break down her comments.

First, Japanese Americans were, for a few weeks in March 1942, permitted to relocate "voluntarily." However, they were required—in practice, and possibly officially—to have an outside sponsor, and they were given no aid or financing for such a move. Such relocation would have meant families had to sell everything they owned or relying on what they had on hand--the bank accounts of enemy aliens were frozen--and move to an unknown location. Despite this, thousands of Japanese Americans did indeed move East. The vast majority of them, relying on the assurances of the West Coast Defense Command, moved inland to eastern California, only to be caught in the cruel net of involuntary confinement when that area was declared restricted. The author correctly notes that the threat of violence from inland communities made further "voluntary" relocation possible.

She might have gone further, in order to defend the government, to point out that the War Relocation Authority did initially intend to place Japanese Americans in communities outside the West Coast, but that when WRA Director Milton Eisenhower visited a Western Governor's conference, the rabid anti-Japanese sentiment he experienced forced him to shelve his plans and prepare for confinement for the duration. Rather, Ms. Malkin's talent for overkill shows itself in her insistence that hostility from inland Japanese-Americans was a significant factor in striking fear in the hearts of the West Coasters.

To say that people were free to enter the camps is true but irrelevant. In many case non-Japanese spouses of confined Japanese Americans, such as Elaine Black Yoneda, "volunteered" to go to camp to be with their families. As with people who volunteer to be jailed for their beliefs, such actions are a result of (or protest against) injustice and not a denial of it.

Finally, the assertion that Japanese Americans were "free to leave" the camps must be placed in context. The author correctly notes that those with permits who were adjudged loyal by the governments were able to leave. Again, she might have gone on to mention that as time went on the camp inmates were able in many cases to get day passes to go into town for supplies or on hikes. However, the Japanese Americans were held for months without individual trials, hearings, or charges. Until individuals were able to arrange to get paroled through the long, cumbersome and inevitably arbitrary loyalty and sponsorship procedure, they had no way to escape being confined against their will. The WRA, for a number of reasons, was unable to accommodate all those who sought resettlement, and some three quarters of Japanese Americans remained in the camps throughout the war.

This just in: Baying at the moon is not a crime in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As I noted yesterday, in her new book "In Defense of Internment," Michelle Malkin undertakes to "defend ... the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called "Japanese American internment")." (p.xii) ("Ethnic Japanese" here means the Nisei--American citizens born in this country to Japanese immigrant parents who had been forbidden by U.S. law from naturalizing as U.S. citizens because they were Asian.)

Michelle is undoubtedly aware that the two most prominently voiced criticisms of the government's program are these:

1. The government evicted all American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and placed them into camps, but took no action affecting American citizens of German or Italian ancestry. (In other words, if your name was, say Joe Kaminaka or Lou Matsumoto, you were evicted and confined; if your name was, say, Joe DiMaggio or Lou Gehrig, well, uh, you know.)

2. The actions taken against Japanese Americans were absurdly disproportionate to the scope of any security risks of which the government was even arguably aware.

If you're going to defend the program, this is what you've really got to defend, because this is what scholars most commonly and cogently criticize.

How does Michelle's book handle these two tasks?

The quick answer (a longer answer follows): As to (1), the 165-page text includes a single paragraph (on page 64). As to (2), the book says nothing at all.

Here's the longer answer.

1. Why no similar treatment of similarly situated Americans of German and Italian ancestry? (Why, that is, did Joe Kaminika end up in Manzanar in 1942 while Joe DiMaggio ended up batting .305?) Here's the lone paragraph on the point from "In Defense of Internment":

The disparate treatment of ethnic Japanese versus ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians is often assumed to be based on anti-Japanese racism rather than military necessity. Japan, however, was the only Axis country with a proven capability of launching a major attack on the United States. Some ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians had divided loyalties, but there was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan's diplomats in the MAGIC messages. Moreover, any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry. An East Coast evacuation of ethnic Germans and Italians, as envisioned by General Drum, would have resulted in the relocation of some 52 million people. By comparison, the total U.S. population at the time was 135 million people.

I'm afraid we're into eye-rolling, head-shaking territory here. Nevermind that Michelle tells her reader nothing about the racial backdrop for the government's distinction between citizens of Asian ancestry and citizens of European ancestry--decades of depictions of Asians as a fearsome, robotic, animalistic Yellow Peril.

Item: "Japan was the only Axis country with the capability of launching a major attack on the United States?" Here Michelle contradicts herself, because the book emphasizes repeatedly that Roosevelt, Stimson, and McCloy had good reason (from MAGIC) to worry about potential Nisei involvement not just in a full-blown Japanese attack on the West Coast, but in more ordinary kinds of domestic spying, disruptions of war production, and the like. So why would it appropriately have mattered (if it were true) to the MAGIC-reading trio of Roosevelt, McCloy, and Stimson that Japan could mount a full-blown assault on the West Coast but Germany could not mount a full-blown assault on the East Coast? What's more, it was not true after early June of 1942--before a single Japanese American was transferred for indefinite detention in a "relocation center"--that Japan had the capability of launching a major attack on the United States. The decisive American victory at Midway ensured that. And folks, notwithstanding Michelle's assertion (page xxxiii) that this view of Midway's impact is hindsight, that's just wrong: Newsweek (June 22, 1942), The New Republic (June 15, 1942), The Nation (June 27, 1942), Time (June 22, 1942), and the Los Angeles Times (June 8, 1942) all opined that the Midway victory essentially foreclosed any large-scale sea-based attack on the continental United States.

Item: "There was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan's diplomats in the MAGIC messages," says Michelle. Huh? This claim is so easily refuted that it's not worth the effort to spell it out. The only difference between the Japanese espionage operations and the Nazi ones was that we didn't have to decypher intercerpted cables to get a hint of the Nazi ones.

Item: "Any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry." Oh, I see. Because there were so many potential spies and saboteurs along the East Coast, it didn't make military sense to do anything to them. (Remember: it's not just that the government didn't evict and detain Americans of German and Italian ancestry: it's that the government did absolutely nothing to them!)

2. How, from the alleged MAGIC evidence that Japan had successfully recruited certain Kibei (that is, American-born citizens who had resided and been educated in Japan) into spying, did the government (and does Michelle's book) justify uprooting tens of thousands of Nisei (American-born citizens who'd never been to Japan) from their homes and forcing them into indefinite detention in barren camps?

Here's how General John DeWitt justified suspicion of all Nisei in February of 1942: "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."

Michelle doesn't say that, though. She just doesn't say anything.

Update: Allow me, before people jump all over me, to correct one thing I asserted (namely, that the government did nothing to American citizens of German ancestry). The government did act against a number of German aliens--a far smaller number than Japanese aliens--and those actions sometimes entailed the internment of American citizen children of those aliens. What I meant is that the government took no sizeable or programmatic action against American citizens of German ancestry as such.

If you were of a mind to unsettle the settled understanding of what led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945, and restore some credibility to the now-discredited claim of military necessity, you'd need to do two things.

First, you'd need to make at least a prima facie case of causation--that is, you'd need to persuade people that the various government actors whose actions produced the decision had well-grounded suspicions of subversion by American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and that those well-grounded suspicions of subversion were what led them to take the actions they took.

Second, you'd have to undermine the settled understanding, supported by several decades of comprehensive research by numerous scholars, that racism, economic jealousy, and war hysteria led these actors to took the actions they took.

How does Michelle's book try to accomplish these two things?

As to the first, the book quotes extensively from a handful of decyphered messages (the "MAGIC" cables) about Japanese efforts to develop some Issei and Nisei as spies for Japan. It really all turns on those MAGIC cables. The trouble is that the historical record tells us absolutely nothing more than that Roosevelt, the Secretary of War (Stimson), and his top assistant (McCloy) generally had access to the thousands of messages of which these concerning potential Issei and Nisei spies were a tiny few. The record tells us nothing about who actually reviewed which of the intercepts, or when, or what any reader understood them to mean. The record is just silent on these issues--reflecting, in a way, the silence of the actors themselves on MAGIC at the time. One might well say (and Michelle does), "but they couldn't talk or write about the MAGIC decrypts; they were ultra-secret and everybody was keen to keep them that way." That may well be so. But that doesn't mean we can fill in the silence in the record with our own suppositions about what they must have read and what they must have thought about what they read. In short, Michelle's book presents no evidence--because, apparently, there is none--to show that MAGIC actually led anybody to think or do anything.

And then, of course, there's the much larger problem (suggested by Greg Robinson below) that the program we know as the Japanese American internment was not a single decision but rather a long series of decisions taken over a period of months (or, if you count some of the pre-war prepartion for action against the ethnically Japanese in the USA, a period of years). And we know--for totally certain--that many of those decisions could not conceivably have been influenced by concerns for military necessity supported by MAGIC.

Let's take one example. When you think of the Japanese American internment, what do you picture? People living in the desolate high desert, in tarpaper barracks, under military guard, right?

Do you know how that happened? Do you know how it happened that Japanese Americans ended up spending years in desert camps under military guard, unable to leave without clearance? If you think that any federal government actors (let alone Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, or John McCloy) made that decision, you're wrong. The federal government, having evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in the late spring of '42 in racetrack and fairground "assembly centers," wanted to move Japanese Americans to wide-open, unguarded agricultural communities in the interior, modeled after Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But in early April of 1942, the governors of the Mountain States unequivocally rejected that idea, saying (I quote here the words of Governor Chase Clark of Idaho) that "any Japanese who might be sent into [the state] be placed under guard and confined in concentration camps for the safety of our people, our State, and the Japanese themselves." The federal government, needing the cooperation of the states, had no choice but to accede to the governors' demands.

So Japanese Americans ended up going into guarded camps (call them what you will) because Mountain State governors demanded it. Do you think that the governor of Idaho had access to the MAGIC decrypts, and that he formulated his demand for "concentration camps" on the basis of an evidence-based belief of military necessity? Or do you think maybe something else explained it? (Before you answer, consider also that Governor Clark liked to compare people of Japanese ancestry to "rats," proposed that all American Japanese be sent "back" to Japan (where most of them had never been) and that the Japanese islands then be "sunk," and admitted publicly that his views on the subject were "prejudiced" because he didn't know "which Japs he could trust" and therefore "didn't trust any of them." Or consider that the Governor of Wyoming announced that if the federal government went ahead with its CCC Corps Camp plan, there would be "Japs hanging from every pine tree.") Personally, I don't see how the MAGIC decrypts could have had anything to do with the decision to confine Japanese Americans under military guard in camps, which is probably the central feature of what we call the Japanese American internment.

OK, so there's really nothing in Michelle's book to accomplish the first of the things the book needed to accomplish--that is, to make out a prima facie case that MAGIC led to the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends.

What about the second? 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.

If a book is going to try to "provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long" (p. xii), and to "correct" the historical "record," I think the book needs to offer a reader more than this.

Several years ago, I wrote a book on the decisions behind the mass removal and confinement of the Japanese Americans, commonly, if inaccurately, known as the internment, and in particular the role of President Franklin Roosevelt. I based it on several years of research in a number of archives around the country. The book was published by the Harvard University Press in 2001. In the time since, I have done further research in this area, which has confirmed me in my conclusions. Since the book was published, I have read a number of critiques by various defenders of Executive Order 9066, especially by bloggers, who seem to constitute a large and vocal group. I have preferred to let the work speak for itself, and I have never before responded to any critics, even when their comments distorted what I actually said. However, I feel that I must break my silence in the case of Michelle Malkin's book.

First, Malkin is a bestselling author whose book is being put out by an established publisher, and her status as a celebrity will make many undiscriminating or unknowing people buy the book and take her arguments at face value.

Also, Malkin, unlike all other writers I have seen, deliberately impugns the motives of those who disagree with her. Although she sets herself up as a disinterested seeker for truth with an open mind, she is gratuitously nasty towards all others: "Unlike many others who have published on this subject, I have no vested interests: I am not an evacuee, internee, or family member thereof. I am not an attorney who has represented evacuees or internees demanding redress for their long-held grievances. I am not a professor whose tenure relies on regurgitating academic orthodoxy about this episode in American history." Well, I am none of these things, apart perhaps from being a professor, and I was not even that when I researched and wrote my book. I am mindful, however, of the wise counsel of Sidney Hook, who in his "Ethics of Controversy" reminded people "[b]efore impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." Since there is a great deal to criticize in Malkin's arguments from a logical and historical point of view, I will start by focusing on that.

The analysis of the book should start with the material the author includes on MAGIC (the decrypted intercepts of the Japanese code), which by her own statement constitutes the heart of her argument. There is a certain boredom born of repetition in any such discussion, since the author's material is mostly if not entirely lifted from the work of the late David Lowman, to whom the book is dedicated. (As the author states in the August 3, 2004 entry on her blog: "After reading a book by former National Security Agency official David Lowman called 'MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during WWII," published posthumously by Athena Press Inc., I contacted publisher Lee Allen, who generously agreed to share many new sources and resources as I sought the truth.") Lowman's work has frequently been refuted and discredited. (Lowman first tried to make the case that the evidence of the MAGIC cables justified Executive Order 9066 in testimony before the Subcommittee on Administrative law and Governmental Relations of the House Committee on the Judiciary in June 1984. At that time, John Herzig, himself a retired Lieutenant Colonel and former intelligence officer, and Peter Irons effectively rebutted his testimony. Lowman did not resurface until 2000, when he put the same information in the book Malkin mentions. According to the Los Angeles Times's review, the editor of Lowman's book himself expressed doubts as to the credibility of Lowman's conclusions.

Since there is nothing new in the author's case for MAGIC, my rebuttal will be brief. (For a more detailed presentation of the matter, John Herzig's "Japanese Americans and MAGIC," Amerasia Journal 11:2 (1984), is still unequalled).

Let me divide it into three parts: first, that the MAGIC cables do not present the image of a Japanese American spy network; Second, that the people who pushed the case for evacuation would not have had access to the MAGIC excerpts in any case; thirdly, that those who did have access to MAGIC did not base their decision on it.

First, an examination of the MAGIC cables provided by the author does not provide any case for implicating the Japanese Americans in espionage activities. Most of the cables discussed (a tiny handful of the thousands of messages decrypted) come from Tokyo or Mexico City and refer to areas outside the United States. Those cables that do speak of the United States detail various efforts by Japan to build networks, and list hopes or intentions rather than actions or results. For example, the author quotes (p. 41) from a January 31, 1941 cable from Tokyo which orders agents to establish espionage and to recruit second generations. It does not say that such recruitment took place, and furthermore that recruitment was to take place even more among non-Japanese. Similarly, the author cites excerpts listing census data transmitted on the Japanese population of various cities--hardly secret information. The author relies most strongly on a memo from the Los Angeles consulate to Tokyo from May 1941. The author claims "the message stated that the network had Nisei spies in the U.S. Army" (p. 44). In fact, the message states "We shall maintain connection with our second generations who are at present in the U.S. Army." This speaks again of agents to be recruited. There is no evidence that any individuals had been recruited as agents, still less that they were actively giving information. Replies back from Los Angeles and Seattle state that they had established connections with Japanese and with "second generations." The rest of the cables she cites recount information given to Japan in fall 1941, long after any discussion of recruiting Japanese Americans had ceased, with no clue as to the source of the information given. The sum total of the information is that Japan unquestionably tried to build a spy network in the US during 1941. It is also clear that the Japanese wished to recruit Japanese Americans, as well as non-Japanese.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that the MAGIC excerpts did show some credible risk of disloyal activity by Nisei on the West Coast, those who made the case for internment did not rely on them. The author herself notes that access to the MAGIC encrypts was limited to a dozen people outside the decrypters, and notably says that President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy had access to the MAGIC cables. This leaves her in the position of asserting that the essential reflection and decision was made by those three figures, and the reasons or motivations of all other actors were irrelevant. However, the record amply demonstrates that West Coast Defense Commander General John DeWitt (and his assistant Karl Bendetsen) were largely responsible for making the case for evacuation, and that their judgment of the situation and their recommendation for mass evacuation overcame the initial opposition of McCloy and Stimson. DeWitt's motivations for urging evacuation--notably his comment to McCloy that "a Jap is a Jap," and his reliance on arguments about the "racial strains" of the Japanese in his Final Report--indicate that his conduct was informed by racism.

Finally, there is no direct evidence to support the contention that the MAGIC excerpts played a decisive role in the decision of the figures who did have access to them to authorize mass evacuation, and considerable evidence that leads to a contrary inference. Throughout all the confidential memoranda and conversations taking place within the War Department at the time of the decision on evacuation, transcripts which show people speaking extremely freely, the MAGIC excerpts are not mentioned a single time. In particular, there is no evidence that President Roosevelt ever saw or was briefed on the MAGIC excerpts the author mentions, let alone that he was decisively influenced by them. As I detail at great length in my book "By Order of the President," throughout the 1930s Roosevelt expressed suspicions of Japanese Americans, irrespective of citizenship, and sought to keep the community under surveillance. As early as 1936, he already approved plans to arrest suspicious Japanese Americans in Hawaii if war broke out. As of early 1941, before FDR could have received any MAGIC excerpts, the Justice Department and the military had already put together lists of aliens to be taken into custody (the so-called ABC lists). These were not based on suspicion of individual activities, but of the suspected individuals' position in Japanese communities. Roosevelt continued to believe in a threat despite receiving reports of overwhelming community loyalty from the FBI and his own agents, reports he called "nothing much new."

As I continue liveblogging my own thoughts about Michelle's book "In Defense of Internment," I'll note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of the Japanese American community have not helped anyone think clearly about the Roosevelt Adminisration's policies by attacking each step of the Bush Administration's domestic antiterrorism policy since 9/11 as a reprise of the worst mistakes of WWII. This was one of the two main points I made in my article "Inference or Impact? Racial Profiling and the Internment's True Legacy," which Michelle graciously cites in her book.

A big part of what drove Michelle to write this book was her disgust with people on the left who have never met an antiterrorism policy they like, and who have trotted out the scary specter of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at every opportunity. In "Inference or Impact," I worried about the Chicken Little effect of repeatedly claiming a replay of the WWII experience of Japanese Americans--that it might lead people to minimize the reality of that experience. Michelle is doing that in this book, and in at least a small way, I think the civil liberties left has some of its own rhetoric to blame. David Cole didn't force Michelle Malkin to write this book, mind you. But maybe some of David's rhetoric helped her build her head of steam.

Now I hasten to add that Michelle is also slaying dragons of her own creation. She's outraged, she says (see pages 95-99), at all of the people who liken the War Relocation Authority's "Relocation Centers" for Japanese Americans to Nazi death camps by naming them with the historically accurate term "concentration camps." (That's what FDR himself called them — see the quotation from FDR on page 21 of Michelle's book.)

I don't have the faintest idea who Michelle is talking about here. I know of no one who compares Manzanar to Auschwitz, and Michelle's book doesn't cite anyone who does so.

Michelle is certainly right that scholars of the Japanese American experience and the Japanese American community itself play games with terminology, sometimes using historically authentic terms such as "concentration camp" while rejecting other historically authentic terms (such as "internment") on the basis that they do not adequately reflect what really happened. (Most savvy people today speak of "incarceration" rather than "internment.")

But Michelle does exactly the same thing, rejecting the historically authentic term "concentration camp" while insisting on using the historically authentic but grossly misleading term "evacuation." (People are "evacuated" in order to protect them from a threat, such as a hurricane or a forest fire. Japanese Americans were evicted from their homes, not evacuated.)

If in fact there were people who compared this country's camps for Japanese Americans to Nazi Germany's death camps, I would certainly understand Michelle's angry desire to set the record straight. My grandfather was in Buchenwald,** and I'd be as outraged as anyone--probably more outraged than most--by the suggestion that this government ran places like that. But--to foreshadow my next post on this topic--the way to counter a comparison of Manzanar to Buchenwald is to describe Manzanar carefully. It is not to compare Manzanar to a Boy Scout Camp, which Michelle comes very close to doing.

More on that later.

**I note that Michelle has set up an "errata" page for the book. Here's one. On page 99, she says that "[h]istorians who compare the American relocation camps to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen will be hard-pressed to find a single European Jew who ... was given permission to leave ... a Nazi death camp." Not so. Nearly all of the German and Austrian Jews (like my grandfather) who were seized at Kristallnacht and taken to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen in early November of 1938 were released over the following several months. Those who could not get visas out of Germany and Austria were later recaptured and killed (like my great uncle Leopold). But Nazi Germany's policy from the mid- to late 1930s was to "encourage" (by which I mean terrorize) Jews into leaving the country. You can read more about this episode here if you're interested.

"This book defends both the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called "Japanese American internment"), as well as the internment of enemy aliens, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, during World War II. My work is by no means all-encompassing; my aim is to provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long."

Read just a bit further, though, and you'll see that the book is not just about "provoking debate." It's about "correcting the record" (page xv). By the time she finishes her retelling of the story of how the U.S. government decided to force 112,000 Japanese aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes and into camps in the interior, she maintains that "it should be obvious to any fair-minded person that the decisions made were not based primarily on racism and wartime hysteria" (page 80), but were based instead on information in top-secret decrypted cables from Japan to its embassies around the world (the so-called "MAGIC" decrypts) suggesting that certain people in the Americas (both ethnically Japanese people, including primarily Japanese aliens but also a handful of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, as well as people of other races and ethnicities) were secretly working as spies for the Japanese government.

In other words, the government did what it did to people of Japanese ancestry in the United States from 1941 to 1945 because a select few officials at the very top of certain branches of the government (really a very few--the President, the Secretary of State, and a few War Department officials, but not the Attorney General or J. Edgar Hoover) knew that the Japanese government had sought to develop relationships with ethnically Japanese (as well as ethnically non-Japanese) people in the United States, and had apparently had some success in developing such relationships. It was cool and calibrated military necessity, not racism and not war hysteria.

I'll have more to say about her substantive claims about MAGIC and racism and hysteria later. (Dave Neiwert has already said plenty about it, by the way.)

First, though, people ought to ask Michelle some very serious questions about the book's goal and the research methods that support it.

I was, frankly, amazed at the speed with which Michelle researched and wrote the book, and then brought it to publication. She mentioned yesterday that she had been led to do much of the research for the book by a weblog dialogue (a "diablogue?") between me and Sparky at Sgt. Styker that took place 16 months ago.

I know that when I undertook to tell the story of a single government decision from this era — the decision to draft American citizens of Japanese ancestry out of the camps and into the military (which is the subject of my book) — I had to spend hours and hours first finding all of the relevant files from all the relevant agencies in archives all over the country, then sifting through those files to find all documents from all agencies and people relevant to the decisionmaking process, and then poring over the documents themselves, in order to link together disparate positions of many different people in many different agencies into a coherent narrative.

In "In Defense of Internement," Michelle "corrects the record" by telling a much broader story about a whole long set of government policies and decisions. She cites to original documents from a staggering number of agencies and offices within agencies--the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, various branches of the War Department (including G1, G2, and the Provost Marshall General's Office), the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division, FDR's communications, and, of course, the voluminous MAGIC cables.

I haven't checked, but I assume that lots of relevant materials for the story Michelle tells would be all over the country--in both DC-area branches of the National Archives as well as many of its regional offices, in presidential libraries, in the private papers of people like John McCloy and Milton Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall and many others who played a role in this long anc complex story, and in lots of other places.

I can't imagine how Michelle--or, indeed, anyone--could have done the primary research necessary to understand the record, let alone "correct" it in the manner the book attempts to do, in five or six years, let alone in one. Especially while doing anything at all in addition to researching the book (such as writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column). To tell the story correctly, a person would need to sift through thousands and thousands of pages of archival material from all over the country and then piece bits together into a coherent story.

I have a hard time believing that Michelle did anything of the sort. I suspect that she derived much of the information that supports her account from secondary sources, and relies primarily on primary research done (or perhaps not done) by others. (I do not doubt, by the way, that the documents to which Michelle cites actually exist; I'm not suggesting she's making them up. What I suspect--indeed, what I know from my own experience--is that there must be thousands of additional documents in the archives that are relevant to a full understanding of the government's wartime decisions, and that massively complicate the simple story she narrates.

A person certainly can "provoke debate" (uninformed debate, at least) by going about things in this way. But a person can't "correct the record" in this way, or report history in a way that anyone ought to believe. It's just not possible, and it's not credible.

OK, I said my first post on the subject of Michelle's book would come in a couple of hours, and would be about the book's goals and method. I lied.

I posted a message on my own blog yesterday that the cover of the book didn't inspire much confidence that the book would be Fair and Balanced. I thought the visual equation of a Japanese American man with Mohammad Atta was a bit, shall we say, scandalous. Michelle disagreed.

Now I know who the Japanese American man on the cover is (Richard Kotoshirodo), and I still say that the cover is scandalous. Kotoshirodo was an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, educated in Japan (making him a "Kibei"--that is, a person born in the US to Japanese alien parents (a "Nisei") and who was sent to Japan for his primary and/or secondary education) who, while employed by the Japanese consulate in Hawaii, was sent out by the consulate to observe various sites of interest to the Japanese consulate in the months before Pearl Harbor and told to report back on his observations.

The book's cover compares this apparentlyly disloyal American citizen of Japanese ancestry who did some surveillance for his employers at the Japanese consulate before Japan's surprise attack to Mohammad Atta, a Saudi citizen who piloted a plane into one of the World Trade towers, killing thousands of civilian innocents. A fair comparison? Not in my eyes. Maybe you see it differently.

One other thing: nobody who looks at this cover in a bookstore is going to have the faintest idea who the Japanese American face is; nearly everyone, it's safe to say, will recognize Mohammad Atta. Coupled with the book's title ("In Defense of Internment") and its subtitle ("The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror"), which sits directly between the two photographs, this cover will, I think, suggest to the ordinary person that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today. If that's not a scandalous aspersion on the loyalty and character of Japanese Americans, I don't know what is.

Update: Folks are photoshopping the cover of "In Defense of Internment" over here, if you're into that sort of thing.

Eugene was kind enough to invite me to guest-blog here today and tomorrow, and with the publication this week of Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror," it looks as though I'll have plenty to write about. About which to write, I mean. (How many times did my father drill into my head the rule that prepositions are incorrect words to end sentences with?)**

The last couple of days have been a bit of a whirlwind. It isn't every day--or every decade, frankly--that a high-profile person like Michelle (syndicated columnist, frequent FOX News contributor) elaborately defends the eviction and incarceration of some 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry from 1942 to 1945 as a military necessity. I got my blog started some 16 months ago when Rep. Howard Coble blunderingly offered his view on a radio program that Japanese Americans were justifiably rounded up because "it wasn't safe for them to be on the streets"--a long-discarded justification for the government's program that Michelle does not see fit to defend in terms (although she generally sticks up for Coble anyway--see page xvii of her book). I would have loved to get a review copy of the book from the publisher, as some bloggers on the right and some warbloggers did, but I didn't. And it's strange that I didn't, given that (a) I'm the only person in the blogosphere who regularly blogs about the government's wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, (b) Michelle wrote yesterday that it was my lengthy exchanges with Sparky at Sgt. Stryker 16 months ago that inspired her to do much of the research for her book, and (c) Michelle cites my work, both approvingly (where, on page 352, she speaks of my "thoughtful" analysis in this article on racial profiling) and disapprovingly (where, on pages 110 and 334, she faults my book "Free to Die for their Country" for "exalting ... belligerent draft resisters" in the camps). Fortunately, my local Barnes & Noble here in Chapel Hill had a copy on Monday, and I was able to read it yesterday, so I'm in a position to say something about it now while the blogosphere is abuzz about it.

I plan to post my reactions to the book serially today and tomorrow rather than posting a single huge review all at once. So, if you're interested in this sort of thing, check back here occasionally. I'll post the first piece of my review--which will pertain to the book's goals and its method--in a couple of hours, when I've got down what I want to say.

In the meantime, a big "thanks" to Eugene for the invitation to guest-blog here again. More soon.

**I know, I know. "With" is a preposition. This was a joke.