The same story contains the following:
Locke delivered a free-ranging speech that also . . . said the federal Patriot Act reminded him of the internment of the Japanese during World War II. . . .
Locke also criticized the Patriot Act approved in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Apparently referring to detainment of suspected enemy combatants, he said the law reminds him of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Well, if the reporter interpreted Locke correctly, then Locke is badly wrong. First, the detention of suspected enemy combatants, whether the Guantanamo detainees or Padilla and Hamdi, is pursuant to other authority, not the Patriot Act, which says nothing about such military detention.
But second, and much more importantly, even if Locke used “Patriot Act” as highly imprecise (though recently quite common) shorthand for “the Bush administration’s policies,” the military detention is vastly different from the internment of Japanese-Americans. The Japanese-Americans were interned because of their race (some of them were Japanese citizens and thus enemy aliens even if they lived here a long time, but the policy applied even to nativeborn citizens of Japanese descent). The military detainees are being interned because the government has specific reason, quite unrelated to their race (Padilla is Hispanic, not Arab) to believe that they are enemy soldiers.
It is conceivable that the reporter misunderstood Locke, and that Locke was referring to sec. 412 of the Patriot Act, which makes it easier for the government to detain, before deporting them, noncitizens who are suspected of terrorist activity or other illegal or dangerous conduct. (I think it’s less likely that this is what Locke meant, given the newspaper account, and given that the section has gotten much less publicity than the military detentions have — if Locke had been referring to that section, then I suspect he would have realized that he had to more specifically explain what he was talking about.) But again this is very different from the detentions of Japanese-Americans: It applies to citizens as well as noncitizens, and it’s triggered by specific suspicion of misconduct.
One can criticize the government’s detention policies on various grounds; as blog readers are aware, I think the government’s position in the Padilla case, for instance, is probably mistaken. But the analogy to the Japanese-American internments is just wrong.
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