David Neiwert explains why Rep. Howard Coble's remarks attempting to justify Japanese-American internment camps during WWII haven't met with the same outrage as Trent Lott's comments on 1940's racism. The answer: Bigtry against Asians.

Atrios shares David's view, and asks, "Does wartime justify the suspension of the basic American right to a presumption of innocence?" His answer, like our's, is a resounding "no."

Eric Muller at Is That Legal, points out that tomorrow is the anniversay of the FDR Order that authorized the detention camps. Take a minute to read Executive Order 9066 here. Pictures of the detainees and camps are here.

Colorado had an internment camp, and Prof. Mueller links to this excellent article about it. You can listen to audio clips of those with personal memories of the camp by scrolling down the article.

Congressman Mark Honda is trying to get Congress to do something about Coble. We all should join in his effort. Join us in writing your congresspersons and asking them to hold Coble accountable for his remarks and remove him from his leadership position on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Do you have concerns about Ashcroft? You're not alone. Check out Ashcroft's Political Agenda by Michael Hill in the Baltimore Sun, in which critics of the attorney general wonder if his taking away of civil liberties goes beyond countering terrorism.

There's a brand new blog that looks very promising called PatriotWatch. It addresses the erosion of civil liberties, privacy, civil rights, and human rights in the context of 9-11. Good links to action alerts and troubling legislation.

Government scientists are recommending a combination of facial recognition and fingerprint scanning technologies for identity documents to be issued to foreigners.

The standards, which were Congressionally mandated as part of the U.S.A. Patriot Act and a border security act, would be used in all documents issued to foreigners by the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, including green cards, student visas and border crossing cards.

The scientists' report, which has been submitted to Congress, is the first step in instituting body-recognition technology, known as biometrics, as a governmental tool on a wide basis....

The technologies will be used to deny entry to foreign nationals who have a criminal record or who appear on government watch lists.

Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, sponsored a program on civil liberties yesterday in Seattle. The speakers, mostly elderly Japanese, detailed their experiences of their WWII detention and seemed to agree that civil rights are teetering anew as they did in WWII.

The stories told by the elderly Japanese Americans and the young Syrian woman were remarkably similar: the shock of suddenly being viewed with suspicion by friends and neighbors, the bewilderment of being torn from homes and locked up, the anger with a government that promised to protect freedoms.

It happened to people of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor. It's happening to Arab Americans and other Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001. But this time, Americans of many races are speaking out against the erosion of liberty in the name of security.

"We will not let history repeat itself," said Dale Minami, lead attorney in a lawsuit in the early 1980s that successfully challenged the federal government's claim that incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans was justified during wartime.

Densho chronicles the experiences of people imprisoned in camps across the Western U.S. in the 1940s, and yesterday's program began with films of several local residents relating a sense of loss and disillusionment still fresh after five decades.

They were followed by Nadin Hamoui, 21, a Syrian college student from Seattle. She tearfully recounted how 15 federal agents stormed her family's Lynnwood home last February as part of a post-Sept. 11 crackdown on Arab nationals living illegally in the U.S. In the chaos of the raid, Hamoui ran in to one of the agents in the hallway. "He pulled his gun and put it right in the middle of my forehead," she told the crowd of nearly 500 people.

There's lots more, go and read the whole thing.

For more on the protest of the detainees, and on those calling for Ashcroft's removal, see our prior post here.

John Perry Barlow, the man who popularized the term 'cyberspace', discusses the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture in this Mother Jones interview . [Link via Ernie the Attorney]

The Total Information Awareness project is truly diabolical -- mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.... It's a combination of the Patriot Act and a Justice Department directive that was issued in May by John Ashcroft. Now I believe that this invasion of privacy is just as unconstitutional as its ever been, but nothing is unconstitutional until somebody's taken it to court and proven it.

The ACLU is planning to slam Attorney General John Ashcroft in a new ad campaign:

The advertisements paint Ashcroft as a zealous ideologue who has hacked away at American civil liberties using post-September 11 concerns about national security as a pretext.

The advertisement accuses Ashcroft of "shamelessly using the events of September 11 as a subterfuge," to undermine the rights enshrined in the US Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and association.

"Today, the government can get a secret warrant to search your home without telling you until long afterwards," the advertisement reads.

"Today, the government can monitor your Internet use, read your emails, examine your online purchases with minimal judicial oversight. Today, you can be detained without access to a lawyer, without being charged with a crime.

"Today, John Ashcroft has authorized the FBI to monitor your political activities, to send agents into your house of worship. We can only guess what tomorrow will bring."

The "hard-hitting," ad, which will begin running in a selection of national current affairs and political magazines later this month, concludes with an exhortation to the American people to "stop the Ashcroft assault on our civil liberties."

With the Justice Department's newly revealed attempt to enact Patriot Act II, the ads couldn't come at a better time.

Republican Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina said on a radio show yesterday that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was appropriate.

Coble is the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.

He said, among other things, ''We were at war. They (Japanese-Americans) were an endangered species. For many of these Japanese-Americans, it wasn't safe for them to be on the street.''

Update: Don't miss Orcinus ( Journalist David Neiwert) on the prospect of Arab-American or Muslim-American internment camps and on Congressman Howard Coble's remarks on the Japanese WWII internment camps. Look for his article on the Japanese camps and the Korematsu decision to appear any day in Salon. We've already read it and it's terrific.

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This just in via e-mail from Legal Aid Attorneys:

Support your right to participate in lawful political and First Amendment activity -- attend an important court hearing on Wednesday, January 29th at 3:00 p.m.

The New York City Police Department has asked a federal judge to virtually eliminate court-ordered protections for citizens and organizations who engage in lawful political acitvity in New York City. The court order they seek to overturn prevents the police from spying on first amendment activities unless a targeted person or group engages in criminal activity.

Oral arguments on the police department's motion in the case, "Handschu v. Special Services Division," will be held on Wednesday, January 29th at 3:00 p.m.

Courtroom 17-C
United States District Court
Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street (east of Foley Square)
New York, NY
(4, 5 & 6 Train to Brooklyn Bridge;
J, M, Z, A, C and E to Chambers St.)

Citing the events of September 11, 2001, David Cohen, Deputy Police Commissioner for Intelligence and a 35-year veteran of the CIA, has told the court in the Police Department's motion papers that continuing to require a "criminal predicate" to conduct political investigations hampers intelligence collection on potential terrorists.

The "Handschu" case was filed in 1971 shortly after it came to light that police had for decades spied on lawful activities of social and racial justice advocates. A front-page article by Chisun Lee in the December 18th Village Voice presents a history of the "Handschu" decree, and what is at stake for New Yorkers. Click here to read the article.

Bump from January 23:

We posted this yesterday, and now the mainsteam media has picked up on it:

People for the American Way is announcing a win for civil liberties with respect to the Total Information Awareness Program --via the Wyden Amendment which was successfully included in the Senate spending package. From their press release, received today:

"WASHINGTON - In a bold bipartisan move, the U.S. Senate today adopted an Amendment that could protect Americans from the broad reach of government data-mining efforts associated with the office of Total Information Awareness. The Amendment, proposed by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), conditions funding of some data-mining programs on actions by the executive branch to protect privacy and monitor the usage of personal information.

"With concerted, bipartisan effort, the Senate today has advanced a common-sense measure to protect the constitutional liberties of all Americans," said Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way. "The House of Representatives should accept the Wyden Amendment in conference, and President Bush should promptly endorse this vital provision."

The San Francisco Chronicle takes aim at the Total Information Awareness program in an editorial today - here's some, but go read the whole thing.

Medical histories. Financial records, including individual transactions. Security cameras. Divorce files and college transcripts. The tracking of cell- phone calls and toll-booth passages. Reading habits, as culled from library records and bookstore purchases.

Bits of information from these and other sources, when combined, can produce a comprehensive profile of an individual. It also could be misleading, dangerously so, if some of the input is inaccurate. Yet the Bush administration appears determined to steam ahead toward an unprecedented system of data-mining under the direction of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, a major figure in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal during the Reagan administration.

The prospect that an American can be identified as a suspect through a flawed database is particularly chilling in view of the USA Patriot Act, which gives authorities sweeping new powers to conduct searches without notifying the subjects -- and even detain "enemy combatants" without judicial oversight....

The issue is not whether Americans feel comfortable in giving vast new surveillance powers to President Bush, John Ashcroft or any other leader. The founding fathers knew the folly of trusting basic freedoms to the benevolence and wisdom of people who happen to be in power at any given moment.

"A government of laws," declared John Adams, our second president, "and not of men."

That admonition should apply to the government's latest attempt to exploit advancements in technology -- and fears of terrorism -- to track the everyday lives of Americans.

And read Sen. Patrick Leahy's letter to Ashcroft about how little Congress has been told about the data-mining plan, and what's wrong with it.

Moreover, as Federal law enforcement agencies obtain public source and proprietary data for mining, the sheer volume of information may make updating the data and checks for reliability and accuracy difficult, if not impossible. Reliance on data mining by law enforcement agencies may produce an increase in false leads and law enforcement mistakes. While the former is a waste of resources, the latter may result in mistaken arrests or surveillance. Such mistakes do occur, even without data-mining.1 In short, while the only ill effect of business reliance on outdated or incorrect information may be misdirected marketing efforts, data mining mistakes made by a law enforcement agency may result in misdirection or misallocation of limited government resources and devastating consequences for mistakenly targeted Americans.

This would be quite funny, were it not so pathetic....Ashcroft invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. to defend his civil rights record.

"From the first days of our administration, honoring the diversity of the American people has been a priority for President Bush and for me," Ashcroft said. ...The largely African-American crowd of Justice Department employees responded with restrained but polite applause.

He's lucky they didn't jeer.