Executive Order 9066 – CSPAN Documentary On US Concentration Camps

Posted by Alexander Higgins - April 30, 2012 at 3:51 pm

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/04/30/executive-order-9066-cs...

The CSPAN grand prize winning documentary warns US can repeat WWII mistake of rounding people up into concentration camps again by suspending the constitution.

StudentCam 2012 Grand Prize: The Constitution and the Camps – Due Process and the Japanese-American Internment by Matthew Shimura

Matthew Shimura, Grand Prize winner of C-SPAN’s StudentCam 2012′s video documentary competition, appears in an interview with Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to discuss the ninth-grader’s documentary on Japanese-American internment. C-SPAN’s national morning call-in program, Washington Journal, will televise the discussion on Friday, April 27 at 8:15 a.m. ET. The winning video will air prior to Washington Journal at 6:50 a.m. ET. Find more information at studentcam.org.

This is a moving documentary that won CSPAN’s 2012 Student Documentary Competitionin which 9th student Matthew Shimura from Punahou School in Honolulu, HI detailed the plight of his grandfather and other Japanese citizens during World War II when the US government decided to suspend the constitutional rights  of US citizens and declared Japanese Americans as C4 “enemy aliens” without due process.

While many don’t know it, it was not only Japanese citizens that were rounded up by the United States. Instead of hundreds of thousands of US citizens including Germans, Italians and political dissidents were also rounded up and hauled off to the concentration camps.

Matthew warns that Americans need to fully understand the gravity of these events which are still clouded in mystery so we can be better prepared and possible try to prevent the government from even again deciding to suspend the inalienable rights the constitution is SUPPOSED to guarantee to us.

Perhaps even more spine-tingling is recollections from Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye’s who recalls how he was serving in the US military during the war and did not even have any knowledge that Americans were being rounded up into concentration camps because the news was censored by the US government.

He explains how the government literally had entire sections and articles in newspapers literally blacked out.

Make no mistake about it, the modern-day US government is already very far along the same path that the WWII government traveled.

The C4 “enemy alien” designation sounds awfully similar to the modern day “enemy combatant” and “enemy belligerent” designations of the constitution suspending NDAA.

Today the government would take a more inconspicuous approach to censoring the news, specifically instead of covering articles by blacking them out they would simply prevent such stories from being published in the first place.

Just as like during World War II, the US Supreme Court continues to uphold constitution trampling legislation and executive government procedures time and again.

To put this documentary into a modern-day context, we would see a complete reenactment of the WWII style concentration camps  if the United States were to go into a world war against Iran, India, Russia, And China.

In such an event we could see Iranians, Russians, Chinese, Indians as well as prominent activists and journalists critical of the US government’s foreign policy rounded up and put into FEMA camps and or CIA torture prisons.

However, there would be a huge difference between then and now.

By all accounts in our censored history, which is backed by those who reportedly were interned at the concentration camps, there was no torture or unjust treatment of those interned then.

Today, torture and inhumane treatment has been legalized and those imprisoned in a modern-day version of the WWII camps would surely suffer a different fate.