🚀 go-pugleaf

Aahz Maruch <aahz@pobox.com> writes:

: Obviously, the armed forces and the CIA aren't going to waste time,
: effort, money and resources on the capture and incarceration of
: people who are innocent and harmless.  If they did, they'd have
: nothing to gain and everything to lose, credibility-wise.

> Japanese internment during WWII?


Not even remotely comparable, for the following reasons:

Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned pre-emptively as
potential security risks.  They were innocent, but as a group, were 
not believed to be harmless.  That seems silly in retrospect, but 
what's relevant is that it didn't at the time.  Don't make the mis-
take of judging the past by the standards of the present.

The proper analogy to the Japanese-American internment isn't holding
captured combatants in Guantanamo and the like, but the preemptive,
wholesale rounding up and internment of entire ethnic or religious
groups in parts of Afghanistan and Iraq.  That obviously isn't hap-
pening.  Nor would it even be feasible; the numbers are too great.

The mere fact that the inmates of Gitmo et al. had to be captured at
gunpoint belies the idea that their situation is comparable to that
of the WWII internment.

If anything, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s would
make the U.S. all the more cautious of incarcerating people without
good reason.



Geoff

--
"Ya'll know the difference between a Florida orange and
 a California orange?  The California orange sucks back."
					 -- flimflam