The Constitution and Internment Camps

Due Process and The Japanese-American Internment

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"


Video By "Matthew Shimura"



This is a moving documentary that won CSPAN's 2012 Student Documentary Competition in 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. Even worse is tens of thousands of American citizens who had their citizenship suspended, including women and children against which there was no evidence for the "enemy alien" designation, were held in the camps for years after the war had ended.

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