We should study history, so we are not doomed to repeat it.

Boston Globe: A lesson of injustice from 1942.

John Ashcroft is trying to get us to repeat it. We should look back at the Japanese internment and what a sickening violations of human rights it was. Talk Left points us to a story in the Boston Globe by Carl Takei, grandson of a man taken in the roundup who died three years later, never seeing his home again.

The FBI arrived at his door carrying pistols and a terse message: Juro, the owner of a small sweater factory and dry goods store in one of Seattle's ethnic neighborhoods, was under arrest. As his bewildered wife and children watched, the agents took Juro away without saying why, where he would be taken, or for how long. He spent the next year being held as an enemy alien in a federal prison nearly 1,000 miles away and died only three years later, never again seeing his home in Seattle.

Juro was a Japanese-American - and my great-grandfather. In early 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested many men like him: people whose sole crime was their leadership or prominence within the Japanese-American community. In the eyes of FBI agents searching for traitors, their foreign faces and foreign names made their guilt a presumption and their innocence unprovable.

Today, February 19, is the anniversary of the authorization of these initial roundups. Please take a moment to remember this horrible time, and maybe read the article on them. Then compare those government actions with the actions the Bush Administratin and John Ashcroft are performing now. Think about the erosion of our civil liberties, the hijacking of our judicial system, the internment of Americans of Middle Eastern descent, the Patriot Act, and the abomination coming down the pike- the Patriot Act II.