Failing with FEMA

The images from the Katrina disaster in New Orleans struck all kinds of chords for everyone, but the images of the levee breaking and flooding the city had a special poignance for me:



Seeing that, I was immediately reminded of this:



This is an image of the failure of the Teton Dam in southeastern Idaho on June 5, 1976. As I described in my first book, In God's Country, I had considerable firsthand involvement in the aftermath of this disaster (which I have excerpted below).

The settings, the circumstances, and the scope couldn't have been more different. In New Orleans, the levee failure flooded a major urban area and the death toll is estimated to be in the thousands. In Idaho, the failure of the dam occurred in a sparsely populated area and wound up killing only 14 people. (As it happened, one of those 14 was my great-aunt.)

Both, however, are vivid examples of the incompetence of government bureaucrats wreaking real catastrophe that results in the deaths of ordinary citizens. Their similarities, as well as their differences, are instructive.

As the excerpt explains, the Teton Dam failed because government dam designers (working for the Bureau of Reclamation) neglected to account for the extremely steep canyon walls where it was built, in combination with the large amount of water that was going to flow around the sides of the dam through the extremely porous rock within those walls. It created stress fracturing in the key trench, a feature that was supposed to seal the water out of the dam structure; and this fracturing let water pour into the dam's core.

In a similar fashion, it's becoming clear that government bureaucrats used "fuzzy math" to calculate that a New Orleans levee failure from a Category 4 or 5 storm was unlikely to occur and was low on their list of priorities. Government officials are already using this flawed calculus to justify their longstanding failure to act in a way that would have prevented the tragedy.

Mind you, these are not the only times I've seen governmental arrogance in handling a disaster cost people their lives. Something similar occurred in 1980, when the eruption of Mount St. Helens killed 57 people -- most of whom, as it happened, were well outside the danger zones established by government officials:

Of the 57 who died on the mountain, only three are known to have been killed within the "red zone,'' the area cordoned off by officials before the eruption. Another three -- all miners carrying permits -- died in the adjacent "blue zone,'' an area closed to the general public but open to permit-carrying workers.

Washington state officials argued that the blast was unprecedented and that there was no way for them to have foreseen the scale of the disaster, which ripped trees out of the ground 17 miles from the crater and devastated an area spanning 230 square miles. Within hours, its plume had blocked the sun over much of eastern Washington. Ash fell like snow as far away as Montana.

The possibility of a far larger eruption had been discussed, but it stayed among scientists, said Richard Waitt, a geologist at the USGS's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver.

"We all have blood on our hands, if you want to look at it that way,'' said Waitt, who was one of a handful of scientists who had tried to warn his superiors that the blast area could be far larger than originally imagined. But even if scientists had predicted the true scope of the catastrophe, Waitt said, it's unlikely the state could have restricted access because much of the blast site was on private property.

In fact, there's a real likelihood that the government's failure to warn people away adequately was caused by its longstanding deference to corporate interests:

The red zone was almost entirely within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. It ended where the landholdings of timber giant, Weyerhaeuser Co., began, Waitt said.

That became the basis for a lawsuit brought by the victims' families, who alleged that the restricted areas were based on property lines, not science. The case against the state was dismissed in 1985, after the court ruled that state officials did not know how destructive the eruption was going to be. Some families sued Weyerhaeuser, settling for a reported $225,000 -- an amount that many said was a pittance.

In New Orleans, it's clear the government officials, both federal and local, calculated that the costs of preparing adequately for a Category 5 hurricane outweighed the risks involved in failing to do so. The chief evidence for this lies in the Bush administration's cutbacks in federal spending on planned improvements for the levees:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

That's not to say that, even if the funding had not been cut, the government would have been in position to prevent the New Orleans disaster. Indeed, it seems apparent that, at the pace with which the SELA improvements were occurring, it would have been another decade at best before those levees would have been made capable of withstanding a Category 5 hurricane.

The system that failed was only designed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. Recent Army Corps of Engineers testimony makes clear that improving them to a Category 4 or 5 level had only recently entered the equation:

Wasn't that study to look at upgrading the levees delayed for funding reasons?

GEN. STROCK: You know, I talked to the study manager about that now, and again, it's a tough thing to talk about. He feels that he has had an adequate level of funding to move that study ahead. The nature of the work we do in both the studies and the engineering, some of it is not a question of throwing money at it, there is just analysis that must be done, coordination that must occur. And so I would prefer to let the people at the level really talk about that from their perspective. But it's my understanding that that was not a significant issue in this. And even if that study had been finished three years ago, it would not have made a difference in this event.

Gen. Strock also explains the calculations that led officials to remain content with allowing this vulnerability to remain:

Now, could this have been avoided? The area where the levee leaks -- where the levee breaks occurred was at its final design configuration. So that was as good as it was going to get. And what does that mean? Actually we knew that it would protect from a Category 3 hurricane. In fact, it has been through a number of Category 3 hurricanes. The intensity of this storm simply exceeded the design capacity of this levee. And those two points-- and others were over top, but those are the two main points of trouble. But that is the basic problem here, is that this storm exceeded the design capacity.

So the next question is, why Category 3 and not 4 and 5? A very complex question, but it involves an assessment of the engineering, the risk associated with that and so forth.

I think the bottom line message here is that we and the local officials knew the capacity of this levee system to handle this storm, and that is exactly why the mayor and the governor ordered the evacuation of New Orleans, because they knew that if a Category 4 or 5 hurricane were to strike New Orleans, that this levee system could not be relied upon. And that is why we evacuated the city. So had they not done that, the losses could have been even more significant.

... We have a study under way to talk about 4 and 5. The business of flood control is very technical and is very dynamic. When you put in a system of flood control, many things can change the level of protection that you once had -- development, drainage patterns, weather changes, that sort of thing. So we're constantly evaluating the level of protection. In this case, the New Orleans District has had a study -- and these studies take years to accomplish and then many more years to implement, to look at that. But yes, we are looking at a Category 4 and 5. And certainly, the government of this country, from the local up to the national level, need to reassess what level of risk is acceptable.

To try to articulate that, when this project was designed -- and this was designed about 30 years ago, the current one that is now being completed -- we figured we had a 200- or 300-year level of protection. That means that an event that we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years. That is a .05 percent likelihood. So we had an assurance that 99.5 percent this would be okay. We, unfortunately, have had that .5 percent activity here.

This calculus is deeply flawed, for the reason that just played out in New Orleans: Even if there were only a 0.5 percent chance that the city would be hit by a Category 4 hurricane or worse -- a questionable figure in any event, given that hurricanes have been rising in frequency and intensity in recent years -- the costs of allowing the flooding that would ensue under the existing system to occur were so high as to be incalculable. Planning to simply evacuate the city in the event of a Catgory 4 or 5 hurricane was horrifically bad planning.

Yet it's clear that all the government officials involved -- local, state, and especially federal -- decided that the chances of this happening were small enough to be worth the risk. They have known for over several decades that New Orleans was at serious risk in a major hurricane, and did not act immediately to address that. They gambled with lives in New Orleans -- just as they had 30 years before in southeastern Idaho -- and lost.

____

There are, of course, major differences between the Teton Dam disaster and the New Orleans levee failure as well. The starkest of these is the respective response to each.

Most of the differences arise from the circumstances: Teton Dam occurred in a sparsely populated farming region, so evacuation was much simpler to achieve, and rescue was not as logistically daunting.

Disaster-relief officials arrived immediately on the scene in Idaho, even before the flood's effects were fully felt (especially farther downriver). And support for relief efforts -- from feeding and housing both evacuees and relief workers -- was put immediately into action.

Much of this relief, however, came from the Latter-Day Saints Church, which is one of the world's wealthiest religions. The vast majority of the people who lived in the flood's path were LDS Church members. The relief work in Rexburg was centered around Ricks College, an LDS school. Indeed, most of the federal presence that was felt came much later.

There was no FEMA in 1976; the Teton Dam disaster, in fact, was one of the precipitating events that drove the government to create the agency in 1979. Congress realized that the federal government had a significant role in responding to major disasters (particularly those of its own making), coordinating rescue, relief, and recovery efforts in a way that could be far more effective than the often patchwork and makeshift response that occurs when various local and state agencies are thrown together into the mix.

This was why, when FEMA was handed the reins in New Orleans, they were expected to take the lead in coordinating the relief efforts. It was responsible for overseeing the evacuation and implementing it, but even more important, it was responsible for providing immediate relief to those victims unable to evacuate. Instead, food drops -- usually the first line in relief efforts -- did not occur for three days, a simply inexcusable failure.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Bush administration has attempted to make local officials culpable for its inaction:

Under the law, Chertoff said, state and local officials must direct initial emergency operations. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials," he said.

Chertoff's remarks, which echoed earlier statements by President Bush, prompted withering rebukes both from former senior FEMA staffers and outside experts.

"They can't do that," former agency chief of staff Jane Bullock said of Bush administration efforts to shift responsibility away from Washington. "The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a federal responsibility…. The federal government took ownership over the response," she said. Bush declared a disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi when the storm hit a week ago.

This kind of incompetence does not necessarily reflect a failure of Big Government; rather, it represents a failure of this administration -- or, perhaps more generically, Republican Big Government.

Unfortunately, for most of the early years of its existence, FEMA became known as a dumping ground for political patronage. This tradition was maintained throughout the Reagan and Bush years, but changed dramatically during the eight years Bill Clinton was president.

Clinton's FEMA chief, James Lee Witt, was the first emergency professional ever named to head the agency, and it soon came to reflect that fact. During his tenure, FEMA became known as one of the more effective and responsive federal agencies, especially in its response to hurricanes.

That obviously changed in 2001, when G.W. Bush took charge. Once again, the agency has succumbed to the cronyism that has come to define FEMA once again.

FEMA was created after Teton Dam to provide an effective federal response to disasters. But by failing to live up to the genuinely urgent nature of its mission, the Republicans in charge of operating it have created a response worse than if it never had been created at all.

It's evidence, once again, that the main reason Republicans hate big government is that they're so bad at it.

The Teton Dam disaster of 1976

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, which was published in 1999 by Washington State University Press (and is still available, I think, as an on-demand print).

I'm providing this excerpt as context for the above post concerning federal disasters.

The crusty old farmer who was my great-grandfather, David Neiwert, was alienated not only from my grandfather Alex, but from one of his younger daughters -- Dolly, his twelfth child, a lively, brown-haired girl who fell in love with a man nine years her senior, Parney Pendrey, in 1931, when she was 17. The old man absolutely disapproved of the match: Parney was a mere carpenter and he sure as hell wasn’t even German, let alone Pentacostalist (he was English!). So the two eloped, and David Neiwert, the man who had once commanded a cannon brigade but found he could not command his own children, disowned Dolly and did not speak with her again for many years.

Perhaps this is why Dolly and Parney were among the few relatives on Alex's side of the family I ever met when I was growing up: they too were familial outcasts of sorts. However, I suspect that the matter of proximity had more to do with it. Dolly and Parney lived in Rexburg, which is a mere 45 minutes' drive from my hometown of Idaho Falls. It was easy to drop in and see them, and they to see us. Sometimes we just had barbecues in the back yard, other times we went on picnicking trips. I don’t think I ever knew anyone with as naturally sweet and unassuming, but firmly down-to-earth, a personality as my great-aunt Dolly. And Parney was a prize human being too -- quiet and modest but well-grounded, not to mention a terrific carpenter.

The Pendreys lived in one of the first pink houses I can remember seeing -- a little one-story place just a block or so off Rexburg's main thoroughfare. Parney bought it in 1950 when it was a cheap little dump of a house, gutted it, restructured its foundation, and spent the next year rebuilding it just to Dolly's specifications, including all the cabinetry and the basement storage areas and even a cedar-lined upstairs closet. It contained some of the finest wood craftsmanship I ever saw -- all tongued and grooved and perfectly fitted. Out back was the big long garage Parney had built himself, which doubled as Parney's woodworking shop. It was full of tools, the shapes and varieties of which I had never seen before. I always thought it was peculiar that the two of them chose to live in Rexburg, the home of LDS-run Ricks College, where the population is literally more than 90 percent Mormon, the Pendreys falling into the other ten (more like five) percent. They always said they didn't mind the Mormons much, because they generally made good neighbors. And the Pendreys were more or less used to sticking to themselves, though I think it must have been rough for their son and only child, Charlie, to grow up in an environment where, as I knew all too well, Mormon children could be especially cruel in the way of excluding and tormenting their "Gentile" playmates.

As I grew older it seemed we saw less of Dolly and Parney, though that was probably a product of my teenage pursuits, which hardly were ever directed toward Rexburg. By 1976, I had gone off north to Moscow to attend college, but still returned to Idaho Falls to spend the summer at home with my parents while I worked summer jobs for my tuition. My first week home, I got a welder's job at Mel Brown Co., putting together farm machinery.

Shortly thereafter Mom, my sister Becky and I drove up to Rexburg to visit Dolly and Parney. Dolly had fallen ill that spring with an enlarged heart and was confined to her bed. The doctors told Parney she probably would not live much longer, but she was a strong woman and we all held out hope for her. Still, it was a little shocking, seeing her in bed that afternoon, a mere shadow of the woman I remembered, a solid woman with a healthy build: now she was scarecrow-thin, scarcely recognizable. But she still had that famous smile that could light up a room, even if it was a little pale and wan. We spent an hour or so with her until it became plain we had tired her out. It was the last time I would see her alive.

She died -- was killed, really -- a couple of weeks later. June 5 was a Saturday, a sunny day off, and I remember that I had spent the morning making plans to put together a house-painting business, as I had done the summer before, so I could earn money on weekends and whatever off time I could put together. Dad was at work at the Idaho Falls tower. He called shortly after noon, and my mom answered.

"The Teton Dam has broken," he told her.

"You're kidding," she said.

"No. It broke about fifteen minutes ago. We're getting the emergency broadcasts right now."

The Teton was Idaho's most recently built dam -- in fact, it had just been finished and was being filled for the first time. It was an earth-fill structure located in a narrow canyon on the Teton River, just above Rexburg, where it flowed into the Snake River. Farmers and ranchers in the surrounding valleys had been begging for it to be built for several years, because about every seven to ten years, the Teton River flowed over its banks and flooded out everyone who lived in its path. So, in the finest tradition of pork-barrel politics, Idaho's congressional delegation as early as 1964 had approved funds for its construction, and the contract went to Idaho's largest employer, construction giant Morrison-Knudsen. However, it quickly became embroiled in controversy; fishermen claimed the dam would destroy one of the nation's best trout streams and set out through the courts to stop it. They only succeeded in delaying it; by 1974, construction was under way, and was finished in the fall of 1975.

The dam that June day in 1976 was still just eight months into what was to have been a two-year process of filling for the first time, yet it had already reached the three-quarters mark on an accelerated schedule. On June 3, workers noticed "wet spots" midway down the 307-foot-high earthen wall -- signs of water leaks on the canyon wall, though they were not considered unusual at first. On the morning of June 5, though, workers checking on them grew deeply concerned; they called back to their bosses and let them know the dam had sprung some major leaks, which were forming sinkholes in the dam wall. The men managed to fill two of the holes by shoveling dirt into them. But a third, much larger one suddenly appeared near the dam's right abutment.

One of the workmen drove a bulldozer down the dam's face and began pushing riprap material into the hole. But everything failed; suddenly, a whirlpool appeared in the upstream side of the dam, directly opposite the leak. More bulldozers atop the dam began pushing material into the whirlpool itself, in hopes that it would plug the hole, while the bulldozer on the dam's face kept shoving more dirt into the hole. The hole kept growing, and soon the bulldozer teetered on its edge. The operator jumped down and the men scrambled up the dam's face as the giant machine too was devoured by the hole. The hole became a pit, then a bank of crumbling dirt, a maw that now reached to the dam's crest. Suddenly, it all gave way, and with a roar the 288,250 acre-feet of water behind it came pouring forth with a vengeance, throwing first a cascade of dust high into the air before it, and then churning out a brown cauldron into the valley below. The dam had become a canyon wall, a gap through which flowed a gigantic, destructive torrent.

All any of us in Idaho Falls knew at the time was that the dam had broken. Idaho Falls wasn't in the immediate path of the floodwaters, but it was obvious that the Snake would flood over with that much water added to its steady flow, and the river passed through the city's heart. Our home was well away from the river, so we were in no danger. Our immediate concern was for Dolly and Parney: Rexburg lay directly in the flood's path, and their home, located in the flat river plain of the city's downtown district, was certain to be hit hard.

Dolly and Parney’s son, Charlie, pulled in sometime that afternoon. He had driven up from Pocatello, where he now lived, but hadn't been allowed to get through to Rexburg. We decided to make our home a base of sorts; Charlie would stay with us until it was possible to get to Rexburg. We hoped Parney would call us if he was able to get to safety. The local TV stations began steady news broadcasts, keeping us updated as the flood moved down the valley and into Rexburg.

Some cameras were stationed on the hill above the town on the Ricks College campus, and from the rooftops of a dormitory relayed the pictures we all dreaded seeing. First came a wall of water about six feet high and as wide across as you could see the town. Soon the entire downtown was underwater. Houses began floating away. One big white two-story structure began floating down main street, twisting slowly in the current, until it struck another building and lodged itself there. Trees were everywhere in the water, their limbs and roots sticking out above the surface, and you could see cattle trying to swim through the torrent too. We watched the images coming across our screens with amazement and horror, and prayed that Parney and Dolly had gotten to safety.

Late that afternoon Parney called. Yes, he said, they had reached high ground in plenty of time. He had loaded Dolly into the back of their pickup hurriedly and driven up the hill to a friend's home. We all were relieved. Mom began making arrangements to drive up to Rexburg the next day and retrieve them, obtaining permits from the sheriff's office and making a bed in the back of our Travelall for Dolly. Dad, as a federal emergency employee, would have to go to work while Charlie and Mom and I drove up to Rexburg.

The next morning we hit the highway early. There was a roadblock about ten miles outside of Rexburg, where our permits let us through. A mile or so later, we suddenly came upon the flood's path: the pavement was covered with mud, as was everything in sight. Water stood in the barrow pits, practically up to the road’s edge. The elevated railroad bed next to the road was washed away in large chunks, leaving skeletal rails suspended in the air over mudholes and puddles.

And everywhere, cows. Dead cows, randomly scattered across the farmlands and in barrow pits and wherever the flood deemed fit to deposit them, legs splayed straight out, often straight into the sky. A few of them were already beginning to bloat and swell in the southern Idaho sun.

Rexburg looked like one of those end-of-the-world movies: houses knocked askew, some twisted sideways into the middle of the street. Trees that had floated downstream with the flood had rammed into a few of them, and I remember one house in particular had a tree driven through it like an arrow. Midway through town, the nose of a school bus was perched up in a tree, stuck there by the flood. The sign that had been a town landmark -- a drive-in joint's big neon creation that announced: "Home of the Famous Rexburgers" -- had collapsed in a heap. A muddy water line that marked the flood's crest -- about six feet high -- was on every building, except those that had been destroyed.

Sure enough, Parney's sturdily built home was still standing when we pulled up, and Parney’s pickup was in the driveway. Parney was standing in the drive, leaning on a shovel and talking to a neighbor. Charlie jumped out to meet him. We were all glad to see him.

"How's Mom?" Charlie asked. Parney hung his head.

"She died last night," he said quietly. He and Charlie walked away together and talked quietly. We all felt tears starting to rise. We had all seen it coming, but it did not make the moment any easier. Later, he told us what had happened: Dolly had awakened in the middle of the night and asked for help going to the bathroom. Finished, she stood up and put her arms around Parney, and then collapsed. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had no pulse.

We simply looked about at the scene confronting us, and the madness of it flowed over the rest of our emotions like a second flood and swept them away. A cow lay bloating in the schoolyard across the street. Midway down the road, a huge house that had been swept off its foundations lay in the middle of the street, awash in the now-caking mud. A few doors down were houses that had been turned into kindling when logs from a nearby sawmill crashed into them en masse.

Inside Parney's house, the same chaos reigned. Everything was covered with wet mud -- about a foot's worth of silt covered all the floors. Pieces of straw and grass hung from the cabinet handles and the doorhandles. The furniture in the living room was a jumbled mess, although the TV, surprisingly, was OK: Parney had had the foresight to toss it onto the couch as he fled the house, and the couch had simply floated up with the floodwaters, circled a few times and come down with the TV still resting atop it. He also had thrown Dolly's stereo on top of the bed, and it too had survived intact in similar fashion.

Not much else in the house had. Mud was inside every cabinet; a couple of them gushed out little mudflows when we opened them. And then there was the basement; it was simply full of muddy reeking water that reached the top step of the stairwell. Not far from Parney’s house and in line with the floodpath was a stockyard that was home to a large number of pigs, and the water in the basement had the distinct smell of having arrived there via their pen.

What all this meant, of course, was work, and lots of it, a job so big it was hard to know where to start. In some ways, it was a relief, for Parney especially, because it meant there was something to do, to throw ourselves into, that let us feel like we had to shelve our sorrow. And so, for the next few days, that is what we did.

In truth, we didn't know then whether the house would even be salvageable. Many of the houses in the neighborhood had been utterly destroyed -- some swept off their foundations, others shattered by the water or the trees it swept along -- and federal disaster relief funds were already being quickly promised for the victims. But we started to dig in and clear the place out, because it seemed likely the old house would pass muster when the federal inspectors came around to pass judgment on it (an assessment that eventually proved correct). First came the silt on the upstairs level: a thick, clayey goo that came up in heavy clumps. All the furniture, most of it ruined, went out on the front lawn. Then there were the cabinets in the kitchen; the top shelves were untouched, but everything beneath them was a muddy jumble of broken glass and warped boxes. They, too, reeked of pig shit.

The basement, of course, was the worst and biggest project. The muddy water level subsided only about a stair’s worth before it became obvious it would never drain, and we were told that no pumps were available that could handle this kind of goo. So we started hauling it out bucket by bucket, dumping the buckets into wheelbarrows that we then hauled out and dumped into the street, from which we were told bulldozers would eventually come by and sweep the mud away. This process took several days. At the end, I was certain my arms were going to fall off from hauling too many buckets of mud up too many flights of stairs.

In the meantime, the floodwaters had continued down the river beds like a gigantic teardrop, bearing a five-foot-high wall of water down the Snake River and sending its normally even-keeled levels well above their banks. In Idaho Falls, sandbaggers who had gone to work with plenty of warning managed to keep the flood away from the businesses that lined the river, though they had to excavate a giant canal at one end of the city’s main bridge across the river on Broadway, in order to save the bridge itself from being washed away in the torrent. In Shelley and Blackfoot to the south, the floodwaters took out a few more homes and farmhouses and flooded a business district before it finally petered out when it hit the vast open plains of the American Falls Reservoir.

In the end, the flood had caused about $400 million in property damage and caused the loss of fourteen lives. One of those was Dolly Pendrey. Others included a couple of fishermen who had been just downstream of the dam when it collapsed, though one such angler survived by hanging onto a tree and riding it downstream. One of the victims was a suicide: a farmer who shot himself in the head after walking around his devastated farm and seeing his entire family acreage transformed from fine arable soil, famous for growing marvelous potatoes, into a vast plain of untillable river silt.

Most people, though, chose simply to go to work to reclaim their lives. Certainly, that was the case at Parney's house: Dolly's funeral was Wednesday, and we took time out to say our farewells. But then it was back to work. Charlie and Parney stayed with us, and made the drive each day to Rexburg to work on the home. That next weekend, I finally met one of Alex's brothers: August Neiwert, who still lived on the family farm in Burley, drove up with his son Gary and dug in to help us clean out the basement. By Sunday we had gotten the mud down to knee level, which enabled Charlie to find the drain. We cleared it out, put a screen around it to hold back the heavy sediment, and cleared off even more of the mud in a few hours than we had in a week. Now all we were left with was a foot-thick layer of heavy silt. That took another couple of days to clear out.

We also found ourselves with a small army of other helpers: Mormon teenagers. They had been organized by the Church, pulling in members from Utah congregations and elsewhere in Idaho, then busing them out to Rexburg and everywhere the flood had struck. They were cheerful helpers and hard workers, and we appreciated them. If we ever harbored any resentment of Mormons in our hearts over the years -- and most of us did -- it vanished on that day. Not only did they manage to clear out all the silt from the yard, but they also hauled out the majority of the mud from Parney’s garage/workshop, carefully sifting his tools from the silt as they went.

We did, in fact, rely on the generosity of Parney's Mormon neighbors a great deal. We ate most of our lunches at the Ricks College cafeteria, where another army of volunteers kept a cafeteria going steadily to feed flood victims. Occasionally we ate dinners there as well. It was easy to feel fortunate in these circumstances. All you had to do was look around at the faces at other tables: pain and misery and despair written on the faces of people who had literally lost everything. Some were preoccupied with their large Mormon families of five or six squealing children, all wearing the same clothes they’d had on for two weeks. Others were simply mud-caked, dog-tired and downtrodden. And through all this gathering, there smoldered a quiet, rising anger at the culprit for this tragedy: the government. Not just the Bureau of Reclamation, which had built the dam, but the whole damned -- in Rexburg, darned -- system.

There was no small irony in this, of course, considering that these same people were the folks who had applied the political pressure that had built the dam. They knew that, too, but it only deepened their anger. After all, they had trusted the government, believed in it, had no qualms about whether the job would be done right. And they had been tragically betrayed. Most of them would find it hard to ever trust a government official again.

During the tedious hours we spent cleaning Parney’s house, I contemplated those faces at the cafeteria and the feelings that lurked behind them, and came to understand these feelings well. That summer, I too had come to hate the Government: not any specific agency, but simply the concept of it, the fact of its massive bureaucratic existence. I hated it for its venal stupidity -- the incompetence that feeds its arrogance and vice versa, like a stupid frantic dog chasing its tail. I learned to hate its obsession with blind adherence to the status quo and adherence to its rules, the way its minions assumed the mantle of power as something outside the communities they are supposed to serve, so that they are somehow above those communities and their well-being. It is a stupidity that, through a blinkered, one-size-fits-all approach, thrusts disasters large and small on its victims, from collapsing dams to monolithic wetlands regulations, with little regard for the consequences. It does not surprise me that, eventually, some of these victims come to regard the stupidity as evil, and from there launch themselves into the abyss.

Parney, however, never did that. Within a few weeks we had managed to strip out all the mud and even most of the smell; all the sheetrock in the house had to be ripped out and replaced, and some of the flooring too, so we stripped it down and then let it sit open and bare for a week or so in the summer heat. Eventually it was back in good enough shape that Parney was able to move back in. Our lives gradually returned to a semblance of normalcy. I went back to college that fall. Parney settled back into his quiet life in Rexburg, made even quieter now by his solitude. Everywhere in Madison County, people put their lives back together, helped especially by the mass infusion of federal funds to help them get back on their feet.

Despite the aid, the bitterness and smoldering anger that I witnessed those afternoons in the relief-center cafeteria lingered on, especially after a congressional investigation of the dam's failure that fall and the subsequent hearings the summer of 1977. The conclusion: Teton Dam failed because it was not built properly for its circumstances. It was situated on a canyon wall that featured porous rock, which meant the water backing up behind it would actually flow through the rock and around the dam itself, which of course posed a danger to any earthen structure that could erode easily. This was not an unusual situation; most such dams feature a "key trench" at the point of contact with these porous walls which actually seals the water out and away from the dam's central structure.

Unfortunately, these canyon walls were so steep that, when combined with the rapid filling process, they created stress fractures in the key trench which allowed the water to leak through. The fracturing phenomenon had already been observed in the failure of a dam in France and was well known among engineers who stayed abreast of the state of the art. The Bureau of Reclamation’s engineers, however, were of an old-fashioned school that scoffed at such advances and ignored concerns about the canyon's steepness. Their bureaucratic incompetence, in essence, cost fourteen people their lives and created a flood of human misery.

For all this, I never heard Parney express any bitterness over what had happened to him; that would have poisoned his life, I think, and made his remaining years shorter. He collected a hefty sum from the government for Dolly's death, but he never talked about it and I don't think he pushed too hard on the amount, because to him it reeked of death, and besides, was something of an insult to the memory of his beloved Dolly. As it was, he stayed healthy and fit and alert for another twenty years. He died in December 1995 at the age of 90, after a brief three-day illness when his respiratory system gave out. Charlie said he was the same old Parney, sharp and witty, right up until the end, and he died quietly in his sleep.

I couldn't make it to his funeral, but I stopped through Rexburg a couple of months later, the afternoon after I interviewed Samuel Sherwood. The house was still pink, and showed no signs of once having suffered a flood’s ravages. I chatted for awhile with Parney's next-door neighbors, a couple my own age who had a young son they told me befriended Parney when they moved in a few years back. Parney was still an expert wood craftsman and made things for people he was close to, which he did for his young pal. I was glad to hear he still was making friends, as he always had, in his last years.

About a block and a half away from Parney's house, the county's historical society has put together a museum dedicated to the Teton Dam disaster. It's filled with memorabilia and photographs from the flood, and they show a film about the tragedy once an hour or so. It's kind of peculiar to have a whole museum dedicated to such an event, but then, the damaged lives and hard feelings it generated have remained here, just under the surface of the polite Mormon society, and the museum is one way they find expression.

There are other expressions of this anger. They are not quite so constructive.

Madison County, as I go on to describe, was a significant hotbed of far-right organizations and recruitment. But that's another story.

Soft-pedaling the internment

It's not surprising, really, that Michelle Malkin's fraudulent thesis defending the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II has found been circulating among the extremist right. After all, that's how right-wing transmitters work: she treads rather easily among the extremist ideologues of the far right despite maintaining a mainstream pose.

Likewise, it's not a big surprise to see her thesis spreading to more ostensibly "mainstream" right mouthpieces. The latest instance is Tony Blankley's excerpt from his new book, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, citing a pro-internment argument straight out of Malkin's text -- not to mention Lt. Gen DeWitt's:

A total of 25,655 noncitizens living in the United States were interned or deported during the war years because of their ethnicity or nationality, rather than their words or conduct. They included 11,229 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 25 Romanians, five Bulgarians and 161 other foreign nationals.

The Supreme Court later held, in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), that "executive power over enemy aliens, undelayed and unhampered by litigation, has been deemed, throughout our history, essential to wartime security." The high court added: "The resident enemy alien is constitutionally subject to summary arrest, internment and deportation whenever a 'declared war' exists." So the power to intern or deport comes into effect only when war has been declared.

Today, we are under attack not by a nation, but by groups of militant individuals who claim Islam as their faith. Yet for the first time in human history, the destructive power of terrorists can be as great as that of a traditional nation-state that has declared war. We need a mechanism to deal with this change.

During World War II, the country was faced with the prospect of large numbers of people -- again identifiable by ethnicity, not conduct -- who were real or potential enemies.

The logic of the Supreme Court's opinion is applicable to the situation we face today. The court held that people ethnically connected to the war-makers are more likely to support them than are others -- and our country at war has a right to protect itself from this presumed higher risk of danger.

Notice what's wrong with this discussion?

Blankley confuses -- quite on purpose, it seems -- the concept of incarercating an "enemy alien" and incarcerations based on "ethnicity."

You see, "enemy aliens" are by definition not citizens. A person's ethnicity, however, does not determine their status as citizens. One may be of Japanese descent, for instance, and still be a full citizen.

This was, of course, the core of the mistake made in the internment of Japanese Americans -- it included some 70,000 citizens among the 110,000 people of Japanese ethnicity who were "evacuated" from the West Coast.

Funny how Blankley makes no mention of that episode -- one in which the subjects' ethnicity was the reason for their incarceration.

But then, the Supreme Court also approved that particular action in two rulings that upheld the evacuation: Hirabayashi and Korematsu. The latter, as Eric Muller described in some detail, arose this week during the Senate confirmation hearings for John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

As Muller explains, Sen. Leahy's question to Roberts regarding Korematsu mischaracterized the ruling and was generally bungled. But Roberts' response, he notes, "gives me very little comfort," muted as it was.

Fortunately, Roberts did make himself clearer in later questioning by Russ Feingold:

FEINGOLD: That's absolutely right. And that's why I want to follow on what Senator Leahy asked about earlier, a different time, a different challenge.

As a nation, we can now look back at wartime Supreme Court decisions like Korematsu v. the United States with something like bewilderment. We talked about it earlier. To me, it seems inconceivable that the United States government would have decided to put huge numbers of citizens in detention centers based on their race and that the Supreme Court would have deferred to the president's decision to do so.

Do you believe that Korematsu was wrongly decided?

ROBERTS: It's one of those cases that I don't think it's technically been overruled yet. But I think it's widely recognized as not having precedential value. I do think the result in that case -- Korematsu was actually considered the exclusion, not the actual detention, but the exclusion of individuals based on their ethnic and racial background from vast areas.

And it's hard for me to comprehend the argument that that would be acceptable these days.

FEINGOLD: It's often included, if you list decisions that are sort of considered some of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court with Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott and others. Is that a fair characterization of your view of Korematsu?

ROBERTS: Yes.

That's fairly unequivocal, and a seemingly straightforward repudiation of Korematsu, although the "I can't imagine an argument" wording has a distinctly weaselish whiff to it.

Muller -- who has been on fire this week -- earlier posted on another ruling of more recent vintage that referred, once again, to the internment rulings. In this case, it was the recent Court of Appeals ruling that cited Ex parte Endo, the 1945 ruling that ended the internment of Japanese Americans.

As Muller explains, the court seemingly misread the clear language of Endo in order to bolster this ruling giving the executive branch virtual carte blanche powers in detaining citizens as "enemy combatants." Given John Roberts' previous inclinations in such rulings, it seems likely that a Roberts-led Supreme Court will be all but certain to validate this historic power grab.

That is, in short, forgetting the lessons of history provided by the internment. But again, we shouldn't be surprised. It's the kind of thing that happens when right-wing ideologues distort and falsify history, and peddle it for millions of gullible consumers.

The revised cover, Flight 93 edition

Liberal Avenger has the details.

Next up: Endangered species

Sure, it's bad enough that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Republicans in Congress have set their sights on a permanent repeal of the estate tax. Just what we need: a permanent loss of revenue after a Category 5 storm and a bumbling Bush League response left taxpayers saddled with a disaster bill of $100 billion and counting. That should work wonders on that federal deficit.

But that's just the start of the march of the completion of the corporate-right agenda under Bush. Next in their sights: the Endangered Species Act, probably the most generally successful piece of environmental legislation ever enacted:

As Congress returns from its August recess, environmentalists and property-rights activists are focused on Rep. Richard Pombo, a California rancher who is chairman of the House Resources Committee. Later this month, Pombo is expected to introduce legislation to overhaul the 32-year-old Endangered Species Act, with House passage expected by year's end.

A draft of the bill that leaked earlier this summer "was comprehensive in trying to undo what's been done over the last 30 years" to protect endangered species, said Patti Goldman, Seattle-based lawyer for the Earthjustice law firm.

Before Pombo was tapped by Republican leaders to head the Resources Committee, he was one of the most virulent attackers of the landmark law. For example, Pombo in 1995 accused the "arrogant" U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of trying "to make California farmers vassals of the federal government" by enforcing the statute.

But now Pombo speaks of "updating" and "modernizing" the law.

"The act isn't working to recover species now," he said during a recent visit to Snohomish County. "At the same time, it's caused a lot of conflict with private property owners. We have to have an act that works and eliminates a lot of those conflicts we have."

Pombo and other detractors say the law is broken because only a handful of species have ever recovered to the point they no longer require protection. Conservationists, however, point out that it's done a very good job of keeping species from going extinct.

Pombo is right in at least one respect: The ESA has not been successful in getting species recovered to the point that they are off its list (though we've come close with both the bald eagle and the Montana grizzlies). The chief reasons for that, however, are associated with the kinds of compromises that have to be made to accommodate private property owners already. See, for instance, the (non-Yellowstone) wolves of western Montana, where predation on livestock brings swift and irrevocable retribution from the feds.

Indeed, the government has bent over backwards to accommodate private property owners, including farming and ranching interests, in enforcing the endangered species act. There's probably no more ludicrous example of this than the billions of dollars the government wastes every year barging salmon fry around the four dams on the lower Snake River that are wreaking so much damage on the native fish runs.

This plays into a subject near and dear to my heart, namely, the status of the Puget Sound orcas, who themselves have only recently won "threatened" status from the federal government, which tried for some time to proceed as though this resident population was indistinguishable from the generic killer whales found throughout the world:

A year ago, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle ruled for the environmentalists, noting that the agency's science used was out of date and not the "best available." He ordered the fisheries service to plug the holes and reconsider its decision.

The judge's order led to the decision to propose the listing.

Bob Lohn, who heads the NMFS' Northwest office, said the resident orcas don't interbreed with other orca populations, have distinct markings and dorsal fins, eat different foods and inhabit different areas, and have a unique language of chirps and clicks.

There is a "significant biological difference," he said.

On the second try, federal scientists were "highly united" in their conclusion that the local killer whales were a subspecies that merit further protection, he said.

The resident killer whales are threatened by a diminished food supply, industrial pollutants and boat noise and traffic.

The "diminished food supply" means one thing: salmon. That's what the resident orcas eat, more than 90 percent of the time.

So protecting the orcas means, first and foremost, protecting the salmon.

And protecting the salmon means a lot of things -- building-code restrictions, limits on development and chemical and pesticide use, strict regulation of timber-cutting practices, among others -- that happen to fall well within the purview of business' bottom line.

It also means tearing down dams, from the Elwha to the Columbia.

And yes, those Columbia salmon do affect the Puget Sound orcas. The NMFS study found that the K and L pods, which reside offshore during the winter, subsist upon spring Chinook runs originating in the Columbia River system while they are en route back to the Puget Sound in late spring.

It's all closely interconnected. And pulling out the threads of protection woven in by the ESA could be disastrous.

The Endangered Species Act does need some reforming, especially in areas where common ground can conspire to create a desired end. But it does not need weakening.

And Pombo, as people in western Washington have learned in dealing with his heavy-handed tactics in keeping in limbo the Wild Sky proposal for creating a new wilderness near here, is simply not a straight shooter. He's a hardball-playing Republican who bends the rules at his pleasure, and aims only to crush his opponents -- namely environmentalists. He does not deal in good faith, so don't be naive about him.

Forget compromising on this. Pombo and the Republicans have to lose this fight -- or we're all in for it.

Cops and immigrants

Even though the Bush administration has put on a brave face with its attempts to court the Hispanic vote with a "moderate" immigration policy, it's becoming increasingly clear that the paleo-conservative faction (aka Tom Tancredo's gang) is driving the whole immigration agenda for the Republicans in power.

This was made clear this week when an ACLU lawsuit finally produced a memo that the Bush administration appears to be relying on in its enforcement policies. As the ACLU release puts it:

The Department had repeatedly invoked the memo to justify a radical shift in immigration enforcement policy that has generated considerable controversy among state and local police, immigrant advocates, and others, but refused to release it until ordered to by a federal Court of Appeals.

That shift, in essence, puts the burden of enforcing federal immigration laws on local and state police and law enforcement officials -- a stark shift that is bound to generate a world of problems for everyone involved.

It's the Bush version of trickle-down theory: Cut back on federal responsibilities so that the burden of necessities falls upon local and state entities. We've seen it everywhere, particularly in the areas of traditional social safety nets, but also in other areas of law enforcement. In other words, an unfunded mandate created through the back door.

As the ACLU explains:

The federal government's longstanding policy used to be that state and local police should not, and legally could not (absent special circumstances), attempt to enforce the non-criminal provisions of the immigration laws. Suddenly, in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the federal government was now asking state and local police to make certain civil immigration arrests. He pointed to a new Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo as legal justification.

Ashcroft's announcement caused immediate alarm in many quarters. Immigrant advocates and many law enforcement officials believe that state and local police should not engage in immigration enforcement because immigrants will be afraid to report crime or interact with the police. Further, immigration enforcement will take police resources away from important public-safety missions; state and local police, who lack specialized training, will fail to properly evaluate whether individuals are in compliance with the highly technical immigration laws, and increased racial profiling, discrimination and costly litigation will result.

Moreover, it appears that the Justice Department -- evidently continuing Ashcroft's policy under Alberto Gonzales -- has been justifying this policy on the basis of a Justice Department memo whose contents are, at best, questionable:

The memo claims that state and local police have the "inherent authority" to enforce all federal laws, including immigration laws. The ACLU says that the legal memo is filled with legal errors and that the opinion by Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General:

-- Selectively reads case law in order to conclude that the federal government has not preempted local authority to enforce complicated, multi-layered immigration law;

-- Misconstrues decisions in cases where police assisted in criminal enforcement to extend them authority to enforce civil laws as well; and

-- Repeatedly ignores instances in which Congress authorized police to assist in immigration enforcement under specific situations, even when the Congressional Record reflects the fact that lawmakers intended such provisions to grant new authority that police did not already possess.

You can read the memo itself here, and a critique of it here. [Both PDF files.]

By way of illustrating the broad ramifications of the policy for law enforcement, consider if you will, its near-certain effect on hate-crime enforcement: That is, it will almost certainly increase the numbers of unreported hate crimes.

This is already a considerable problem, since it's been estimated that only a quarter of all the hate crimes committed in this country are reported, and a substantial portion of those crimes go unprosecuted altogether. These crimes only widen and deepen the nation's racial and cultural divides, as does the massive failure to respond adequately to them.

Part of the problem lies with the system of reportage itself. As I explain in Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, in Chapter 13:

Initiated in 1990 with the passage of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the project [for collecting hate-crime statistics] under the care of the FBI was largely understood in its early years to be nascent and problematic at the outset, for a variety of reasons: many law-enforcement agencies were slow to participate; the initial numbers of hate crimes were likely to be skewed by the sharp increase certain to result from increased awareness of the crimes; and uncertainty and confusion reigned regarding the need to report and how to do it. It was hoped that, given enough time, the reporting system's flaws would self-correct and begin providing a clearer picture of the phenomenon. That was largely what happened. As already noted, by 1996 the wild fluctuations in numbers that occurred early on had largely disappeared, and the statistics began indicating a fairly stable phenomenon indicating about 8,000 bias crimes reported annually, and largely stable percentages of the kinds of the different kinds of hate crimes.

However, what closer examination -- particularly the Department of Justice study [titled "Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Hate Crime Reporting, conducted by the Justice Research and Statistics Association released and coauthored by Northeastern University's Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research] -- revealed was a reporting system that was deeply flawed, with statistics distorted by widespread failures to report the crimes and moreover, confusion about the differences between the absence of a report and the active reporting of zero hate crimes. The DOJ study, which surveyed 2,657 law-enforcement agencies, reported a "major information gap" in the data: It estimated that some 37 percent of the agencies that did not submit reports nevertheless had at least one hate crime. Worse yet, roughly 31 percent of the agencies that reported zero hate crimes did, in fact, have at least one; about 6,000 law-enforcement agencies (or one-third of the total of participants) likely dealt with at least one unreported bias crime. All told, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the total number of hate crimes committed annually in America is closer to 50,000 than the 8,000 found in statistics.

"The overall numbers are worthless," says hate-crime expert Donald P. Green, a Yale University professor whose work includes debunking the notion that tough economic times increase the likelihood of hate crimes. Green says that bias crimes are especially likely to arise when minorities, for a variety of economic reasons, begin moving into communities that were previously homogeneous (that is, for the most part, predominantly white, such as the Midwestern communities that are currently experiencing a large influx of Hispanics); or when previously oppressed minorities, such as homosexuals, begin asserting themselves in public fashion.

Forcing local and state police to enforce federal immigration laws will immediately create a barrier between them and local immigrant communities, which remain among the most vulnerable to hate crimes. As I explain later in the same chapter:

Of all the factors that cause law-enforcement officers to fail to identify and investigate bias crimes, the most significant, the DOJ study's authors found, was the gap between the victims and the police. The less trust that exists between minorities and their local law enforcement, the greater the likelihood that hate crimes will go unresolved.

The Filipino family that encountered Chris Kinison and his friends in Ocean Shores was a textbook example of how hate crimes can go unresolved this way. Many of the victims spoke poor English and had difficulty communicating with the police officers who came to their rescue; even though some of them later reported that they had wanted to pursue harassment charges against the men, the officers either failed or refused to register this. And the officers, little trained in dealing with hate crimes, clearly did not recognize that they had come upon the scene of a felony, which in most other such cases would require a careful and serious investigation and specialized handling of the victims.

By seeming eager to simply break up the potential violence and send everyone on their respective ways -- and particularly by escorting the family to the town's borders -- the officers communicated to the victims the message that the harassment they had endured was insignificant. This in turn feeds the distrust that any outsider (particularly a minority) in a strange town is likely to feel.

Moreover, the incident vividly illustrates that the problem of letting hate crimes go unresolved extends well beyond the mere statistical issues, and that the stakes can be very high indeed, especially for small towns. The result, as it was in Ocean Shores, was that these crimes can escalate from simple harassment to outright violence. Perpetrators, as some studies have observed, see their escape from the arm of the law almost as an invitation to step things up.

Other studies have likewise observed that the most common cause of this cascade of crime is the failure of police to proactively bridge the gap between themselves and the victims. The JRSA's Joan Weiss, in earlier research, found that the reluctance of victims to report crimes was significantly higher for hate crimes than for other crimes. The DOJ study reiterates this point: "For a multitude of reasons, hate crime victims are a population that is leery of reporting crimes -- bias or otherwise -- to law enforcement agencies."

Most hate-crime victims are minorities in the communities where the crimes occur. In many cases, they have poor English skills and have difficulty asking for assistance; in others, they may simply be unaware that what has happened to them is a serious crime. This is particularly true for immigrants, who may be reluctant to even contact police because of their experience with law enforcement in their homelands, where corruption and indifference to such crimes are not uncommon. Likewise, hate-crime victims may be confused about or unaware of the bias motivation involved, interpreting a threat or assault as a random act when other evidence suggests it was not. At other times, they may be reluctant to tell police about the bias aspects of the acts against them, fearing the police won't believe them or that they simply won't do anything about it anyway. And in the case of gays and lesbians, many are reluctant to report the crimes out of fear they will be forced to reveal their own identities as homosexuals; many more fear (sometimes with good reason) that they will wind up being humiliated and victimized further by police.

Likewise, many minorities in certain communities -- blacks in the South or Hispanics in the Southwest, for example -- have long histories of built-up distrust of law enforcement in their communities, and may simply refuse to participate in an investigation without proactive efforts on the part of police to bridge that gap. Indeed, this level of involvement was almost unanimously the chief factor reported by advocacy groups when queried by the authors of the DOJ study about what most affected hate-crime victims' decision to call or cooperate with police.

Putting local police in charge of immigration law enforcement will only create a massive amount of distrust of these forces in the immigrant communities, whether legal or not. It's a policy bound to produce myriad personal tragedies.

This is only one facet of what will no doubt be a multi-faceted problem created by this policy. Here's hoping the ACLU wins this one.

Just different clues

You know, when I read this:

Already there's talk of rebuilding N.O. in such a way as to exclude those most affected by the hurricane.

The impact of the hurricane diaspora on the country will be interesting.

I can't help but recall this:

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had ''absolutely no credentials.''

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

''He said 'Why would I do that?''' Pelosi said.

'''I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'''

Indeed, it looks like -- once the Newspeak and information-suppression counteroffensive gets into full swing -- things will turn out just swimmingly for Bush and his cohorts. Katrina will have provided all kinds of opportunities: clear an entire city of its lower-income (and blue-voting) blacks, blame black culture and local Democrats, and replace them all with upper-income "entrepreneurs." Meanwhile, it'll give El Presidente plenty of photo ops with swarthy firemen.

If he can keep surfing that wave, what indeed went wrong for Bush?

Sort of like when he "hit the trifecta."

Sure, it was arrogant. I'm not sure Bush was quite as "clueless" in this response as everyone seems to think.

That's not to suggest that there was a conspiracy or that "Bush knew", at least not any more than he did with 9/11. But there is a reason that, after being properely warned, Bush stayed on vacation and, essentially, sat on his hands, both before 9/11 and Katrina: It was in his best interests to do so.

The mistakes that were made in the runup to both events were in fact a direct outgrowth of policies that benefited Bush's cronies and his political allies. Counterterrorism -- derided in the early Bush administration as a "Clinton thing" -- was deemphasized in favor of the greatest defense-spending black hole ever devised, "missile defense." Preparing for a federal emergency in the event of a real disaster -- whether a terrorist attack or a hurricane in New Orleans -- was forsaken on behalf of pursuing a needless war in Iraq. The outcomes of both have been nothing but a huge bonanza for Bush's cronies.

Those policies were a product of this administration's priorities, which in the end are always about promoting the well-being of the moneyed class at the expense of the middle classes and poor, while effectively driving a wedge within those classes. That's no conspiracy; it's just the way the world works, especially with men like Bush in charge.

New Strawberry Days dates

I'll be making some more appearances this month on behalf of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. Here's the quick rundown:

September 9: University Bookstore, Bellevue, 7 p.m.

September 10-11: Aki Matsuri Festival, Bellevue, 2 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. Sunday

September 21: Montana Book Company, Helena, MT, 7 p.m.

September 23: Montana State University Bookstore, Bozeman, MT, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.

I'm especially looking forward to the Aki Matsuri Festival appearance on Saturday, because it won't just be me talking about the book; I'll be joined by a collection of the elderly pioneer Nisei who helped contribute to the book (and with whose story it is chiefly occupied). It's a chance to honor their contribution to the development of the Eastside and its communities.

I'm also looking forward to the Montana trip, just cuz. (I tried to get a Missoula date, since I'll be staying there several days, but couldn't work it out on admittedly short notice.)

If you're in the vicinity, I hope you can make it.

Robertson at the Katrina trough

Max Blumenthal has an excellent, "must read" report at The Nation examining "Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash":

With the Bush Administration's approval, Robertson's $66 million relief organization, Operation Blessing, has been prominently featured on FEMA's list of charitable groups accepting donations for hurricane relief. Dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN and the Associated Press, duly reprinted FEMA's list, unwittingly acting as agents soliciting cash for Robertson. "How in the heck did that happen?" Richard Walden, president of the disaster-relief group Operation USA, asked of Operation Blessing's inclusion on FEMA's list. "That gives Pat Robertson millions of extra dollars."

Though Operation USA has conducted disaster relief for more than twenty-five years on five continents, like scores of other secular relief groups currently helping victims of Hurricane Katrina, it was omitted from FEMA's list. In fact, only two non-"faith-based" organizations were included. (One of them, the American Red Cross, is being blocked from entering New Orleans by FEMA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.)

There really are no depths to this administration's dogged attachment to the religious right -- even at the potential expense of alleviating the suffering and death in the hurricane's wake. Of course, Max's dad has already reported, the New Orleans tragedy was not only predicted and forwarned, it was decisively worsened by Bush policies before and after the storm. Why should it change its MO now?

Still, with Robertson horning in on the action, you would be well within your rights to ask how Robertson has been discussing the Katrina tragedy in his sermons.

And, well, there's this in Max's report:

The 700 Club's featured guest was Wellington Boone, a black minister invited by Robertson to provide a counterpoint to the ubiquitous Rev. Jesse Jackson. Boone is a member of the Coalition on Revival, a Christian Reconstructionist organization that advocates replacing the US Constitution with biblical law. Throughout his career, he has distinguished himself from his black clerical colleagues with such remarks as "I believe that slavery, and the understanding of it when you see it God's way, was redemptive" and "The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model."

Though Boone's appearance on The 700 Club consisted mostly of benign appeals for "laser-beam prayer," CBN featured a separate interview with Boone on its website in which he declared, "We need to consider the culture of those people still stranded in New Orleans. The looting of property, the trashing of property, et cetera, speaks to the basic character of the people." He added, "These people who have gone through slavery, segregation and the Voting Rights Act are doing this to themselves."

A role model, indeed. Indeed.

Malkin and McCloy

Michelle Malkin dedicated her book In Defense of Internment to the memory of two men: David Lowman, author of the oft-debunked MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during WW II and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who in later years -- attempting to defend the internment as well -- would claim that he and other officials were indeed heavily influenced by the MAGIC decrypts that form the core of Malkin's thesis.

Malkin takes McCloy's claims at face value, and throughout her text depicts him as the chief driver of the decision to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II. From pp. 76-77:

Under normal operations in the military, the local commander -- in this case [Lt. Gen. John] DeWitt -- would be the one to make the recommendation based on his evaluation, which he would then send to War Department officials in Washington, D.C., for approval. This has been the assumption of virtually every popular account of the West Coast evacuation, written by historians convinced that DeWitt's alleged racism and West Coast hysteria drove the decision. In truth, the push came from higher up, where knowledge of the MAGIC intelligence outlining Japan's alarming espionage operations rested. Army historian Stetson Conn's account makes this clear. On February 11, 1942, McCloy informed Bendetsen that Roosevelt "had specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens." This was two days before DeWitt's final recommendations had been sent to Washington, dated February 13. ...

When McCloy testified before Congress in 1984, he affirmed that the MAGIC cables helped shape the decisions of those who ordered the evacuation. He stated that he read MAGIC messages on a daily basis, and that it was a "very important" factor in the development of the evacutation policy.

There are many problems with this account, not the least of which is that the document trail makes clear that the actual architects of the internment were Provost Marshall General Allen Gullion and his protege Lt. Col. Karl Bendetsen, both of whom agitated for mass evacuation from early on in the process, and whose advice profoundly affected the decisions made by both DeWitt and McCloy. Even more dubious, though, is Malkin's credulousness about McCloy's later testimony.

Now a document has surfaced that makes plain that McCloy at the time was not affected by the MAGIC decrypts -- a fact that seriously undermines Malkin's whole thesis.

In today's Seattle Times, Bruce Ramsey reports that historian Greg Robinson uncovered the following document during recent research:



This is a memo from McCloy to his immediate superior, War Undersecretary Robert Patterson, describing his view of then-current agitation (which I describe in Strawberry Days) to make conditions for the Japanese American internees actually harsher. Note particularly the handwritten lines at the bottom of the memo:

These people are not 'internees' -- they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.

This directly contradicts McCloy's later claims that the intelligence, particularly MAGIC, led officials to have concerns about the security risk presented by the entire Japanese American population on the West Coast. The second half of the note is also, as Robinson notes, not very accurate; the official pretense was a nonexistent "military necessity," and there is no evidence that white vigilantism was anything more than a peripheral concern for the officials who made the decision.

Like Eric Muller, Ramsey notes that the meaning of this second half-sentence may have been more along the lines of acknowledging the political realities that government officials faced regarding the racial hysteria that swept the Coast after Pearl Harbor:

I see another meaning in the words, "we could not control our own white citizens." McCloy may have been saying the government could not control its white citizens' political demands.

The sense of alarm ran deep. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, people were told the West Coast was undefended.

A map in The Seattle Times showed likely invasion beaches at Grays Harbor, with big black arrows sweeping toward Seattle and Portland. Japan had no capability of launching an invasion across the Pacific, but the article gave the impression that maybe it did. Another article told of Japanese Americans arrested in Seattle for attempting to sell gasoline tanks to Japan; the tanks, it said, would hold enough fuel for bombers to fly all the way from Tokyo to Seattle and back. Japan didn't have bombers that could fly that far, but the article gave the impression that maybe it did.

Editorially, The Seattle Times was neutral on the internment (though its news coverage does not feel neutral). But the Los Angeles Times was beating the drums for it. The entire Pacific Coast congressional delegation was for it. The mayor of Seattle told a congressional committee the people here were for it.

It is, in any event, already abundantly already clear that there is little actual basis for Malkin's claim that McCloy, reading those decrypts, was the man who decided that rounding up citizens en masse according to their race was the appropriate policy. Indeed, as Muller and Robinson explained previously:

One of the two or three most significant historical claims that Michelle makes is that it was Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy who pressured others in the War Department for wholesale eviction of all people of Japanese ancestry because of his access to MAGIC.

In 1992, Kai Bird, a distinguished biographer, published The Chairman, a definitive 663-page biography of McCloy.

Here's what Bird has to say about McCloy and MAGIC:

"The signing of Executive Order 9066 later came to be regarded as one of the most controversial decisions associated with McCloy's career. . . . More than any other individual, McCloy was responsible for the decision, since the president had delegated the matter to him through [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson. . . . Why ... did McCloy become an advocate of mass evacuation? One answer is simple racism, particularly evident in Stimson's attitudes. Another is that McCloy and Stimson were 'led by the nose by second-rate people like Colonel Bendetsen.' And it was true ... that at the time, McCloy was 'distracted and distraught with a large number of problems.' But he also possessed a unique combination of predilections that made him particularly vulnerable to Bendetsen's and [Provost Marshall General] Gullion's arguments [for mass evacuation]. [Gullion] had convinced him that the enemy would inevitably engage in sabotage. Ever since Amherst and his enthrallment with the military-preparedness movement, he had been instinctively swayed by national-security arguments. Theoretical objections to strong action on civil-libertarian grounds were indications of soft thinking. ... "Another major factor was McCloy's exposure to intelligence sources. Some observers in recent years have cited evidence of Japanese American disloyalty in such special intelligence resources as the Magic intercepts. There is no doubt that McCloy was reading Magic intercepts of Japanese diplomatic traffic at the time of the evacuation decision. But, as in the question of how much warning the Magic cables should have given him regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is difficult to determine whether this intelligence information was a factor in his thinking. McCloy himself, in testimony before a congressional commission forty years later, did not mention the intercepts. "Only a handful of Magic cables, out of thousands intercepted, might have conveyed the impression that Tokyo had recruited both alien Japanese and Japanese American citizens for espionage work. . . . "Prior to Pearl Harbor, there had been no systematic analysis of Magic intercepts. So any references McCloy saw in the Magic intercepts to Japanese American espionage were fleeting and impressionistic. A meticulous analysis of the intercepts, in fact, would have shown that the intelligence information cabled back to Tokyo came almost exclusively from 'legal' espionage conducted by Japanese diplomats out of their embassy and consulates. Even the covert, 'illegal' espionage coordinated out of these Japanese consulates was not very sophisticated or extensive. One Magic intercept, for instance, reveals that, as late as May 1941, the Japanese Embassy was reporting that 'only about $3,900 a year is available for actual development of intelligence ...' The few agents hired were invariably Caucasian Americans or German nationals. "Whereas such Magic evidence was highly ambiguous, McCloy also had access to intelligence that firmly dismissed the potential for sabotage. ... "It is hard not to conclude that McCloy allowed his fears of sabotage and his penchant for decisive action to sweep aside any other considerations." (from pages 154-56)

In earlier pages of the biography (145-51), Bird depicts McCloy as racked by indecision about what sort of action to take against ethnic Japanese--and favoring far more narrowly targeted action than that ultimately taken--until as late as February 6 to February 10, 1942. He says that it was unremitting pressure for mass eviction from Provost Marshall General Gullion that finally led McCloy to settle on that course of action.

Michelle dedicates her book to the memory of John McCloy (and David Lowman). But Kai Bird's biography of John McCloy does not appear in her bibliography.

They are not, of course, the only historians to question this point, which is the real linchpin to her claim that the MAGIC decrypts provided the "real" reason for the internment. Another is Klancy Clark deNevers, author of the definitive biography of Bendetsen, The Colonel and the Pacifist.

DeNevers also examined Malkin's text, and thoroughly eviscerated it in a separate critique:

Malkin's main thesis is that the decision to exclude was based not on racism or wartime hysteria, as a government commission found in 1983, but on information obtained in translated cables of Japanese diplomatic traffic prior to December 7, 1941. She asserts with boring repetition and no convincing evidence, that the MAGIC translations were the real basis for the military necessity of the evacuation and internment of the ethnic Japanese (which they were not). She asserts that information in the cables PROVES that there were "espionage networks" among the Japanese communities and that this was sufficient reason for the mass incarceration. In order to argue that such a network could be dangerous she fills several chapters with accounts of the perfidious behavior of Japanese agents in numerous countries in South East Asia prior to Pearl Harbor. To support her contention that Japan was the "only Axis country with a proven capability of launching a major attack on the United States" (a claim she has had to withdraw) she mentions actions by Japanese submarines in the first weeks of the war and the shelling of Goleta, which occurred after the decision to exclude was made.

Moreover, as Charles Lofgren points out, Army historian Stetson Conn found that the evacuation plan originated primarily with Bendetsen. Malkin's claim that Stetson's account makes McCloy out to be the chief driver of the evacuation plan is simply false.

Malkin has turned a pretty penny selling fraudulent history. She cannot evade this reality forever.

Update: Robinson has more here and here.

Race baiting

You've probably been hearing the phrase "race baiting" a lot lately. Especially from conservatives eager to tear down critics of the Bush administration who raise serious questions about the racial components of its manifestly inadequate response to the disaster in New Orleans.

Problem is, none of them seem to really know what "race baiting" is -- which may, in fact, explain why so many of them are also engaging in it.

You can find it every pool of the conservative swamp. Nearly every discussion of race in the context of New Orleans available at the Free Republic, for instance, refers to any questions raised about the racial component of the response as "race baiting". Same in the blogosphere, at places like The Corner, Wizbang, Red State, Little Green Footballs, Rathergate, and on and on.

It would help, perhaps, if we recalled exactly what race baiting really is:

Race baiting is the act of using racially derisive language, actions or other forms of communication to anger or intimidate a person or groups of people, or to make those persons behave in ways that are inimical to their personal or group interests. The term race in this context can be construed very broadly to include the social constructs which define race or racial difference, as well as ethnic, religious, gender and economic differences. Thus the use of any language or actions for the purpose of exploiting actual or perceived weaknesses in persons who can be identified as members of certain groups in order to do them some sort of harm can be contained within the concept of "race baiting."

The act of accusing others, particularly white Americans, of racist behavior typically does not entail racially divisive language, unless it features talk about honkies and crackers and white-hooded Klansmen. It doesn't disparage white people generally, but, if it is disparaging, it tends to be disparaging of behavior that is racist.

This is only "race baiting" if you believe that exposing bigotry by whites somehow inflicts harm upon them; if you believe that whites are themselves the victims of systematic, oppressive, and widespread "reverse racism" in America -- a notion that enjoys considerable support among the angry white men of the right, but for which the evidence is scant indeed; and that suggesting at times that their behavior might be motivated by racism is itself a degrading racial stereotype.

This may be true in a handful of instances, but more often the charge is raised in instances where there is no derisive language, only serious questions. Indeed, compared to the real history of oppression and racism in this country, both in the past and present, such claims appear, more than anything, to be little more than the bathetic whining of the privileged.

Reformulating "race baiting" to include raising concerns about racism is a form of Newspeak: it inverts the actual meaning of the phrase to suggest its nearly polar opposite, thereby rendering it meaningless. As I've discussed previously, the right in recent yeaars has deployed Newspeak primarily to nullify and muddle our understanding of precisely the behavior that they themselves are prone to engage in. The appearance of Newspeak is actually a reliable indicator of the conservative movement's own intended behavior.

The right has been redefining "race baiting" to include any attempt to raise serious charges of racism for some time now. Recall, for instance, that Trent Lott's defenders were quick to charge his accusers with "race baiting" (see, for instance, the Claremont Institute's defense of Lott). It has enjoyed a considerable half-life among right-wing pundits such as Mona Charen. Meanwhile, Instapundit has made a virtual career of this misuse of the phrase, while the rest of the right-wing blogosphere has followed suit. Needless to say, this redefinition of the term is also now an article of faith at Free Republic and the Council of Conservative Citizens, as well as such reliably racist outfits as American Renaissance and Stormfront.

Just for clarity, I thought it might be useful to provide some clear examples of genuine race-baiting, just so no one is confused about its meaning:

"The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race."
-- John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Georgian, 1904

"As long as rape continues lynching will continue. For this crime, and this crime alone, the South has not hesitated to administer swift and certain punishment. ... We are going to protect our girls and womenfolk from these black brutes. When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of the women of the South then lynching will stop."
-- Rep. Thomas Upton Sisson, D-Miss., 1921

"This is a race war! The white man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. ... Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ... I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or on the mainland ... I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii, now and putting them in concentration camps... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!"
-- Rep. John Rankin, D-Miss., 1941

"If our buildings, our highways, and our railroads should be wrecked, we could rebuild them. If our cities should be destroyed, out of the very ruins we could erect newer and greater ones. Even if our armed might should be crushed, we could rear sons who would redeem our power. But if the blood of our White race should become corrupted and mingled with the blood of Africa, then the present greatness of the United States of America would be destroyed and all hope for civilization would be as impossible for a Negroid America as would be redemption and restoration of the Whiteman's blood which had been mixed with that of the Negro."
-- U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-Tenn.), 1947

"The negro is a native of tropical climate where fruits and nuts are plentiful and where clothing is not required for protection against the weather ... The essentials of society in the jungle are few and do not include the production, transportation and marketing of goods. [Thus] his racial constitution has been fashioned to exclude any idea of voluntary cooperation on his part."
Dixicrat platform of 1948

"And I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."
-- Strom Thurmond, 1948

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
-- Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., 2001

And for some more recent samples, out of the New Orleans disaster:

Most people have seen videos depicting the brutality and inhumanity of the African tribal uprisings and lawlessness. Now you don't have to watch a video shot in Africa, just look at the many videos from an historic and once beautiful American city, New Orleans.

... One must ask, is this a story about tribal brutality in Uganda…the raiding by bandits of a children’s hospital?

No, its happening in one of the most beautiful and historic of American cities. And my dear friends, it is only a foretaste of what’s ahead for the multicultural America of the future.

... Differences do exist and these differences can be seen consistently across racial lines around the world. Take for instance Japan. Japan suffered a series of devastating earthquakes, and yet the Japanese people in these communities pulled together, rooted by their common heritage, culture, and racial unity and they helped each other. There was no anarchy, no bands of simian-like Japanese in cars trying to raid nursing homes!
-- David Duke

"Our society (thanks soccer moms) is far to tolerant of it's degenerate gangsta sub-culture. We make it's more talented members wealthy heros and role models, via rap music, movies and sports. In many ways the gangsta sub-culture was brought to us by Hollywood and the NBA, bleeding heart soccer moms tolerate it at the voting booth. Maybe now that we can see exactly what is in store for all of us, soccer moms get raped first, maybe we as a society will become far less tolerant. One can only hope."
--- Free Republic commenter "jpsb"

It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry...

In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.
-- Steve Sailer, VDare

Of course, once a bit of Newspeak becomes entrenched, it's hard to dislodge. Look for a lot more claims of "race baiting" to arise along with serious questions about the role of race in the response to the Katrina disaster.

Bolstering the bigots

Remember how Michelle Malkin likes to claim that, while her book In Defense of Internment makes the case that the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II was perfectly justified, she's only making the argument for "limited measures" against Muslim Americans in the war on terror?

Heaven forfend, of course, that anyone else might use her "findings" to argue for anything harsher than that, right?

In which case, I'm sure she'll be eager to denounce a piece just published by the Center for Immigration Studies titled "Keeping Extremists Out: The History of Ideological Exclusion and the Need for Its Revival", authored by a Hoover Institute fellow named James R. Edwards.

Edwards, as Kynn Bartlett points out, argues from some of the darker corners of American history to justify a proposal to exclude "enemy aliens" from our shores based purely on their ideology. Among the historical policies of which he bases this argument are previous efforts to exclude Catholics, Quakers, and various races and ethnicities, including the Japanese.

Even more disturbing, he proposes that the current policy not be too specific, but cut an extremely broad swath:

[I]deological exclusion should be restored, allowing aliens to be excluded or deported not only for overt acts but also for radical affiliations or advocacy. Such grounds for exclusion and removal should be based on characteristics common to the many varieties of extremism, rather than target a specific ideology.

How broad? Well, Edwards explains:

Therefore, we should promote intelligence-gathering on aliens abroad and intense investigation by consular officers. The State Department should establish management policies that reward consular officers who ferret out fraud or identify visa applicants who are found to hold anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish views. All diplomatic personnel should be trained to look for such dangerous signs.

Of course, how often have we heard from the people now in charge (see, e.g., Karl Rove), as well as their chorus of right-wing-media sycophants (see esp. Rush Limbaugh), that merely being liberal is a sign of being "anti-American" and "anti-Christian"?

Edwards, as it happens, bases at least a portion of his argument on Malkin's text:

Even before the United States was drawn into World War II, the domestic threat became more serious. As tensions mounted, ideological exclusion and removal, as well as alien registration and control laws, became all the more important tools for the U.S. government to have at hand.

Secret intelligence operations by the U.S. military, known as MAGIC, intercepted and decoded Japanese diplomatic messages beginning in the late 1930s. These communications evidenced the extent of Japan's espionage on American soil. By late 1940, MAGIC unveiled Japan's plans for spying in the United States, directing the recruitment of agents from "our 'Second Generations' and our resident nationals" among others.

As it had been invoked in previous wars, the Alien Enemies Act served as the basis for designating German, Japanese, and Italian nationals as enemy aliens, along with prudential controls during World War II, such as prohibiting enemy alien travel into certain areas, restricting alien property ownership, and internment (not only of Japanese nationals, but other Axis nationals). The 1940 Alien Registration Act resulted in nearly five million foreign nationals registering with the government during World War II.36 The context of the times saw liberal columnist Walter Lippman writing in 1942:

The enemy alien problem on the Pacific Coast, or much more accurately, the fifth column problem, is very serious and very special. ... The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody' constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.

German fifth columns had assisted Hitler's European conquests, thanks to "German citizens and Nazi sympathizers" living in such nations as Poland, Belgium, Holland, and France. Thus, the perceived threat was realistic.

The shoddiness of this argument is readily apparent to anyone familiar with the facts, to wit:

-- The "MAGIC" encrypt that he cites actually prioritizes the recruitment effort by the Japanese agencies involved in a telling fashion: Highest on its list are African Americans; next come white supremacists, particularly William Dudley Pelley's Silvershirts. At the bottom of the list are Japanese Americans, who were in fact widely mistrusted as "traitors" by the militarists in Tokyo. Anyone arguing that the intercepted message was reason for ethnic-based incarceration would be arguing that blacks and Caucasians should be first on the list.

-- Nearly all of the "enemy alien" Japanese incarcerated during World War II -- that is, the first-generation Issei immigrants -- had been in America for at least 18 years (immigration from Japan was shut off entirely in 1924), and many for as long as 40 years. The primary reason these immigrants still were citizens of Japan was that they were forbidden to naturalize. Most of them, by virtue of their extended tenure on these shores, had long established themselves in their respective communities as fully contributing members of society and, by most standards, good Americans in intent, if not officially.

-- Some 70,000 of the 120,000 Japanese incarcerated during the war were not "enemy aliens" at all, but American citizens.

-- Lippman's column was riddled with the classic errors of the time, particularly the failure to distinguish between citizens and aliens. And the reality of the matter was that the West Coast never, at any time, at risk of becoming an actual "battlefield" in the war.

-- Finally, Edwards cites the real threat of espionage and sabotage posed by Nazi sympathizers on the East Coast -- but neglects to observe that this threat did not result in the internment of the entire population of German-Americans on that seaboard.

Edwards' piece, as you can see from reading it, is not only problematic for its grotesque distortions of history, it's positively chilling in its call to relive some of the darkest chapters of our history -- repeating mistakes that most of us believed we had long since put behind us. Edwards not only wants to revive ideological exclusion, he wants to make it so vague that one need only hold views critical of the current government to be excluded from entering the country.

He elides, in fact, the very well-grounded reasons that "Congress effectively repealed ideological exclusion" -- namely, it was legally unsound and itself deeply unAmerican. It goes directly against the very clear and careful wording of the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The amendment specifically refers to "any person" as distinct from "any citizen" because the intent was to include visitors to our country as well. It's an important distinction particularly in the areas of free-speech and free-assembly rights, because excluding visitors on the basis of their beliefs is noxious to the core principles of free speech itself.

What's next? Excluding all Muslims? Excluding "liberals" or environmentalists? This isn't just a slippery slope; this is diving over the cliff itself.

Of course, this perhaps shouldn't be terribly surprising. The Center for Immigration Studies, after all, is part of the John Tanton network of anti-immigration activists who are funded in no small part by old-line white-supremacist organizations, notably the Pioneer Fund. As the SPLC's damning report on Tanton illustrated, this network included several outright white-supremacist organizations, notably Jared Taylor's outfit, American Renaissance,, and the nakedly racist Council of Conservative Citizens (who, judging by their Web site, are currently leaping aboard the Dukesque "blame 'black culture' bandwagon" being promulgated by the extremist right).

I don't think it's likely, though, that Michelle Malkin will find much to disapprove of here. This is part of her team, after all (her immigration blog has blogrolled the CIS). It speaks volumes, of course, that she also writes regularly for VDare, designated by the SPLC as a bona fide "hate group" -- and if you read their report, it isn't hard to see why:

Fast forward to 2003. Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.

One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

It has run articles by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in dubious race and IQ studies and eugenics, the "science" of "race betterment" through selective breeding.

Malkin's In Defense of Internment is likewise of a piece of this same willingness to indulge views that are by any measure bigoted, and in some cases, extremist, by ignoring the latent bigotry and its broader ramifications.

As I observe in the epilogue of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community:

A thorough accounting of the entire historical record surrounding the internment clearly reveals that racism played a significant role at every key juncture. This is not to say, by any means, that racism or its associated hysteria constituted the sole cause of the internment. There were many factors that contributed to the decisions, and the resulting policy was in many ways the outcome of a tangled bureaucratic nightmare. Tetsuden Kashima, in his landmark 2004 study Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, surveyed the broad range of intelligence gathering (not merely the MAGIC encrypts) as well as policymaking in the years prior to the war and found that the internment was the product not so much of hysteria as of the inexorable inertia wrought by policies that had been set in motion well before Pearl Harbor. However, even Kashima makes clear that racist attitudes toward Japanese Americans had a significant role in forming these policies, just as it likely colored the policymakers' interpretations of prewar intelligence about the Nikkei; certainly, the blurring of the distinction between American citizens and Japanese nationals -- a blurring based clearly on popular prejudices -- was prevalent during the entire course of these decisions.

That same blurring, it must be observed, occurs throughout Malkin's text. In dozens of instances, she refers to "ethnic Japanese" to describe her subjects, a phrase so broad it allows Malkin to lump American-born citizens in with Japanese-born spies. After repeatedly referring to the citizen Nisei as "ethnic Japanese," she uses the same phrase to describe Japanese-born operatives engaging in espionage from inside consulates. The unrelenting appearance of the phrase transforms Malkin's thesis into a 21st-century version of the hoary "Yellow Peril" truism reiterated by General DeWitt: "A Jap is a Jap."

Likewise, her claim to only be justifying "limited measures" while arguing in defense of mass incarceration simply does not hold water:

Malkin and her cohorts couch their defense of the decisions made in 1942 at least partially as a response to the critics of the Bush administration who have raised the specter of the Japanese American internment. To her own critics who charged that in doing so, she was opening the doors for post-September 11 internment camps, Malkin would refer to a key line in her text: "Make no mistake: I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps, but when we are under attack, 'racial profiling' -- or more precisely, threat profiling -- is justified."

This is, however, more than a little disingenuous, since Malkin's text is not merely a rationalization for racial profiling but indeed one for mass internment based on ethnicity as well. Beyond the immediate question -- Why use a massive violation of civil rights to justify relatively limited measures such as those proposed? -- there is the effect this logic has on the discourse: Justifying an action may not be semantically the same as advocating it, but it can have the same effect. And indeed, within a few weeks, the discussion had shifted to the possibility of interning Arabs or Muslims. U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo, while praising Malkin's book lavishly, concluded thus: "It's also reasonable and important to open an honest discussion of internment, past and present." Similarly, Daniel Pipes—a Bush administration appointee to the U.S. Institute of Peace—penned an op-ed piece likewise praising Malkin's text as reopening the way for an honest discussion of potential wartime measures against domestic enemies.

So it should be no surprise, then, that Malkin's text is being used to foment an assault on the equal-protection clause through "ideological exclusion" on behalf of a far-right agenda. That's the kind of thing fraudulent history is always good for.