FORTUNATELY, THIS PRESIDENT ISN'T A RACIST:

Manzanar redux?: In an echo of Japanese internment, a judge's ruling allows foreign nationals to be rounded up on the basis of their race or religion (David Cole, June 16, 2006, Los Angeles Time)

'WHAT WILL they do to us if there is another attack? Will they intern us like they interned the Japanese?"

That is the single most common question I get when speaking about counter-terrorism policies and civil liberties to Arab and Muslim audiences. Until Wednesday, I assured them that such a response was unthinkable. The Japanese internment during World War II is now so widely recognized as morally, legally and ethically wrong, I told them, that it could not possibly be repeated.

But after a decision by a federal judge in New York, I'm no longer confident that I can be so reassuring. Dismissing a case challenging the detention of Arab and Muslim foreign nationals in the weeks after 9/11, U.S. District Judge John Gleeson ruled that it is constitutionally permissible to round up foreign nationals on immigration charges based solely on their race, religion or country of origin. What's more, he said that they can be detained indefinitely, even after they have agreed to be removed to their home countries.

In essence, he authorized a repeat of the Japanese internment — as long as the internment is limited to foreign nationals charged with visa violations (a group that at last count numbered about 11 million people).

The parallel is haunting, just as FDR and Earl Warren interned people solely because of their ethnicity, so could we imprison people solely for violating the law.

NOR A CROOK:
Historians measuring Bush's scandals against past presidents (KEN HERMAN, 6/18/06, Cox News Service)

It's been a collection of scandals and problems without handy monikers. But the Bush administration has had enough of them to begin nudging the needle on the presidential scandal-o-meter.

Historians are measuring them against the brand-name scandals — Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Monica - that have plagued previous presidents.

"I think it's still kind of high-average," political scientist Ryan Barilleaux of Miami University said Tuesday after word broke that longtime Bush friend and adviser Karl Rove would not be indicted by a grand jury looking into the White House disclosure of a CIA operative's name. [...]

"There is something that is different about the current administration and more worrisome about this," said presidential historian William Leuchtenburg, a University of North Carolina professor emeritus. "The kinds of problems that administrations have had in the past have usually involved bad behavior by an individual on his own."

"What's different about this administration is that the behavior involves important matters of policy of breach of security," Leuchtenburg said. "From what we actually know, it hasn't yet reached the dimensions of the Nixon White House. But it certainly goes beyond the sort of petty personal scandals that one associates with Truman and Eisenhower or with Carter." [...]

Barilleaux said the jury is out on where Bush's woes rank when compared to previous presidential scandals.

"The highest ranking would be the kind of scandal on the order of Watergate, something that consumes the administration is to the point of potentially damaging an entire presidency, the way Watergate did," he said.

One level down is Iran-Contra of the Reagan era, "the kind of scandal that will attract a lot of attention, raises a lot of questions about presidential involvement and about the administration but didn't quite rise to the level of a Watergate."

Another level down is what Barilleaux calls "garden-variety scandals that seem to hit many recent administrations."

"We are somewhere in the area of the kinds of things that crop up in lots of administrations, people getting in trouble for various things," Barilleaux said.

And while Leuchtenburg worries that Bush's problems swirl around substantive security matters, Barilleaux believes those kinds of problems - as opposed to fooling around with an intern - can be easier to deal with.

"On one hand, these do potentially involve bigger national security issues," he said. "On the other hand, the public has often been willing to accept various kinds of behaviors by presidents or administration officials if they can make the case those are really in the nation's interest."

So they acknowledge that the biggest difference is that the controversies surrounding the President himself are just policy differences, on which the public and the Constitution suport him, while the petty scandals touch only on a few aides, unlike prior administrations where cabinet members, and even a president, were forced to resign or where someone like Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2006 10:59 AM