Solicitor General Admits Suppression of Evidence

The Acting Solicitor General of the United States has admitted that the government deliberately withheld evidence from the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944 as the Nikkei community was swept out of California and incarcerated.

The extraordinary admission was made on Tuesday by Solicitor General Neal Katyal who said that U.S. Naval Intelligence had issued a report saying that the Nikkei community posed no military threat, that there was no evidence Japanese Americans were disloyal or were acting as spies as government officials claimed.

The report however was not presented in the Hirabayashi case or the Korematsu case, both of which challenged President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.  Solicitor General at the time, Charles Fahy, was told that not presenting the report would be considered “suppression of evidence” yet he took no action.

Fahy, who died in 1979, also neglected to tell the court that information that Japanese-Americans "were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast had been discredited by the FBI" and the Federal Communications Commission, Katyal wrote

“It seemed obvious to me we had made a mistake,” said Katyal. “The duty of candor wasn’t met.”

Hiding the truth, he said, “harmed the court, and it harmed 120,000 Japanese Americans. It harmed our reputation as lawyers and as human beings, and it harmed our commitment to those words on the court’s building: ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’”

Here are links to the story.

http://www.salon.com/wires/allwires/2011/05/24/D9NDLIVO1_us_wwii_internment_justice_department_apology/index.html

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/acting_sg_katyal_tells_of_mistakes_by_a_predecessor_in_world_war_ii_koremat/

http://hosted2.ap.org/CAVAN/7d8cc182f2be4ace870269f44557ee9a/Article_2011-05-24-US-WWII-Internment-Justice-Department-Apology/id-fddd151494c342b2be55bce2d3fe5158