LA TIMES– Acting Solicitor Gen. Neal Katyal,
in an extraordinary admission of misconduct, took to task one of his
predecessors for hiding evidence and deceiving the Supreme Court in two
of the major cases in its history: the World War II rulings that upheld the detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.
Katyal said Tuesday that Charles Fahy, an appointee of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
deliberately hid from the court a report from the Office of Naval
Intelligence that concluded the Japanese Americans on the West Coast did
not pose a military threat. The report indicated there was no evidence
Japanese Americans were disloyal, were acting as spies or were signaling
enemy submarines, as some at the time had suggested.
Fahy was defending Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized forced removals of Japanese Americans from “military areas” in 1942. The solicitor general, the U.S. government’s top courtroom attorney, is viewed as the most important and trusted lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court, and Katyal said he had a “duty of absolute candor in our representations to the court.”
Read full article about Misconduct Cited in Japanese American Internment Cases.
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