[RAA Question: The following article (which is one week old), mentions 
that the Report was released, I am assuming that it means to Congress, 
but I am NOT yet aware that the Report was released PUBLICLY and 
in UNREDACTED form. Does anyone out there have the current status?]
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Ashcroft Ignores the Lessons of the Last Roundup
Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.)
By Marie Cocco
11/29/2001

TODAY THEIR names do not instill fear. 

They include Scalia and D'Amato, DiMaggio and Stallone, Grasso and 
Gallo. These names are shared now by people who hold positions of high 
public trust, or guarantee high gross at the box office. They are leaders 
of business, or legends for all time.

In another day, these were names of people - dark people with exotic 
customs - who were officially branded by the U.S. government as a threat 
to the nation. 

They were roused from their jobs and from their sleep. They were dragged 
in without charge or guarantee of ever hearing one. They were brought 
before special tribunals, prohibited from seeing secret evidence against 
them. 

They were ripped from their families and held indefinitely. Their reputations 
were ruined; their livelihoods destroyed. 

They were, after all, aliens. Italy, their country of origin, was the enemy. 
It was war. And so it was ordered. 

The report of the U.S. Justice Department on the treatment of Italian 
Americans during World War II is either perfectly timed or perfectly 
ill-timed, depending on your point of view. It was released this week 
because Congress ordered it a year ago. Lawmakers could not have 
known, then, how exquisitely apt the study would be now. 

The law requiring the report has in its title a presumption by Congress 
that there was something terribly wrong about this ensnarement due to 
ethnicity. The law is "The Wartime Violation of Italian-American Civil 
Liberties Act. "It assumes a clear violation, even though it was wartime. 

History's voice speaks through these pages. It has a tone of truth not 
heard from the current Justice Department, with its policy toward 
Mideastern immigrants that bears such resemblance to this ugly ancestor. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin 
D. Roosevelt ordered the roundup not only of Japanese Americans, but of 
German and Italian Americans, some of whom had lived and worked in 
the United States for 40 or 50 years. But even before that, in the 1930s, 
J. Edgar Hoover had prepared. 

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation drew up a list of those thought to be 
security risks to the nation," the report states. Those thought to be "most 
dangerous" were leaders of ethnic and cultural organizations. Others were
deemed suspicious because they belonged to these clubs or simply 
because they were "known to support" them. 

Then, as now, the questions put to the immigrants (some already had 
become U.S. citizens) bore no discernible relation to risk. One young 
woman's father was asked why his daughter spoke French and Italian 
so well; she lost her job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she sometimes 
interpreted for foreign customers, because of his detention. 

Today's FBI wants to ask 5,000 legal aliens from Mideastern countries 
how they "felt" when they heard news of the attack. The lawmen would 
also like to know whether these immigrants noticed anyone who reacted 
"in a surprising or inappropriate way." 

Then, as now, arrest could come on minor violations, overlooked if 
committed by someone who was not ethnically suspect. Theresa Borelli 
was arrested repeatedly for violating curfews that applied to Italian 
Americans in California. Her crime: making hospital visits to her 
paralyzed son, who'd been wounded in the Army overseas. 

Then, as now, it was government policy to detain immigrants as a way 
of soothing public nerves. 

The act of wartime apprehensions, according to an Immigration and 
Naturalization Service document cited in the report, "served two important 
purposes: [It] assured the public that our government was taking firm 
steps to look after the internal safety of the nation, thereby preventing the 
growth of war hysteria; and it took out of circulation men and women 
whose loyalty to the United States was doubtful and who might therefore 
commit some inimical act against the nation." 

Congress required this history to be revealed. It told the Justice 
Department to use the review "to determine how civil liberties can be 
better protected during national emergencies." 

This clause is mostly ignored by John Ashcroft, who signed the report. 
Instead, the current attorney general merely states his belief that his 
department is doing just fine, this time.
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Marie Coccos e-mail address is cocco@newsday.com.