Michelle Malkin

[Konovalov]

As per Avon's request I've moved this discussion to a new thread:

Originally Posted by The Avon Lady

Why?

shill ( P ) Pronunciation Key (shl) Slang
n.
One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

This belongs on a separate thread but I asked you before to show us her deceptions.

This does not define a shill. It defines an idealist or possibly an idealogue.

Something strange going on here. My link is to an article titled Eco-Terrorism 101. Watch the movie.

And the point was that there are lots of people with personal beliefs that violence is a legitimate means to achieve an end. Some people base themselves on their own decisions of right and wrong, others on what is dictated to them.

Originally Posted by The Avon Lady

Michael Moore lies and distorts. Coulter, IMO distorts and has some absurd opinions. But please find me where Malkin does the same? Again, I would prefer a new thread for this issue.

I point you to one particular issue surrounding Malkin's book titled "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror." Specifically the issue I focus on here has to do with the comparison between a Japanese American man and the 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta.

http://www.isthatlegal.org/Muller_an...kin.html#Cover

Sometimes You Really Can Judge a Book by its Cover.

My first post on the subject of Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment� was a complaint about its cover. I objected to the visual comparison of a Japanese American man with Mohammad Atta, a comparison that I didn’t think inspired confidence that Malkin’s depiction of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans would be fair and balanced. At the time, I did not know that the Japanese American man on the cover was Richard Kotoshirodo, an American citizen who went on some scouting missions around the Hawaiian Islands in the months before Pearl Harbor on behalf of his employer, the Japanese consulate. Of course, in this I was not alone: nobody looking at the cover could possibly know who this man was—and that was what led me to worry that the cover would inevitably mislead people into thinking "that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today."

Malkin responded that this was precisely her intent, but that it was not misleading: Kotoshirodo was the Atta of his day, and a segment of the Japanese American community was the era's al Qaeda:

As Eric notes, hardly anybody knows who Kotoshirodo is. That's exactly the point. Hopefully, I will have changed that by putting his face on the cover, highlighting his treacherous actions, and placing them in their proper national security context. (Eric, by the way, sent me a cordial e-mail soliciting the FBI files I used in my research of the Kotoshirodo case. I pointed him in the right direction and have offered to copy and send the files to him myself if need be. Perhaps after he reads them, he will come to a different conclusion about Kotoshirodo. But I doubt it.)
Now, do I suggest that some American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented WWII America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda in America today? Absolutely. That's the painstaking argument at the heart of my book. Kotoshirodo was not the lone example. He was emblematic, just as Atta is.

Malkin was, in fact, gracious enough to send me copies of the files she used. I read what she sent me.

Then I did some homework. I went and found the files on Kotoshirodo that Malkin had never bothered to look for—even though they were at the National Archives in College Park, just a stone's throw from her home. And those files revealed a different Richard Kotoshirodo from the monster who stares out from the cover of Malkin's book alongside Mohammad Atta.

The story of Michelle Malkin's makeover of Richard Kotoshirodo is a story worth telling, because it turns out that Malkin's use (and abuse) of Richard Kotoshirodo encapsulates everything that is irresponsible and dangerous in Malkin's book—its selective and shoddy research, its hysterical overstatement, and its malicious willingness to smear people's reputations in order to advance her agenda.

Who was Richard Kotoshirodo?

He was a mail clerk in the Japanese consulate in Honolulu in the months leading up to December 7, 1941. Born in Hawaii, Kotoshirodo was an American citizen, but he had gotten his education in Japan.

Usually in a taxi driven by a Japanese man named Mikami, Kotoshirodo accompanied a Japanese official in the vice consul's office on a number of trips around the Hawaiian Islands, including several trips to Pearl Harbor. A few times Kotoshirodo was instructed to go to Pearl Harbor alone, and he did so. On these trips, the Japanese consular official and Kotoshirodo wandered around public places, looking at buildings and sometimes counting ships. They did so in the open, from public vantage points, although Kotoshirodo understood that what they were doing was gathering military information for Japan. The man from the vice consul's office assured Kotoshirodo that what they were doing was not illegal because they were just looking at things that anyone could see, and that in any event, all countries gather information on each other in this way. Kotoshirodo apparently believed this, and continued to go on these surveillance junkets until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack.

The Man Malkin Wants Us to See

Malkin includes just a few details about Richard Kotoshirodo beyond the basic facts of his scouting. She notes that in October of 1942, Kotoshirodo testified before an Internee Hearing Board that at the time he was working at the Japanese consulate and making his surveillance trips, he felt "100% Japanese." She also reports that he testified that he was not sure that he would have quit his job at the consul even if he had known that war was coming. In an appendix, Malkin reproduces just the three pages from the 57-page hearing transcript that substantiate these two things.

After sketching Kotoshirodo as a 100% disloyal American bent on helping Japan prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, Malkin says this:

Despite the conclusion of a hearing board in Hawaii that Kotoshirodo was a willing collaborator …, despite the determination by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover that he should be charged with espionage, and despite Kotoshirodo's own confession of his involvement with the Honolulu spy ring, the U.S. Attorney in Hawaii blocked prosecution. Kotoshirodo and his wife were instead interned briefly in Hawaii, then were sent to relocation centers in Topaz, Utah, and Tule Lake, California.

What a perplexing turn of events: "The U.S. Attorney in Hawaii blocked prosecution." Why, the reader wonders, would the Justice Department not go after such a dangerous agent—the Mohammad Atta of his day—for giving (in Malkin's words) "extensive help . . . to Japan's espionage efforts in advance of the Pearl Harbor attack?"

This is a question Malkin never really answers. At one point she hints that the U.S. Attorney "blocked prosecution" because American espionage law did not actually criminalize information-gathering from public observation. (Ironically, here Malkin appears to believe what Kotoshirodo's Japanese superiors told him about his activities.)

But Malkin is quite vague on this question of why Kotoshirodo was never prosecuted. Reporting the story as she does, perplexingly dead-ending in the U.S. Attorney's Office, she is able to do two things: she can leave Kotoshirodo in the reader's mind as a Mohammad-Atta-like monster, an emblem of the "untold numbers of . . . suspected subersive ethnic Japanese" (p. 156) whom the enemy "routinely utilized" (p. 141) before and after Pearl Harbor. And she can plant that idea that American law then (hint, hint: just as today!) was full of loopholes that kept the government from protecting the American people.

The Real Richard Kotoshirodo

The truth about Richard Kotoshirodo and his non-prosecution—had Malkin wished to know it—actually lay in a file at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, a few miles from her house. It is the file of the Justice Department lawyers who who handled Kotoshirodo's case. And it reveals that prosecutors filed no charges against Kotoshirodo not because what he did was legal—it wasn't—but because their case was weak and they thought the prosecution wasn't worth the effort.

One might have expected that a spy so loyal to the Emperor would have been reluctant to cooperate with the naval and FBI investigations into his espionage for the Japanese consulate, but it didn't turn out that way. Kotoshirodo was instead exceedingly cooperative with investigators. Within a short time of his arrest, Kotoshirodo told investigators everything he knew not just about his own trips around Hawaii on behalf of the Japanese consulate, but more generally about "the espionage activities carried on by the consulate." (Here are links to the eight pages of the Office of Naval Investigation's ("ONI") report on the Kotoshirodo case in February of 1942: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 page 7 page 8.)

What did this investigation reveal? It revealed a bit a simpleton—a man who, out of loyalty to his employer and to Japan, naïvely did what his superiors asked him to do, believing (as, ironically, does Malkin herself) that he was doing nothing illegal. It revealed a man who guilelessly confessed to ONI after he was caught—and who did so in a way that made clear to his questioners that he was "not fully aware of the seriousness of his own situation."

Malkin makes a great deal out of Kotoshirodo's admission at his hearing that he had felt "100% Japanese" while working at the Japanese consulate. She includes in the book's appendix the page from his hearing transcript where the admission appears. What she omits, however, from both her narrative and from the appendix, is this excerpt from the same hearing:

Q. How is your feeling now? You said you were 100% Japanese when you were at the consul? Do you feel that you are loyal to Japan, or that you are an American?
A. Well, after the war broke out I thought it was terrible, and I thought it was a tragedy. I could not imagine what war really was until the war broke out. Of course, I do not have any feeling toward the Japanese government. I do not feel that if there was an attack on Hawaii that the Japanese should do their part for Japan or anything like that.
Q. You say you do not have that feeling?
A. No.
Q. Well, what is your feeling? Who do you want to win the war?
A. (hesitates) Well, I think I, myself, feel that according to the publications in the newspapers and magazines—I read a lot of articles about the point where the United States and the allies stand, I can say that Japan's action was treacherous and inhuman.

Naturally, a person considering Kotoshirodo's loyalties must recognize that when he made these statements, he was under arrest and had every reason to present himself positively to his interrogators. But of course, he had those same incentives when he described himself during the same questioning as having felt "100% Japanese" while in the employ of the consulate. On balance, the hearing—all of it, that is, rather than just the couple of pages that Malkin chose to reproduce in her appendix—reveals a gullible man of confused loyalties.

And what of the Justice Department's decision not to prosecute Kotoshirodo, which seemed so inexplicable in Malkin's telling? A document in the archived Justice Department files that Malkin did not bother to examine states the Department's rationale clearly:

"Lack of evidence to constitute a prima facie case especially in view of lack of Mikami's testimony through his permitted repatriation in August of 1943; [Mikami, the Japanese taxi driver who drove Kotoshirodo and his superior around the islands, was allowed to repatriate to Japan as part of a swap of nationals. With Mikami gone, all the government had on Kotoshirodo was his own statements, which revealed him as a none-too-bright lackey rather than a scheming saboteur.]

"Necessity of exclusive reliance on subject's statements;
"Early and continued detention of subject by military authority;
"The long period which has expired since the alleged offense;
"Inadvisability of the first espionage case in federal court at Honolulu being weak."

The U.S. Attorney for the Territory of Hawaii further explained his rationale for seeking no charges against Kotoshirodo in a letter he wrote on February 28, 1944, to Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark—another primary source that Malkin does not cite and presumably did not find. If Mikami, the taxi driver, had not been repatriated, the U.S Attorney said, the case against Kotoshirodo could have proceeded. "But lacking Mikami and the evidence which might be elicited from him, we have little of weight to present in establishing a prima facie case except his own statements." "I am of the opinion," said the U.S. Attorney, "that the first case of espionage to be instituted in this area should be one having more than an even chance to result in a conviction." Assistant Attorney General Clark agreed.

Think about this for a moment: This was Honolulu, 1944--Ground Zero, just two years after the sneak attack. The chief federal prosecutor, with Kotoshirodo's own full confession in hand, thought he had less than a 50-50 chance of persuading a jury to convict Kotoshirodo of espionage. And an Assistant Attorney General of the United States agreed. If Mohammad Atta had somehow survived the attacks of September 11, 2001, can you imagine the government's deciding to forego prosecution?

That tells us quite a bit, I think, about the real Richard Kotoshirodo, as distinguished from the monster that Malkin invents in her book. He acted disloyally, to be sure, and he seems to have identified more as Japanese than American, at least before the war began. But he was a two-bit traitor and a fool—not the murderous zealot that Malkin wants us to imagine. More importantly, his activities on behalf of the Japanese consulate allow us to draw no inference about the loyalties and conduct of Japanese Americans generally, or about the existence of "vast networks" of Nisei spies.

Why did Malkin not learn the whole truth about Richard Kotoshirodo and about the Justice Department's reasons for declining to prosecute him? I assume she did not learn it because she did not go to the trouble of seeking out the readily accessible archival material on Kotoshirodo's case in the Justice Department files at Archives II in College Park, mere minutes from her home. Instead she relied on research performed and supplied for her by someone else, Robert B. Stinnett, a journalist who served in the Navy in World War II and who is best known for arguing that President Roosevelt knew of the planned Pearl Harbor attack in advance. What Stinnett sent Malkin was incomplete—but it allowed her to tell the story she wanted to tell.

So there you have it: Mohommad Atta and Richard Kotoshirodo.

A fair comparison? Or an hysterical exaggeration? In my view, it's an hysterical exaggeration—indeed, a repetition of the very hysteria that led to the Japanese American internment that Malkin defends, and that could one day lead to the Arab American internment that Malkin invites.
UPDATE: This, by Dave Neiwert, is a must-read on Malkin's revisionism.

FURTHER UPDATE (The "Non Sequitur" Edition): Michelle Malkin responds to this post:

Muller continues his attacks today, this time getting a link from Instapundit. Now Muller is kicking up a big fuss because he says he found documents which show that the prosecution's case against Richard Kotoshirido (the Japanese-American man featured on the cover of my book) was weak. Muller apparently considers this a blockbuster revelation. However, it is exactly the same point I made in my book on page 78, where I wrote, "many of those suspected of serving Japan had not committed any crime (remember that the gathering and transmission of intelligence information from open sources before the declaration of war, such as that performed by Richard Kotoshirodo, probably was not criminal)." I made the same point on page 140, where I wrote: "Some individuals working on behalf of Japan, it should be noted, provided Japan with information that was sensitive but unclassified. Though some advocated prosecution of Hawaiian Nisei Richard Kotoshirodo, for example, it was not clear that he violated any law." As I noted in my book, this is an argument for internment, not against it, since relying on criminal prosecutions in civilian courts would have left Kotoshirodo and other Japanese agents untouchable.

I guess it is asking too much to expect my detractors to actually read my book before launching into their critiques.

And I guess it is too much to expect Malkin to read the post she's replying to--or to know the law.

I pointed out in my post above that the notion that Kotoshirodo could not be prosecuted because the information he observed was unclassified was false. In response, Malkin scolds me for not noting that she said in her book that people could not be prosecuted for passing unclassified information to Japan. I know she said that in her book (which, incidentally, I read--as she well knows). It was wrong there. And it's still wrong.

Under the Espionage Act, it was (and still is) illegal to supply any defense-related information, classified or unclassified, to a foreign nation so long as the person has the intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the detriment of the United States.

Saying something false more loudly doesn't make it true.

The case against Kotoshirodo was weak, but not because his conduct was legal.

In my eyes Malkin distorts.

[The Avon Lady]

See if you can follow through Ms. Malkins history of responses to Robinson here.

[Ishmael]

I must take exception to this, as my wife likes to call her,"Fascist Bitch". To defend force relocation on racial grounds is by itself indefensible. Let's remember that no German-Americans were similarly confined. This despite the very active German-American Bund organisation of the late 30's. I will also point to the exploits of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 101st Infantry Division in World War 2. Made up exclusively of Neisei volunteers from those same internment camps, these units had the highest per capita rate of combat decorations for valor of any unit in the US armed forces in the entire history of the republic.

I apologize if it seems like I'm on a rant here, but I have known and worked with a few survivors of internment. In California, where I grew up, Thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans were not only interned without constitutional rights, but lost everything in the process, property, money, jobs. One would think and understand if these people had taken repatriation to Japan. Instead, they took their injustice with stoic loyalty and a fierce determination to prove themselves to be loyal Americans. The $20,000 dollars belatedly provided them some 40 years later as an acknowledgement for the injustice doesn't even begin to address their patriotism and sacrifice.

After the war was over, they quietly returned to civilian life. In most cases, having to buy back property that they had previously owned that was stolen from them. To have Malkin complain about her so-called book being banned from Manzanar is like having a Holocaust denier complain that his book is banned from the Auschwitz Book Store.

[The Avon Lady]

Malkin already handled the question here:

Part 6: Eric is unimpressed by my explanation for the disparate treatment of ethnic Germans and ethnic Japanese. Let's break this down:

• Item: "Japan was the only Axis country with the capability of launching a major attack on the United States?" Here Michelle contradicts herself, because the book emphasizes repeatedly that Roosevelt, Stimson, and McCloy had good reason (from MAGIC) to worry about potential Nisei involvement not just in a full-blown Japanese attack on the West Coast, but in more ordinary kinds of domestic spying, disruptions of war production, and the like. So why would it appropriately have mattered (if it were true) to the MAGIC-reading trio of Roosevelt, McCloy, and Stimson that Japan could mount a full-blown assault on the West Coast but Germany could not mount a full-blown assault on the East Coast?

What on earth is he talking about? There is no contradiction in what I argue. The West Coast, where the vast majority of ethnic Japanese were concentrated, was uniquely vulnerable to attack, invasion, spot raids, sabotage, and surveillance that could potentially cripple the war effort. As I write:

The West Coast was home to many strategic army and naval installations, aircraft factories, shipyards, and other war plants and vital defense resources and utilities. The region was home to one-fourth of the nation's aircraft production and one-third of its shipbuilding capacity. Through the three major ports of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, vast quantities of men and material were being shipped to the war zones of the Pacific. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, Gen. George Marshall and his staff "worked feverishly to strengthen the west coast defenses as rapidly as they could," according to Army historian Stetson Conn.

Spies on the West Coast, where the movements of our aircraft carriers could be easily monitored and where the risk of hit-and-run attacks like the one at Pearl Harbor was substantial, posed a greater threat than spies on the East Coast, where there were no aircraft carriers and no risk of a major attack. This lesson was underscored by the pre-Pearl Harbor activities of Richard Kotoshirodo and other Japanese agents in Honolulu, who gathered intelligence for Japan that was used to design the attack on Oahu.

The increased vulnerability of the West Coast to espionage seems obvious, as does the strategic value of moving ethnic Japanese to the interior to reduce the threat--a measure taken not only by the U.S., by the way, but by Canada and Mexico.

Reason and logic does not a fascist make. Fascist - another abused word, like shill.

[tycho102]

Originally Posted by Someone, at some point,

shill ( P ) Pronunciation Key (shl) Slang
n.
One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

Sounds like Hillary Clinton, to me.

As for Michelle, she toes the party line, so I don't always agree with her. I'm probably closer to Libertarian, but even that doesn't always fit.

The Fascist references are just a way to avoid actually using Hitler's name. The Europeans have been programmed that Hitler was as evil as evil gets. Unfortunately, in comparison to Stalin, The Great Khan, and Chairman Mao, Hitler was a complete n00b. Hitler was an amateur in comparsion to the Great Khan; but Europeans (and Americans, by liberal proxy) are just concerned with references to Hitler. So, references to Hitler are made under the pretext of Fascism. I guess because he is the most popular example of a Fascist government. Any time someone uses the word "fascist", they are making a reference to Hitler. They are calling you Hitler, or they are calling something a Nazi. One of the two.

As far as the internment camps are concerned, we also should have been rounding up Communists. I am in the belief that our State Department had Soviet spies in it's ranks. We prevented the Japanese from waging a guerrila war within our states, but it took 12 years to address the communist problem. It's unfortunate for all the innocent immigrants, but I blame JAPAN for putting in that kind of position to start with.

Had it not been for Japan, we'd never have had the internment camps.

[August]

Originally Posted by Ishmael

and the 101st Infantry Division in World War 2.

Uhm, the WW2 101st was an Airborne Division made up primarily of white guys. Perhaps you're thinking of the 100th Infantry Battalion?

[Enigma]

Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter and the like make a living by being "shcoking"". They are alot like Howard Stern. They create conversations that they know will bring a staunch reaction, and do so because it makes people repeat their names, and buy/read them. they are a waste of everybodies time and money.

Off soapbox.

[Ishmael]

Originally Posted by August

Uhm, the WW2 101st was an Airborne Division made up primarily of white guys. Perhaps you're thinking of the 100th Infantry Battalion?

You are correct sir. It was the 100th Infantry Battalion. Here's a link to their website.

http://www.njahs.org/research/442.html

My main point, however, is that there never was any organised sabotage comitted by the Japanese. Most ironic for me was that some of the internment camps were in New Mexico where the Navajo Code Talkers were formed specifically for the Pacific war, not to mention Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project.

I can only contrast that with the German U-boat effort, Drumbeat, which also included landing saboteurs on the East Coast of the US. Some of those saboteurs were to contact members of the same German-American Bund I have mentioned previously. Also, some members of the Bund returned to Germany,were recruited into the SS and used in the Battle of the Bulge.

Regarding Japanese raids/invasion of the US, Japanese strategic doctrine was concerned with securing the raw materials of East Asia, not an invasion of the West Coast. In fact, the Attu & Kiska invasions were only a diversion meant to draw US naval forces away from the Midway area prior to that battle. The fact that the US had broken the IJN naval codes and had advance knowledge of this fact contributed to the decisive victory at Midway. The subsequent expeditions to reclaim those outposts in the Aleutians, which my father took part in, were started after the Midway battle was concluded.

I have an original copy of the Internment Order that I picked up at an antiques store some years back. These people were basically given 24 hours at most to take care of their own affairs before being shipped out, mostly allowed one suitcase of personal effects. So I find Miss Malkin's arguments disingenuous in this case, as I find most of her arguments on most subjects. Perhaps if she had joined what Bill Mauldin called,"The grand & glorious fraternity of them that got shot at", like the members of the 442/100, then I might give her opinions more credence and weight. But then that seems to be the motif of most of these right-wing opinionaters. They're great cheerleaders for a war as long as they don't have to fight in it. But such is the way of the children of privledge, military service is for suckers, poor people and democrats.

[joea]

You make good points Ishmael, but isn't the question "what was known at the time"? Maybe in the immediate afgermath of Pearl it could be feared an invasion or raid of the West Coast was a possibility...not that it was justified to lock up the whole Japanese-American population of course. Prudence would have been in order, and certainly the German-American Bund would have been the equivalent of Al Queda opening a branch office in the US and should have been treated the same way I imagine AQ would be.

[scandium]

Originally Posted by tycho102

The Fascist references are just a way to avoid actually using Hitler's name. The Europeans have been programmed that Hitler was as evil as evil gets. Unfortunately, in comparison to Stalin, The Great Khan, and Chairman Mao, Hitler was a complete n00b. Hitler was an amateur in comparsion to the Great Khan; but Europeans (and Americans, by liberal proxy) are just concerned with references to Hitler. So, references to Hitler are made under the pretext of Fascism. I guess because he is the most popular example of a Fascist government. Any time someone uses the word "fascist", they are making a reference to Hitler. They are calling you Hitler, or they are calling something a Nazi. One of the two.

If people wanted to call you a Nazi then it would make more sense to simply call you one, since you don't have to be a Nazi to be a Fascist. Note that fascism is actually an Italian word, not a German one, and that Mussolini's fascist regime came to power long before Hitler's National Socialism even existed (even before Hitler wrote Mein Kampf). Both regimes were fascist, but Hitler neither invented fascism nor was he the first dictator to employ this system of government. What you've written here is disengenous and incorrect, both historically and factually.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."