In one sense, the U.S. solicitor general's recent admission of his office's wrongdoing wasn't really news. After all, commissions courts and investigators long ago established that various government agencies and officials fudged or withheld facts during World War II in order to sweep all people of Japanese descent — American-born citizens as well as immigrants — out of California and parts of three other Western states.

Congress, the president, state and local officials and the military rode a wave of war hysteria to support the politically popular but blatantly un-American evacuation and confinement of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. When lawsuits challenging the action reached the Supreme Court, the government's lawyers in the solicitor general's office suppressed crucial information that could have debunked the racism-fueled assertion that all people of Japanese blood posed a danger to U.S. security, or that it would never be possible to distinguish the loyal residents from the traitorous ones.

But even though the government's actions have been well documented, there is real value in the acknowledgment earlier this month by acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal that his war-era predecessor, Charles Fahy, was wrong to have withheld that information from the high court....