Whoops

In a bizarre post at the U.S. Department of Justice blog this week, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal settles an old account without actually settling the thing: "There are several terrific accounts of the roles that Solicitors General have played throughout history in advancing civil rights. But it is also important to remember the mistakes." 

The mistake that Katyal reveals is that Solicitor General Charles Fahy, who served in that post during World War II, deliberately withheld from the Supreme Court a military intelligence report that dismissed concerns about the loyalty of most Japanese-Americans:

"The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody.  But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court 'might approximate the suppression of evidence.'  Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones.  Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC." (Apologies: our blockquote function doesn't appear to be working.)

This is, of course, not a description of a mistake. It's a description of calculated official dishonesty in the service of formal policy. Fahy didn't accidentally forget to include this information in his briefs to the court. And yet the news coverage of Katyal's "admission" marches right in line with this characterization, discovering an accident in an act of fully conscious and intentional policy. The Los Angeles Times, blinking doe-eyed in the light of history, goes farther, revealing somberly that... Well, here: "Katyal said that last summer he was doing research for several immigration cases when he came upon some ugly, disturbing comments about Asians in 19th century briefs submitted to the Supreme Court."

Gasp! Ugly comments about Asians in 19th century legal briefs! Our history books will have to be updated.

"March of progress" history, meet the planet Earth. If you insist on seeing government as a force for ineluctable human progress, then yes: you will have to be surprised by the plainest reality of well-known historical events.