On Feb, 19 1942 the President of the United States signed an order authorizing the imprisonment of American citizens without due process. Armed with confidential information from the census bureau, the US Military set about rounding up about 115,000 Japanese on the US West Coast and placing them behind barbed wire. True to form the Federal Government used terms like "Internment" and "Detention" to justify the outrage. Long before Order 9066 the FBI was developing a list called "custodial dentention" of Japanese Americans in 1939 in preparation for the impending war with Japan. Order 9066 didn't make much sense on a lot of levels because it authorized the detention of Japanese people only on the West Coast and not all the Japanese in the hotbed of espionage in Hawaii. So what was the point of Executive order 9066? If you factor in the value of Real Estate in Ca. at the time and the fact that Japanese Americans were forced to sell property and Japanese (legal) aliens had their property siezed you might get an idea that the real purpose was to make a killing for real estate speculators. A public apology to the incarcerated Japanese by republican governor Ralph L. Carr of Colorado cost him his political future and the Supreme court managed to delay their decision until the War was almost over.
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