Japanese internment by the U.S. during WW2 was justified

Resolution AnalysisMy opponent repeats that this debate is about the internment of the Japanese. He says that it's not about the execution of the internment (basically admitting that the conditions were horrible) which is fine. I've said in the last round that the USFG could have rounded up the Japanese-Americans and put them in 5-star hotels... and yet the resolution is still FIRMLY negated. The very simple, blatantly obvious point remains: these people were held captive and incarcerated against their will, unconstitutionally, and against every single standard of constitutional jurisprudence and judicial review that this country has/had in place -- which the government is legally obligated to abide by. Yet Pro continuously tries to differentiate between the term internment camp (WCCA) and relocation center (WRA), though he admits both are fair game for this debate. Relocation Centers are generally referred to as "internment camps," but scholars have urged dropping such euphemisms and refer to them as concentration camps and the people within them as incarcerated [1]. Earlier, Pro said that the people at one of the WRA facilities did suffer horrible conditions (such as regular beatings, overcrowding, curfews, unannounced searches, shoddy medical care and restrictions on work and recreational activities) but these people renounced their citizenship so that was fine. Those people didn't give up their citizenship until the Renunciation Act was passed in 1944, after they were already held captive. And why wouldn't they? Their status as U.S. citizens meant absolutely nothing in terms of their legal rights [2]. The people in camps were given loyalty questionnaires asking if they would be willing to fight and die for America (most said yes) or forswear any allegiance to Japan. WRA Director, Dillon S. Myer, later admitted "A bad mistake was made in the loyalty question... question #28 forced them into an untenable position: they had not been allowed U.S. citizenship, and now they were being asked to renounce allegiance to the only country of which they were citizens" [3]. Still the vast majority of those locked in camps did swear allegiance to the U.S. despite 38% of them not being allowed to attain citizenship, and 62% of them being locked up despite their citizenship. As I mentioned, tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans that weren't locked up in Hawaii did, in fact, fight on America's behalf. MAGICIntercepts from MAGIC show the Japanese government calling to 'utilize' Japanese-Americans. David Lowman, a retired special assistant to the director of the National Security Agency said 'Today we know that the Japanese Government misjudged the loyalty of Japanese Americans completely. But at that time no one knew for certain" [4]. This gives credibility to my claim, not Pro's. This country holds the legal standard of innocent until PROVEN guilty. As Peter Irons (civil rights attorney and scholar on constitutional litigation) noted, the government knew that its actions were unconstitutional and needed to find justification for the exclusion. The argument of military necessity was concocted as a defense of the program, and documents that contradicted the argument were either ignored or altered [5]. Wylted again straw mans my position in his analogy. He writes, "My opponent admits it is okay to mandate the movement of people to save lives" which is not what I said. I said evacuation of the west coast was permissible; not the FORCED evacuation. Moreover, you can force evacuations without mandating incarceration, which is yet another reason this analogy is not remotely applicable. The Law"The presumption of innocence is a legal right of the accused in a criminal trial, and it is also regarded as an international human right under the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11. The burden of proof is thus on the prosecution, which has to collect and present enough compelling evidence to convince the trier of fact, who is restrained and ordered by law to consider only actual evidence and testimony that is legally admissible, and in most cases lawfully obtained, that the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. If reasonable doubt remains, the accused is to be acquitted. Under the Justinian Codes and English common law, the accused is presumed innocent in criminal proceedings, and in civil proceedings (like breach of contract) both sides must issue proof" [6]. This means that punishing *possibly* guilty parties with absolutely no proof beyond race is illegal. The ConstitutionHabeas Corpus Pro brings up Habeas Corpus which I've addressed in R2. Under Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, the privilege of the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. "Japanese Americans were denied the right as detainees to be brought before a court at a stated time and place to challenge the legality of their imprisonment. Not only was the right violated, but the government attempted to suspend habeas corpus through legislation in response to Mitsuye Endo's petition for freedom under habeas corpus. U.S. Intelligence reports showed no indication that Japanese Americans posed a threat to the U.S. defense or public safety" [7].Pro then cites the SCOTUS case ruling against the Japanese-Americans. This appeal to authority is also fallacious in that it is circular: the entire purpose of this debate is to prove the Supreme Court was wrong here (as it has been many times throughout history). Indeed almost half of the Supreme Court Justices at the time dissented from the majority opinion. Strict ScrutinyIn conclusion, I'd like to repeat my first round (R2) assertion and the most winningest point in my favor. Pro has not contested the standard of Strict Scrutiny even though I have singled it out as the basis of my argument. I'll repeat: the agreed upon definition of justified includes the terms "just" and "right" which implicates the constitutional obligations of the government, and more readily accounts for the fact that they're held to a higher standard. In constitutional jurisprudence, race based laws are subject to strict scrutiny - the highest level of scrutiny. The notion of "levels of judicial scrutiny," including strict scrutiny, was introduced in Footnote 4 of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), so it was very much in place at the time of this incarceration. "Strict scrutiny is the most stringent standard of judicial review used by United States courts. It is part of the hierarchy of standards that courts use to determine which is weightier, a constitutional right or principle or the government's interest against observance of the principle" [8]."It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect... It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can" [9].In his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Jackson wrote, "A citizen's presence in the locality, however, was made a crime only if his parents were of Japanese birth. Had [the Japanese] been one of four -- the others being, say, a German alien enemy, an Italian alien enemy, and a citizen of American-born ancestors, convicted of treason but out on parole -- only ... The difference between their innocence and his crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock" [9].Here is where Pro definitively loses the debate. U.S. courts apply the strict scrutiny standard in two contexts: when a fundamental constitutional right is infringed (which absolutely was the case here), and those the court has deemed a fundamental right protected by the Due Process Clause or "liberty clause" of the 14th Amendment, or when a government action applies to a "suspect classification," such as race or national origin [8].To pass strict scrutiny, the law or policy must satisfy ALL three tests:- It must be justified by a compelling governmental interest.- The law or policy must be narrowly tailored to achieve that goal or interest. If the government action encompasses too much (overbroad) or fails to address essential aspects of the compelling interest, then the rule is not considered narrowly tailored.- The law or policy must be the least restrictive means for achieving that interest. That is, there cannot be a less restrictive way to effectively achieve the compelling government interest [8].First, the law was not NARROWLY tailored; it imprisoned over 120K people based on 1-4th generation ties to another country. This was incredibly broad and did not remotely attempt to narrow down or single out the most dangerous targets before incarceration and complete suspending of the constitutional rights of hundred/s of thousands of people. Second, the policy was not anywhere near the "least restrictive" means for achieving the goal. My counter plan provided a better, less restrictive way to effectively promote security without such a broad violation of people's rights. It did so by restricting the Japanese-Americans from specific places or positions or industries, as opposed to locking up 60 tons of people like caged animals. Pro repeatedly dropped the fact that any other non-Japanese had access to whatever the USFG was trying to prevent the Japanese from seeing.Furthermore, while Pro says the conditions of the camp don't matter, they do in fact matter (even though they don't need to for the sake of this debate) in terms of the strict scrutiny standards. For if there was a "less restrictive" way to detain or monitor these people -- which I have provided -- it would trump the conditions that they were subjected to, thus also winning me the debate. SOURCES: http://tinyurl.com...