So the Japanese internment was not useful for military security. No doubt various influential people had differing motives for moving the program forward. Excessive caution to the point of paranoia or idiocy is hardly unknown in wartime.

It is easy to forget that top-secret assessments of Japanese strength weren’t published every day in the newspapers. The civilians and most ranks of the military lacked ways to accurately assess danger.

Jim Collins: You might be right. If I get the time I will read a little more about the thoughts of Spruance and Nimitz before Midway. Still I think the West Coast was not a factor in positioning.

IMO our carriers were positioned as they were because it was our only chance. They might avoid detection and still engage the Japanese. Or they might be detected and doomed. They raced to get there in time. The short range of our carrier planes gave us few options.

Dividing your forces when facing a superior enemy was daring but it worked there by the closest of margins.

German-Americans were the largest, by far, ethnic group in America, an internment of all German-Americans would have crippled this country. In 2000, German-Americans still comprised the largest ethnic minority in the US.

In the early days of the war the Japanese message traffic indicate they believed a substantial contingent of saboteurs were waiting to strike. Whether this is true or not is both unknown and unknowable. An agent of Japan who was interned alongside immigrants and their children would have been insane to break cover and could easily have returned to Japan after the war or simply kept their silence for the rest of their lives. We will never know.

The critical issue is that the Japanese believed they had such agents at their command and the small portion of the US government reading these intercepts had good reason to believe this was other than a delusion on the part of Japan. Thus the real reason for the internment. It isn’t a pretty part of our history but it cannot be properly understood without all the stuff that was declassified long after the war. There was much more involved than hysteria and petty rascism.

We imprisoned and restricted Japanese-Americans because of ‘war fever’ and because anti-oriental racism was common and strong. Note that we put no restrictions on German-Americans, not even those who emigrated to the U.S. as adults shortly before the war. Logic indicates that the German emigres posed a bigger threat than Japanese-Americans: Germany was the tougher opponent, German-Americans were scattered across the U.S., and German-Americans blended in with our predominant European heritage. But, they looked like ‘us’ and many of us were partly German, so nothing was done. This fact alone convinced me that our treatment of Japanese-Americans was racism justified by the needs of war.

USS Saratoga (CV-3).

I came across a reference to a US Admiral (I believe) who was in charge of building the carrier fleet in the late 1920s conducting a surprise air attack against US naval facilities in Panama in 1931. It was a completely successful surprise attack.

It seems clear that the US Navy and the US military in general should have known of the potential for Pearl Harbor.

You have imputed a reason for this one, but was it the correct one? After all, if the goal was to remove rights from Japanese Americans, why did they just round up the ones on the west coast? As others have commented, it seems like 20-20 hindsight to me.

As for today, I haven’t seen an exaggeration of threats at the national security level. Terrorism with WMDs remains a significant threat to the US. The 9-11 attacks, which used an unusual and relatively (1kT) low powered WMD, killed more Americans than all previous terrorist attacks put together, and greatly damaged the economy. The August 2006 plot, foiled in time, would have been at least as bad, and as a second successful attack, would perhaps have prompted much more severe threats. The continued advances in prosperity and technology, combined with the reappearance of jihadist ideology, have created a vastly more dangerous time.

In spite of all of this, the government has been remarkably circumspect in its use of surveillance and other security means – perhaps too much so. The TSA annoyances are certainly a problem, but they are merely an extension of security measures already in place due to long existing terrorist threats.

The big threats on civil liberties today don’t come from the security apparati – they come from the green/socialist/multi-culturalist movement.

Property rights are fundamental to liberty, but they are not even considered even by the lefties, and are routinely infringed for environmental reasons and “urban planning” (central planning, anyone?).

Free speech isn’t threatened by the War on Terror, but is under threat by “reformers” (sadly, including McCain, whose sense of honor overrode his common sense) and grievance seekers (look to Canada or Britain or many US campuses for shocking examples).

Freedom of travel is threatened by environmentalists who want to dictate inferior modes and increased costs.

Social architects want to tell us where to live, what to eat, who we cannot offend (and who we can offend, such as males and Christians).