The September 11th attack
Warnings raised about erosion of civil liberties

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

George Hoshida referred to the Hilo neighbor who wrongly accused him of disloyalty as the "Inu," or dog.

His family believes the false accusation, which came after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, led to Hoshida's being put under FBI surveillance. Federal authorities accused Hoshida of being sympathetic to the emperor of Japan.

"Even after the war," said his daughter, Sandra Hoshida, "there lingered a suspicion that my father had his loyalties to Japan."

Yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft urged Congress to grant expanded powers to wiretap and monitor the activities of suspected terrorists. They are the kinds of ideas that make some people in Hawai'i worry that the U.S. government is again wrongly accusing innocent people during a national crisis.

This time, the people under suspicion could be innocent Muslims or Arab Americans.

In the days that followed last week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, people all around Hawai'i eagerly cooperated with stricter security measures.

Carol Grey of Buffalo, N.Y., sat in the shade of a tree a few hundred yards from the USS Arizona Memorial, where rangers and Navy sailors kept backpacks, purses and wallets out of the visitors center and off the memorial.

"I think our security in the United States is lax in a lot of areas," said Grey, 62. "The Arizona Memorial is a tribute to the fellows who lost their lives in World War II. So it's a potential terrorist target."

The new intensity makes people feel more secure, said Jon Goldberg-Hiller, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Hawai'i. But most people haven't thought about the ramifications, he said.

"We've seen the danger come to fruition many times in our history," he said. "Right now, a lot of people will do anything to feel better about security. It's often down the road that people realize they've given away too much."

The original wiretap laws were written during the Communist-scare era of the 1950s "when you saw a great deal of exuberance without any limits," Goldberg-Hiller said. "In times of great fear, and this is one now, it's easy to turn in one's neighbors and establish a wire tap on one's house without much proof, other than faceless innuendo. When the American way suddenly disappears, that's a subtle victory for the terrorists."

Around Hawai'i yesterday, Ashcroft's proposals gave a chill to those who were among the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

There were also comparisons to McCarthyism and the war on drugs. All three are examples of the government's intruding into innocent people's lives through surveillance, informants and wire taps to serve a greater good, they said.

"We have to operate out of a sense of caution and not destroy the civil rights and civil liberties that we are really fighting to protect," said Bill Hoshijo, executive director, Hawai'i Civil Rights Commission. "Just because they have popular support doesn't necessarily mean that they're right."

Dennis Ogawa was born in the Manzanar internment camp and now teaches courses at UH, such as "Japanese American Experience in Hawai'i." He's bracing for the possibility that innocent people could draw unwelcomed attention of federal authorities through innuendo.

Local FBI and police won't say whether there has been an increase in reports of suspicious activity. And local Muslims have reported an outpouring of support, especially from Japanese Americans. But on the Mainland, mosques have been vandalized and federal agents have detained Arab Americans, who were later released. President Bush also has urged against stygmatizing people based on ethnicity or religion.

"You've got to believe in the system, that over the long haul it works," Ogawa said. "But over the short run, there's going to be mistakes. If you have a certain assumption that these people are guilty, it doesn't matter what evidence you have because it can be twisted any way you want."

No Japanese American was ever proven to be a spy after Pearl Harbor. But the government used that fact as evidence of how sneaky the alleged spies were, he said. "They said Japanese Americans must be superior spies because there was no evidence. How can you argue against that?"

Federal agents were wiretapping the Japanese embassy in the days before Dec. 7, 1941, and intercepted a telephone call to a Japanese-American dentist. He had a view of Pearl Harbor and — when asked by the anonymous caller — said that, yes, Navy ships were at their berths.

The call led federal agents to suspect the dentist was a spy, said Clayton Ikei of the Honolulu chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. Although the dentist was cleared, Ikei said, the implication was immortalized in this summer's movie "Pearl Harbor."

Sandra Hoshida didn't find any indication that wiretaps were used against her father when she obtained his FBI file in the 1980s through the Freedom of Information Act. She was then a UH law student and sought answers to why she and her family were sent to different internment camps on the Mainland.

George Hoshida stopped speaking Japanese in public. He burned every Japanese-language magazine and book and even got rid of the children's Girls' Day dolls.

As the years passed, he made cryptic references to the "Inu," Sandra Hoshida said. It was only later, when she pressed for answers, that her father revealed the name, someone who sat in their Hilo church for years after the war.

"I would never have known," she said, "because I never, ever saw my father display any animosity toward that person." Her father's attitude, she said, was a sign of his character.

The informant's motives, she said, were the result of national duress.