“Guantanamo has become a symbol for a set of practices in the war on terror that people object to. But it's really not Guantanamo that people have a problem with. It's the practices involving detainees at Guantanamo that are the fodder for the critics. ” Most people know about the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Gitmo for short, Cuba and have varying opinions about it. Some legal experts argue that keeping detainees there violates international law, while others are comfortable with leaving the so-called, “worst of the worst,” as former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld called Gitmo’s prisoners, where they are. The argument is not so much do the men housed in any of the prison camps deserve to be there, it is how long can they legally be held without …show more content…
Very few Japanese-Americans were spies for the Empire of Japan, and the government knew who they were and kept tabs on them, but John DeWitt, the general in charge of the West Coast took the position and convinced the government that, “A Jap’s a Jap. They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not.” Japanese and other Asian people were rounded up like cattle and placed in internment camps all along the West Coast, and at military installations in Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Kansas. This was not legal according to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits illegal search and seizure of property. Peruvians of Japanese descent were also seized and put in internment camps like their American counterparts. Some were even shipped here to America to military labor camps even though US embassy official Jon Emmerson read through correspondence to and from the accused people and could not “find a single missive which divulged bomb plots, secret trysts, contemplated assassinations, codes, or even plans to signal a Japanese ship from a lonely beach. It is hard to escape Harvey Gardiner's conclusion: "’The Americans, ignoring both law and legal formality, simply wanted to weaken the Japanese community by seizing and expelling its leaders.’" This is an obvious violation of international law, almost akin to the capturing of slaves, but the Peruvian government was fine with the situation, even going so far as to aid the US in rounding up citizens of Japanese descent due to fear and paranoia of a Pearl Harbor-like attack. Several other Latin-American countries joined the cause and willingly shipped their own citizens, mainly women and children, to the island of Tobago. Similar to the complaints about Guantanamo, the lists of people set for deportation were shoddy and