The US Justice Department recognised on Friday that 'mistakes' were made in its legal defence of the forced relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Following the 1947 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the United States forcibly displaced over 110,000 people of Japanese descent and held them at internment camps during the war. Most were US citizens.
'The solicitor general was largely responsible for the defence of those policies,' Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said in a statement on the agency's website. Mr Katyal, who represents the US federal government before the Supreme Court, noted that his predecessor many years ago ignored a US Naval Intelligence report that found that only a small portion of Japanese-Americans may pose a threat.
'Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones... And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalisations about Japanese-Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by 'racial solidarity',' added Mr Katyal.
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