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This New Hampshire Republican Should Be a 2016 Kingmaker. Instead, He’s Radioactive.

Mother Jones

As the sole GOP congressman from New Hampshire, Rep. Frank Guinta should be having plenty of fun in the run-up to the state’s bellwether primary. Ordinarily, Republican presidential hopefuls would be lining up to woo him for his endorsement and begging him to host events to introduce them to New Hampshire voters. Instead, he has quickly become one of the state’s least popular Republicans, due to a campaign finance scandal that threatens to derail Guinta’s political career.

The other Republican in New Hampshire’s congressional delegation, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, has called on Guinta to resign. Meanwhile, the publisher of the famously conservative New Hampshire Union Leader, who has steadfastly supported Guinta’s political career since his days as mayor of Manchester, recently signed his name to a brutal six-word editorial about Guinta: “Frank Guinta is a damned liar.”

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This New Hampshire Republican Should Be a 2016 Kingmaker. Instead, He’s Radioactive.

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Hastert on Hastert: "What You See Is What You Get"

Mother Jones

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In 2003, The New Yorker dispatched acclaimed novelist Jonathan Franzen to write a mega-profile of Denny Hastert, who four years earlier had improbably become House speaker following Newt Gingrich’s implosion during the Clinton impeachment scandal. (During the Clinton mess, Hastert was an advocate of impeachment, at one point castigating the president for his “inability to abide by the law.”) With the developing news that Hastert has been indicted for allegedly violating banking laws while paying $3.5 million in hush money, apparently to conceal sexual abuse involving a male student at an Illinois high school where Hastert once taught and coached wrestling, Franzen’s lengthy take serves up useful insights (and what now appear to be a few wrong notes) about a man who was often described as a rather forgettable politician.

Below are several snippets (subscribers to the magazine can find the full article here):

“Hastert’s public persona, to the extent that he has one, is the Coach.”
“When I asked him if he had gay friends, he replied that he has friends who are single. ‘They’re really good people,’ he said. ‘And I’ve never asked.’ Does he care? ‘If I cared,’ he said, ‘I’d probably ask.’ (He is uncomfortable with Senator Frist’s advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. ‘I think the courts should decide that,’ he said.)”
“‘With me, what you see is what you get,’ Hastert told me the first time we met, in June. ‘There’s not a lot of nuances here.'”
“Later in the speech, Hastert describes the Speaker’s office in the Capitol. ‘It has a great big chandelier in it,’ he says. ‘Yeah-oh, I was a high-school wrestling coach. I never thought I’d have an office with a chandelier.
“As a coach in Yorkville Illinois, Hastert was famously impassive during matches. While opposing coaches paced at the edge of the mats and shouted at their wrestlers (‘Stand up!’ ‘Grab the wrist!’ ‘Head up!’), he sat silently, with his arms crossed over a clipboard.”
“For Hastert, though power seems always to have been more about service than about the advancement of his own ends or vision. He became a born-again Christian in high school, and much of his time at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, was devoted to religious study… He comes from a religious college that provided instruction in service and submission, rather than in partying and doubt.”
“What you see there—a Speaker who delivers the Republican goods—really is what you get. It doesn’t matter, in the public realm, what kind of person Hastert is. It matters only privately that, to do the brutal work in Washington, he requires psychic ballast back in Illinois.”

Franzen wasn’t the only one who promoted the Coach Hastert theme. When Hastert wrote his own autobiography 10 years later, he titled it, Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics.

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Hastert on Hastert: "What You See Is What You Get"

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5 Chilling Pages From the Aurora Mass Shooter’s Diary Debunk a Favorite NRA Talking Point

Mother Jones

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It’s an argument we hear frequently from gun rights activists and conservative lawmakers: Mass shooters select places to attack where citizens are banned from carrying firearms—so-called “gun-free zones.” All the available data shows that this claim is just plain wrong. As I reported in an investigation into nearly 70 mass shootings in the United States over three decades, there has never been any known evidence of gun laws influencing a mass shooter’s strategic thinking. In fact, the vast majority of the perpetrators have indicated other specific motivations for striking their targets, such as employment grievances or their connection to a school.

Most recently, the marquee villain used to decry gun-free zones is James Holmes, who is currently on trial for the July 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado. “Out of all the movie theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment showing the new Batman movie that night, it was the only one where guns were banned,” Fox News pundit John Lott wrote not long after the attack. “So why would a mass shooter pick a place that bans guns? The answer should be obvious, though it apparently is not clear to the media—disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks.”

Now, with the release this week of a detailed handwritten diary that Holmes kept before the attack, we know that there is no evidence to support Lott’s widely parroted claim.

The diary includes five pages in which Holmes laid out his strategy for attacking the Cinemark theater complex. Under the header “Case the Place,” he drew maps and diagrams accompanied by many tactical notes regarding where victims would be located and how they would potentially react. “South side of theater optimal,” he wrote, noting its “15 screens.” He zeroed in on theaters 10 and 12 as the “best targets in complex” and marked the “best parking spot” for his car. Among his lists of “pros” and “cons,” he observed that theater 10 would have “many initial persons packed in single area.” He assessed the many doors and hallways through which people would try to escape.

Nowhere in any of this extensive planning did Holmes make reference to gun regulations at the theater or the potential for moviegoers to be armed. Moreover, he had every expectation that he would not get away with his crime. In one sketch, he drew two other locations not far from the theater: the Aurora Police Department and a Colorado National Guard facility. “ETA response approximately 3 mins,” he noted. In his list of possible methods of attack, where he checked off mass murder using firearms as his choice, he also wrote “being caught 99% certain.”

Additional evidence from the trial underscores that Holmes clearly was not planning to avoid getting shot, killed, or apprehended. On an AdultFriendFinder.com profile he filled out shortly before the shooting, he wrote: “Will you visit me in prison?”

Here are the five diary pages filled with Holmes’ plans, followed by the full document:

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Full diary:

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James Holmes Notebook (PDF)

James Holmes Notebook (Text)

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5 Chilling Pages From the Aurora Mass Shooter’s Diary Debunk a Favorite NRA Talking Point

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"Doors Have Been Locked. Papers Have Been Shredded": We Asked a FIFA Expert About the Scandal

Mother Jones

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On Friday, as FIFA continues to deal with the corruption-related indictments that have rattled international soccer, president Sepp Blatter will find out whether he will earn a fifth term as the head of the sport’s governing body.

Blatter’s opponent, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, has received newfound support in recent days, including the backing of US Soccer president Sunil Gulati. Meanwhile, with big-name sponsors like Visa calling for “swift and immediate steps to address” the organization’s issues, some critics, including FIFA VP David Gill, have asked for the election’s postponement or for Blatter’s resignation.

We spoke to Alan Tomlinson, a professor at England’s University of Brighton and author of FIFA: The Men, the Myths, and the Money, to understand how FIFA and its frontman have held off critics for years—and where they go from here.

Mother Jones: How has FIFA changed since Sepp Blatter became president?

Alan Tomlinson: He’s not got the charisma of his predecessor, João Havelange, but he has a cunning way of operating. He has a mind and charm to him. He can be very hand-shakingly charming, but he can also be a bit ruthless. If you fall out with Blatter and you make allegations within the organization, you don’t seem to last long. It might be difficult for you to get another job, though you might have had a very, very good payoff to perhaps stay silent. So Sepp Blatter has been creating more dilemmas by the way that he operates and the way that he monopolizes the administration. He’s there all the time.

In 2002, FIFA was close to bankrupt, but the cycles of sponsorship and broadcasting since then has put it in something like the $5 billion in revenue category. But Blatter’s not liked—I’m not saying Havelange was liked, but he had authentic charisma. Blatter’s a much more cunning operative, but I also think that leads to vulnerabilities. There are so many cases where Blatter has been close to directly involved in forms of inappropriate deal-making or maladministration. But there are potentially an expanded number of former allies who could become whistleblowers.

MJ: How has Blatter survived these allegations of corruption in the past?

AT: One way is a public way, particularly since FIFA was persuaded to set up an ethics committee: “We have these independent inquiries. We do read these reports. We do act upon them. So we do tell people they’re not welcome in the world of football.” So they get suspended for a while, investigated, and suspended for life. He uses the procedures that he’s been in a way forced to put in place to deal with revelations that emerge. He can then say: “We are on a mission to clean this up. Yeah, we don’t want people like that in the world of sport.”

Another way that you can deflect all forms of not just critique but challenge is, of course, destroying the evidence. At certain times, doors have been locked. Papers have been shredded. In the electronic age, who knows quite who is in control of what the knowledge base is. So behind the huge figures that get audited and passed by reputable bodies like KPMG or PricewaterhouseCoopers, there’s probably a trail of destruction of evidence, so you can’t find the stuff.

MJ: How have the indictments changed the game—and Blatter’s prospects for reelection?

TA: The sponsors are expressing serious doubts, but they do that regularly. They usually get calmed down, they get satisfied when some people get suspended. So in previous, comparable cases, the FIFA ethics committee—which has only existed since 2004—would just suspend the people, and Blatter could say, “We’re cleaning out the stables.” He’s not able to say that when there’s a body like the US justice system pursuing criminal charges on this scale.

I think what will happen tomorrow, within the congress hall, is that big FIFA people will show that combination of loyalty and fear, which Blatter is able to cultivate. I think he will, unless an entire further time bomb happens beforehand, he will move into his fifth term. But it won’t be quite as smooth a term. He won’t be able to silence the critics quite as much. He won’t be able to satisfy the nervous partners quite as easily unless he starts to generate some wider debate about how FIFA itself works and what are the compositions of the committees.

MJ: You seem certain about his victory.

TA: Yeah, certain as one can feel, but who knows what time bomb may suddenly appear. UEFA President Michel Platini is directly asking him to stand down, but he’s got the president of the Russian federation saying, “We support this man.” This is a big level of Cold War politics with FIFA in the middle of it in some ways.

So he’s got a lot of supporters, and a lot of them, in the context of a place like FIFA, don’t have to speak out. They’ll just stay quietly there, knowing that if the whole thing doesn’t crumble, there’s still a lot in it for them in terms of their personal status and the untaxed pay bonuses or expenses that they receive for traveling the world, staying in the world’s top hotels, and talking now and then a little bit about football.

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"Doors Have Been Locked. Papers Have Been Shredded": We Asked a FIFA Expert About the Scandal

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Inside the Unlikely Coalition That Just Got the Death Penalty Banned in Nebraska

Mother Jones

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When the final aye of the roll call vote was recorded on the electronic panel above the West Chamber of the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln yesterday, the crowd in the galleries overlooking the floor couldn’t contain their shouts of relief. Or maybe it was disbelief. The wooden benches were filled with death penalty opponents who had come hoping to see the senators of the unicameral Legislature override Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto of a bill repealing the state’s death penalty law—but they had good reason to worry they no longer had the necessary votes. After enduring more than two hours of heated debate (ranging from tearful stories of personal evolution to bellowed passages from the Bible), the override received exactly the 30 votes required. The death penalty was officially abolished in Nebraska, and activists whooped and clapped, prompting gavel-pounding and calls for order.

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Inside the Unlikely Coalition That Just Got the Death Penalty Banned in Nebraska

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How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician

Mother Jones

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Sometime in the late 1970s, after he’d had a kid, divorced his college sweetheart, lost four elections for statewide offices, and been evicted from his home on Maple Street in Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders moved in with a friend named Richard Sugarman. Sanders, a restless political activist and armchair psychologist with a penchant for arguing his theories late into the night, found a sounding board in the young scholar, who taught philosophy at the nearby University of Vermont. At the time, Sanders was struggling to square his revolutionary zeal with his overwhelming rejection at the polls—and this was reflected in a regular ritual. Many mornings, Sanders would greet his roommate with a simple statement: “We’re not crazy.”

“I’d say, ‘Bernard, maybe the first thing you should say is ‘Good morning’ or something,'” Sugarman recalls. “But he’d say, ‘We’re. Not. Crazy.'”

Sanders eventually got a place of his own, found his way, and in 1981 was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city—the start of an improbable political career that led him to Congress, and soon, he hopes, the White House. On Tuesday, after more than three decades as a self-described independent socialist, the septuagenarian senator launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the Vermont city where this long, strange trip began. But it was during Sanders’ first turbulent decade in Vermont that he discovered it wasn’t enough to hold lofty ideas and wait for the world to fall in line; in the Green Mountains, he learned how to be a politician.

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How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician

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Chart: America Is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fascinating tidbit of research. A pair of grad students surveyed 2,000 state legislators and asked them what they thought their constituents believed on several hot button issues. They then compared the results to actual estimates from each district derived from national surveys.

The chart on the right is typical of what they found: Everyone—both liberal and conservative legislators—thought their districts were more conservative than they really were. For example, in districts where 60 percent of the constituents supported universal health care, liberal legislators estimated the number at about 50 percent. Conservative legislators were even further off: They estimated the number at about 35 percent.

Why is this so? The authors don’t really try to guess, though they do note that legislators don’t seem to learn anything from elections. The original survey had been conducted in August, and a follow-up survey conducted after elections in November produced the same result.

My own guess would be that conservatives and conservatism simply have a higher profile these days. Between Fox News and the rise of the tea party and (in the case of universal health care) the relentless jihad of Washington conservatives, it’s only natural to think that America—as well as one’s own district—is more conservative than it really is. But that’s just a guess. What’s yours?

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Chart: America Is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

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These Photos of Sea Creatures Soaked by Oil in California Will Break Your Heart

Mother Jones

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Volunteers fill buckets with oil near Refugio State Beach. Michael A. Mariant/AP

On Tuesday, an oil pipeline burst near Refugio State Beach west of Santa Barbara, California, sending an estimated 105,000 gallons of oil onto the beach. Up to a fifth of that oil is believed to have reached the ocean, Reuters reports.

Now, volunteers and private contractors are racing to clean up the oil. About 6,000 gallons have been collected so far, according to the AP. But damage has already been done. At least two pelicans have been found dead, and five more pelicans and one sea lion were sent for rehabilitation. Biologists have also found many dead fish and lobsters. Local officials have closed the beach at least through Memorial Day, and possibly for “many weeks” after that, one scientist at the scene said.

A young female sea lion affected by the Santa Barbara oil spill receives treatment from the SeaWorld California animal rescue team. Rex Features/AP

The company that owned the pipeline, Plains All American, has one of the country’s worst environmental safety records. An analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that the company’s rate of incidents per mile of pipeline is more than three times the national average. A spokesperson said the company deeply “regrets this release,” but it remains unclear what penalties it could face for this latest accident.

It could be years before the full impact is truly understood, since damage to the ecosystem can sometimes take a while to manifest. Five years after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, biologists are still tallying the damage.

Here are some of the latest images coming in from the scene:

Refugio State Beach Santa Barbara News-Press/ZUMA

A small crab covered in oil Troy Harvey/ZUMA

Two whales surfaced near an oil slick off Refugio State Beach. Michael A. Mariant/AP

A dead lobster covered in oil on the shoreline Troy Harvey/ZUMA

Clean-up workers remove a dead octopus from the beach. Mike Eliason/ZUMA

Crews from Patriot Environmental Services collect oil-covered seaweed and sand. Michael A. Mariant/AP

A helicopter coordinates ships below pulling booms to collect oil from the spill. Michael A. Mariant/AP

Clean-up workers monitor the site of the underground oil pipeline break. Michael A. Mariant/AP

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These Photos of Sea Creatures Soaked by Oil in California Will Break Your Heart

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How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Mother Jones

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For three years, Wisconsin prosecutors have been investigating whether Republican Gov. Scott Walker broke campaign finance laws as he battled a 2012 recall effort sparked by his push for a law that undercut the power of public sector unions. Prosecutors allege that Walker and his aides illegally coordinated with conservative groups that were raising money and running ads to support Walker and his Republican allies. At least one group at the center of the probe, the Wisconsin Club for Growth, has gone to court to stop the investigation. Its fate now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which will rule any day now on whether the inquiry can proceed.

But there’s a rub. Two key targets of the investigation—the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), the state’s leading business group—have spent over $10 million since 2007 to elect a conservative majority to Wisconsin’s top court. Given their involvement in the investigation, and the Wisconsin Club for Growth’s position as a party to the case, good government advocates question whether the four conservative justices elected with the help of these two groups should be presiding over the case.

Read about the scandal that could that could crush Scott Walker’s presidential hopes.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC did not make direct contributions to the campaigns for these justices. Instead, they poured millions into so-called independent issue ads that clearly conveyed messages that supported these campaigns. And in an odd twist, due to lax recusal guidelines—which were adopted at the urging of one of these conservative outfits—these justices on the state’s high court are not compelled to sit out a case involving these two groups.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC are top players in a years-long undertaking by Walker and his allies to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is friendly to conservative policies—an operation that has included spending millions on ads, ending public campaign financing for Supreme Court elections, rewriting the court’s ethics guidelines, and amending the state’s constitution. This effort has led to one of the most partisan and dysfunctional judicial bodies in the country, a court with liberal and conservative justices who won’t appear together in public. And it could well end up benefiting the conservative groups under investigation should the jurists they helped elect rule the probe should stop.

“This large amount of money and special interests has impacted the workings of the court, the reputation of the court, and how it’s interacting internally,” says former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who served on the court from 1993 to 1998.

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How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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Moving Photographs of Japanese-American Internees, Then and Now

Mother Jones

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In early 1945, the federal government started to open the internment camps where it had held 120,000 Japanese Americans for much of World War II. Seven decades later, photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. has been tracking down the internees pictured in wartime images by photographers like Dorothea Lange (who photographed Kitagaki’s own family—see below).

So far, he’s identified more than 50 survivors, often reshooting them in the locations where they were originally photographed.


Seven-year-olds Helene Nakamoto Mihara (left, in top photo) and Mary Ann Yahiro (center) were photographed by Lange as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance outside their elementary school in San Francisco in 1942. Both were sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Yahiro (right, in bottom photo) was separated from her mother, who died in another camp. “I don’t have bitterness like a lot of people might,” she told Kitagaki.

Dorothea Lange

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Lange photographed 19-year-old Mitsunobu “Mits” Kojimoto in San Francisco as he waited to be sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California. “We were being kicked out of San Francisco,” he recalled to Kitagaki. “It was kind of shocking, because as you grow up you think you are going to have certain rights of life, liberty. And to be sitting there was very disheartening. I was really wishing that somebody would come and save us. We were citizens, but now we were not.”

Kojimoto volunteered for the army and received a Bronze Star for his service in France and Italy. “I felt, I’m going to volunteer,” he said. “Why not?…We were behind barbed wire, and we should put our best foot forward and volunteer.”

Dorothea Lange/UC Berkeley Bancroft Library

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


In one of the best known photographs of Japanese-American internment, 70-year-old Sakutaro Aso and his grandsons Shigeo Jerry Aso and Sadao Bill Aso wait to be deported from Hayward, California, in 1942. “When I look at the picture, I can see my grandfather realized that something terrible was happening and his life was never going to be the same again. That was the end of the line for him,” Bill Asano told Kitagaki about his grandfather. His brother, Jerry Aso, agrees: “So, grandfather’s dream of coming to the United States, his dream of making a life, his dream of having his children working in this business, to support them all were totally dashed.”

“My parents and my grandparents seldom talked about the internment experience, even though I know that it was a searing memory,” said Aso. “And I think because it was so searing, that they didn’t want to talk about it. But I think also, also the idea that, if you try to explain the unfairness of the whole situation, the explanation itself kind of falls on deaf ears.”

Dorothea Lange

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Below, seven-year-old Mae Yanagi before being sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, where her family spent several months in a horse stall before being shipped to a camp in Utah. The Yanagis left their home and nursery business in Hayward, California, in the care of a businessman. “When we got back, it had been sold,” Mae Yanagi Ferral told Kitagaki. “It was there, but somebody else was living there. We didn’t talk about it.” Her father had to start over as a gardener in Berkeley. “He had the most difficult time with the relocation and he never accepted the premise that they were doing it for our benefit. For many years he was very angry. My father felt the injustice of the interment, and my older siblings really felt the injustice of it. We just didn’t say anything about it.”

Dorothea Lange/UC Berkeley Bancroft Library

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Harvey Akio Itano was interned in 1942, forcing him to miss his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded the school’s highest academic honor in absentia. In the summer of 1942, he was allowed to leave Tule Lake War Relocation Center to attend medical school. Itano went on to help discover the genetic cause of sickle cell anemia while working with Dr. Linus Pauling at Cal Tech in 1949. He also worked as the medical director of the US Public Health Service and as a pathology professor at University of California, San Diego. In 1979, he became the first Japanese American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 2010.

Dorothea Lange

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


“We should be careful not to incarcerate whole groups of people, as they did,” Anna Nakada told Kitagaki. “We need to be very wary of that.” As a girl, Nakada was photographed during a 1945 performance at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. After the war, Nakada became a master of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. Internment, she reflected, “displaced our family in kind of a positive way rather than negative. It didn’t drag us down. In fact, it gave us some chances.”

War Relocation Authority/California Historical Society

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Kitagki located former Boy Scouts Junzo Jake Ohara, Takeshi Motoyasu, and Eddie Tetsuji Kato, who had been photographed during a morning flag raising ceremony at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. “I didn’t feel anything until later on,” said Ohara, who later became a pharmacist. “I got kind of angry, because of all the experiences that we went through, the losses, not for myself but for the parents and the older guys that had already graduated high school. You start to think about those guys.” After Takeshi returned home, he became an electrical engineer. “I think for us young guys it was not too bad,” he said. “They fed you, they clothed you. It’s just the persecution from you being the enemy, that’s the only thing that would bother you.”

Pat Coffey/War Relocation Authority/UC Berkeley Bancroft Library

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Ibuki Hibi Lee stands in the exact location in Hayward, California, where she and her mother waited to board a bus with their belongings 70 years earlier. Her parents, Matsusaburo Hibi and Hisako Hibi, were artists who documented life in their internment camp in Utah. “You have to think of camp from the view of injustice,” Lee said. “And it was really an injustice to Japanese-Americans and those who were citizens. It had to do a lot with economics, racism and politics.”

Dorothea Lange

Paul Kitagaki Jr.


Lange photographed Suyematsu Kitagaki and Juki Kitagaki as they sat with their children, 11-year-old Kimiko and 14-year-old Kiyoshi, at the WCCA Control Station in Oakland, California, before being detained in May 1942. In the photo, a family friend hands Kimiko a pamphlet expressing good wishes toward the departing evacuees. The Kitagakis were later sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah.

More than 60 years later, Paul Kitagaki Jr. joined his father and aunt outside the same Oakland building where they had been photographed with his grandparents. From left to right: Agnes Eiko Kitagaki (his mother), Kimiko Wong (his aunt), Paul Kiyoshi Kitagaki (his father), Sharon Young (his cousin), and Paul Kitagaki Jr.

Dorothea Lange

Paul Kitagaki Jr.

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Moving Photographs of Japanese-American Internees, Then and Now

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