HNN: @MichelleMalkin Book Blasted “As Blatant Violation of Professional Standards”

A committee of scholars and professional researchers  is deriding Michelle Malkin’s  book as “a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness.”

In  Defense of Internment. Michelle Malkin quotes from government documents to make the argument that the United States had knowledge of both Japanese and Japanese Americans working as spies for Japan. She concludes the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II was not based on racism or wartime hysteria, but decrypted cables(the so called MAGIC decrypts) from the Japanese themselves.

Malkin acknowledges her book  “is by no means all-encompassing; my aim,” she wrote, “is to provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long.”

In a blog for the History News Network, University of North Carolina law professor Eric Muller and a member of the Historian’s Committee for Fairness, questions how Malkin could have possibly pored over documents from so many agencies–the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, various branches of the War Department (including G1, G2, and the Provost Marshall General’s Office), the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division, FDR’s communications, and, of course, the voluminous MAGIC cables — in just 16 months as she has claimed to do.

More importantly, he writes: “there is no evidence that those who made the decisions were influenced by the MAGIC decrypts. The record tells us nothing about who actually reviewed which of the intercepts, or when, or what any reader understood them to mean. The record is just silent on these issues.”

You can read Muller’s blog in its entirety in the History News Network,