After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour during World War II, thousands of Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps. No charges were ever made against them but many suffered physical and mental abuse while in captivity. Some were even killed by their guards.

The survivors never thought they’d see this dark chapter of American history repeated. But the attacks on of 9/11 in 2001 have been called “The New Pearl Harbour,” and the American Muslim community is the latest group to be singled out.

Many in the Japanese-American community see Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as America’s concentration camp for Muslims. Survivors of the Japanese internment camps are horrified, as Joe Tougas found out. He tells their stories in the second of our special series on Asian-Americans.

Japan town in San Francisco is a bustling district of the City where Japanese Americans live and work.

But this area was a ghost town during World War II. The Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbour sparked a wave of revenge against anyone who looked Japanese.

Japanese Americans were rounded up and detained in camps.

“I don’t go for this euphemism, ‘assembly center,’ ‘relocation center.’ I call it a concentration camp. That’s what our President at the time Franklin Roosevelt called it. I’ll use his words; it was a concentration camp.”

Toru Saito remembers the camps well, even though he was only three when he was taken away with his family to the Tule Lake internment camp in northern California.

Sitting in his living room in Berkeley, surrounded by his musical equipment, the retiree looks at a small box of artifacts from his time at the camps.

“I remember mostly the twenty foot high cyclone wire fence with the armed soldiers with the bayonets sticking out of the rifles and being taken from our homes and being in the race track stable…that was horrendous. And to see my family living in these horse stalls, that was something new. We had never been to the race track before. We lived our entire lives in Japan town in San Francisco, which was a segregated community and were amongst Japanese Americans our entire existence. So to be around nothing but whites and being guarded by them was very traumatic,”

The Tule Lake camp held nearly 19 thousand people. It was a high-security segregation centre under martial law.

Hiroshi Kashiwagi was taken there when he was 19, for refusing to answer the question of whether he swore allegiance to Japan or the U.S.

Those who refused to answer were punished.

“So that’s where I stayed because I refused to answer the questions. So we could not go outside,”

The fact that Japanese Americans had to prove their patriotism was insulting.

When inside the internment camps many faced abuse from the US guards.

“I know that there was one murder which has never been solved. And there were other people who committed suicide, and others who became insane,”

“On April the 11th 1942, Mr. James Wakasa was shot in the back by a guard. He was walking inside the camp, by the fence. The guard shot one bullet, hit him in the back and killed him,”

While those that survived the camps never fully recovered. Social stigma and low esteem plagued them for many years.

Saito says he lost his dignity.

“If you’re raised in a country where you’re viewed as lesser than equal to the majority race, you’re wearing the clothes of the disadvantaged or the disenfranchised, so it goes without saying that your self esteem has suffered from your early childhood experiences. That is coupled with self hatred and feeling hopeless and helpless about your station in life,”Many internment camp survivors thought they’d never see this happen again in America,”

They were wrong.

The attacks on New York and Washington on the 9th of September 2001 have been described as the New Pearl Harbour. The perpetrators this time were believed to be from the Islamic faith.

The retaliation by the United Stated has been dubbed the War on Terror.

Now, the U.S. has been detaining people once again without charges, without access to courts, lawyers, judges, or basic human rights in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I’ll tell you where history is repeating itself. For instance, what about habeus corpus?”

“I think it’s an exact replica of what’s happened to us.”

The scrutiny, discrimination, and unjustified detention of many Muslims is a great concern for the Japanese internment survivor community.

They believe that Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is the Americans new internment camp.

“I am completely surprised that it’s happening again, and I guess I was just naive to think that idealistically that we have learned from our experience in 1942 that we wouldn’t repeat such a thing. I guess human nature being what it is, the people who have power are going to use that power whether it’s justifiable or not.”There are similarities. We were held without any charge and we had no access to habeus corpus and this seems to be the same situation with those who are held at Guantanamo,”

But there is reluctance in the Japanese American community to aggressively speak against the U.S. government’s treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

“If you raise your hand in protest, your voice in protest, they mark you and disregard you,”

In spite of President Bush’s denial that torture is taking place at Guantanamo, Mr. Kashiwagi doesn’t believe him.

“It seems to me that what I’ve seen and read is torture and it’s hard to understand a decent human being could do that. I think they’ve gone beyond what is decent,”