Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, sponsored a program on civil liberties yesterday in Seattle. The speakers, mostly elderly Japanese, detailed their experiences of their WWII detention and seemed to agree that civil rights are teetering anew as they did in WWII.

The stories told by the elderly Japanese Americans and the young Syrian woman were remarkably similar: the shock of suddenly being viewed with suspicion by friends and neighbors, the bewilderment of being torn from homes and locked up, the anger with a government that promised to protect freedoms.

It happened to people of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor. It's happening to Arab Americans and other Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001. But this time, Americans of many races are speaking out against the erosion of liberty in the name of security.

"We will not let history repeat itself," said Dale Minami, lead attorney in a lawsuit in the early 1980s that successfully challenged the federal government's claim that incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans was justified during wartime.

Densho chronicles the experiences of people imprisoned in camps across the Western U.S. in the 1940s, and yesterday's program began with films of several local residents relating a sense of loss and disillusionment still fresh after five decades.

They were followed by Nadin Hamoui, 21, a Syrian college student from Seattle. She tearfully recounted how 15 federal agents stormed her family's Lynnwood home last February as part of a post-Sept. 11 crackdown on Arab nationals living illegally in the U.S. In the chaos of the raid, Hamoui ran in to one of the agents in the hallway. "He pulled his gun and put it right in the middle of my forehead," she told the crowd of nearly 500 people.

There's lots more, go and read the whole thing.

For more on the protest of the detainees, and on those calling for Ashcroft's removal, see our prior post here.