Please don't miss this chilling and powerful commentary in the Boston Globe by Paralegal Carl Taki on the anniversary of February 19, 1942, the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. As a result of that Order, 110,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in detention camps. Taki speaks from personal experience, that of his grandfather.

THE FBI ARRIVED at his door carrying pistols and a terse message: Juro, the owner of a small sweater factory and dry goods store in one of Seattle's ethnic neighborhoods, was under arrest. As his bewildered wife and children watched, the agents took Juro away without saying why, where he would be taken, or for how long. He spent the next year being held as an enemy alien in a federal prison nearly 1,000 miles away and died only three years later, never again seeing his home in Seattle.

Juro was a Japanese-American - and my great-grandfather. In early 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested many men like him: people whose sole crime was their leadership or prominence within the Japanese-American community. In the eyes of FBI agents searching for traitors, their foreign faces and foreign names made their guilt a presumption and their innocence unprovable....

Though few spoke out against it at the time, the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans is now widely recognized as one of America's grossest violations of civil liberties, forcing an entire race to labor under a collective presumption of guilt."

Every year, members of the Japanese-American community pause on February 19 to reflect on the injustices of 1942.

This February, we do so in an environment that increasingly mirrors that of 1942: when the courts are too timid to challenge the wisdom of military decision making and when free-floating anxiety combines with racial suspicions to embolden those who would conduct witch hunts of the foreign-born and trample over the rights of the accused.... This month, as we remember how America's leaders violated the rights of those of Japanese ancestry, we should recall that the public's failure to dissent - their willingness to turn away in the face of injustice - is what allowed that wrong to be perpetrated. Today, America has a chance to avoid making a similar mistake. This time, let's stand up and stop it from happening again.