And he just happens to be a mail snooper in WWII? What a coincidence!
I love all of his conjectures: That DHS is monitoring him personally. Hmmm. BTW, an important passage for those who don't click to the article:
“All mail means ‘all mail,’” said John Mohan, a CBP spokesman, emphasizing the point.
“This process isn’t something we’re trying to hide,” Mohan said, noting the wording on the agency’s Web site. “We’ve had this authority since before the Department of Homeland Security was created,” Mohan said.
It is ironic, isn't it? Goodman used to earn a living opening other people's mail and has written about it.
America’s Japan $24.95
The First Year, 1945–1946
Grant K. Goodman
ISBN 0823225151
176 pages
Cloth
Publication date: 10/1/2005
“This book entices like a rare gem. Second Lieutenant Grant K. Goodman, then 21, was honest, brilliant, energetic, and, above all, enamored of a great cause: the democratization of Japan.”
—Rinjiro Sodei, Hosei University
“America’s Japan is a rare and insightful working-level view of the Occupation informed by Goodman’s lifelong career of scholarship and involvement with East Asia.”
—Ronald H. Spector, The George Washington University and author of Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan
One of the few non-Japanese Americans trained to read, write, and speak Japanese, Princeton undergraduate Grant Goodman had a privileged position during World War II. As an Army lieutenant, Goodman served in the Philippines at the close of the war and in Tokyo as an intelligence officer on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. Goodman translated thousands of letters, interviews, and other documents by Japanese citizens of all kinds, and came to know, as few Americans could, the “hearts and minds” of a defeated people as they moved slowly to democracy.
This book is a not only a fascinating personal chronicle of Grant Goodman’s unique experience in Japan. Moving deftly between his role as an Army officer gathering essential information and as a young scholar fascinated by Japanese culture, he provides a vividly drawn portrait of daily life in occupied Tokyo.
Here he looks back at signal events: Japan’s responses to occupation, the writing of the new constitution and the de-deification of the Emperor, the International Military Tribunal and the issue of Japanese war crimes, reactions by ordinary Japanese to American occupiers, and much more. September 2, 2005, marks the 50th anniversary of the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. First published in Japanese in 1986, America’s Japan is not only superb history. It is also a timely reminder of the realities of war and the responsibilities of victors and vanquished alike.