Anyone from an Axis allied country was rounded up in the US duringf WW2. I just talked about those whose files I have read.
Boats were confiscated, yes. So were short-wave radios in the possession of aliens and even som citizens.
It was total war and our govt acted in the manner that they thought was appropriate. This does not mean that it did the right thing, got the right person, etc.
It was the ability of the FBI and Military Intelligence to check out thousands of people that made the program much more accurate.
Unless you have a communist/Stasi type program, you will never be able to keep track of the “enemy”.
The problem with militant Islamists is that we were asleep at the wheel despite the best efforts of Steve Emerson, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Brigette Gabrielle, Pam Geller, Walid Shoebat and even Glenn Beck, to point out where and who some of the supporters of “jihad” were, such as CAIR, ICNA, MSA, etc.
For decades some of us tried to tell the public where the communists were, what their fronts were named, how they operated, and their ties to the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Sandinistas, etc.
In fact, I worked for a newsletter that went to 500 police departments around the country. They could not do their own intell work but they were allowed to receive unsolicited materials. That is why when I did the INDEX to the issues, every 6 months, I named “names” so that they could readily be matched to radicals coming into a new area.
A few others also did this type of investigative research and writing, but were almost totally ignored by the mainstream media.
Fortunately Glenn Beck was able to put all this together, with his famous black boards and exhibits, so that the American people could see the SOROS subversive network and its ties to the Democrats and White House.
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealander researcher on the American Left, has written two massive books entitled “The Enemies Within” (including Congress), that names names, has photos, copies of documents etc, that updates all this.
The other great work on marxist influences on government and the media is Steve Powell’s “Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Marxist Studies”, the only major study of this KGB-connected organization that had ties right into the Carter and Clinton “White Houses”.
All we can do, as private citizens, is to research and write up our findings. It is up to the govt agencies to do the rest, and under our present Attorney General and recent heads of the FBI (from Freeh to Comy), they have really fucked up in many cases [Some agents and prosecutors have been fantastic but they don’t run the show, and Holder isn’t going after Obama’s Moslem buddies anytime soon).
The point of all this is that you’ve got to know your enemy, not imaginary ones. Precise information is needed, whether by informants, defectors, reading the enemy’s materials, physical and electronic surveillance, etc. Forget the drones and the NSA. While the NSA program seems to me to be extremely wasteful, we don’t know which of their covert surveillance programs have been successful, and probably never will.
You don’t want the enemy to know what you know and how you got it.
My hope is that we have very sharp, knowledgeable people doing the intell work so that we don’t make mistakes and hurt innocent people.
Just rounding up everyone from a group isn’t the answer and it isn’t going to work. How’s that immigration deportation program going?
Intelligence, targetting, and then necessary action, whether here or abroad, is the way to go.
Been there, done that.
Hope? This machinery is now under the control of a very corrupt administration ... and George Soros ... who paid for it.
This is the question of the age. All-powerful intelligence is ncessary. But how do we make sure that the people who are operating it are "the good guys?"
We can't.
How do we make sure that Obama and Holder aren't working against us, the way FDR's people did?
We can't. (And they obviously, IMO, are.)