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Chapter 6 Isolating Citizen Dissidents Moab Isolation Camp After their arrest in the wake of the Manzanar revolt, Kurihara and the other members of the Committee of Five were taken with Ueno to the jail in Bishop, and after a few days, to Lone Pine. Eventually the group at Lone Pine grew from six to sixteen after other dissidents from Manzanar were brought there.1 As the men awaited their fate, federal officials explored the possibility of prosecuting them. “Unless the evidence [justified] a fairly long prison term,” wrote Deputy Director E. R. Fryer and Assistant Solicitor Lewis A. Sigler in a memo to the WRA Director Dillon Myer in late December, “it is recommended that prosecution” of the “leaders in the Manzanar incident” and those who made “threats ofdeath to informers” “would be undesirable. Butthis recommendation was “conditioned,” continued the memo, “upon the immediate availability of an isolation center to which the group can be sent. If for any reason that center should not be available immediately, prosecution in the local courts would be the only feasible method of holding the men until the isolation center can be made ready.” The goal was to keep the men away from Manzanar.2 On the basis of this recommendation, prosecution was held at bay, since WRA officials were able to secure a temporary isolation camp near the town of Moab, Utah. Meanwhile, in a show of support, the Nikkei at Manzanar sent the men gifts and food. They also formed a negotiating committee of 105 representatives, which in turn appointed a Committee of Four. The latter then attempted to negotiate the return of the men to Manzanar. But their efforts were unsuccessful. On January 9, the men at Lone Pine received a letter from Merritt, stating that they would be taken immediately to the camp near Moab, that Myer had established a three-person hearing committee to review their cases, and that they would be given “a fair and speedy hearing.”3 Thus on that cold, wintry day, the sixteen men left Lone Pine on a Greyhound busthattookthemsouthtoBarstow,California.Fromtheretheyboardedatrain traveling northeast. Guarding them were sixteen soldiers, including a lieutenant and an assistant chief of police. During the trip the soldiers cooked the meals andstoodguardinthecoachesandintherestroom.OnJanuary10theyreached their destination, a barren, isolated former Civilian Conservation Corps camp that was, according to Kurihara, “the size of a single block of Manzanar.” Ueno later recalled, “All around [the barracks], nothing but sagebrush, not even trees.” This was to be their home for the next two-and-a-half months.4 The isolation camp was fourteen miles from Moab. Located near the Colorado River in the southeastern Utah desert and surrounded by breathtaking red rock formations of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Moab is today a frequently visited tourist center. In the 1940s, however, it was a sleepy town of a thousand residents, one elementary and high school, three churches, and a Main Street that boasted a bank, the office of the Times Independent newspaper, and various retail stores.5 The isolation camp was on Highway 191 at Dalton Wells, a remote site reachable only by gravel road. Because it was to be a temporary WRA camp, no fence or other improvements were made, but the men were kept under constant military guard. Except for brief mentions in the local paper, “the whole operation was kept pretty quiet in Moab,” and the rest of the country knew even less about it. Most Americans, in fact, were unaware of its existence.6 The Moab camp was designed specifically for Nisei, who, as U.S. citizens, could not be transferred to the enemy alien internment camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). On the other hand, because of an informal agreement between Myer and Edward J. Ennis and Thomas Cooley of the Alien Enemy Control Unit, noncitizens at Moab could be transferred to the INS internment camps. Thus, after a month at Moab, the Issei from Manzanar were removed to the INS camps, “although”—as Ennis noted to J. Edgar Hoover—“their conduct did not establish subversive activity under the standards heretofore applied.” The informal agreement also enabled the WRA to send Issei dissidents directly from other WRA camps to the INS camps.7 Within several months after the Manzanar sixteen had entered the Moab camp, other dissidents arrived from the Gila, Manzanar, and Tule Lake camps. No formal charges were made against any of these men either. Rather, they were sent at the discretion...

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