During World War II, Japanese Americans experienced a monumental peril to their rights as American Citizens. Because they were thought to pose a threat to our national security they were placed into camps for control over any malicious outbreaks that were predicted to occur. Not only was this a complete contradiction to America's constitution, the founding law of the land, but it could be seen as almost a mirror image of the root evils from Hitler's past regime. Because of the excessive power given to the executive branch in a time of crisis, we weren't able to realize what kind of atrocity we were creating. American Citizens were being held against their will and rights, in military prisons because our free-willing government thought it fit at the time to strip us from our own independence.
It wasn't till Korematsu V. United States, where a Japanese American spoke out in legal outcry to challenge the decisions made by the United States government in that time of World War II. The courts response was that of Justice Murphy's dissention that such exclusion goes over "the very brink of constitutional power" and falls into the ugly abyss of racism. The necessity of the argument was that there was a judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity could validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights if the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger. The government's decision to place Japanese American under military controlled camps made it apparent that racism and prejudice can and will supercede constitutional law. Even though today we are able to recognize the immorality of the occurrence, there are still similar situations where our government is being given to much control over our own free civil liberties. .
One evident example of this can be seen in a recent law made by the government in response to the attacks of September 11.