Word: kawakita
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Treason is a rare crime. According to the FBI, just eight people have been convicted of it in the nation's history, most for wartime actions. Gadahn is the first American charged since Tomoya Kawakita, a Japanese American who abused captured U.S. troops during World War II and was convicted in 1952. Kawakita was pardoned by President John F. Kennedy, but not all accused traitors have been so lucky. Here are a few of the most memorable...
...others: Nazi Propagandists Douglas Chandler and Robert Best; Army Deserter Martin James Monti, who became a Nazi Storm Trooper; U.S.-born Tomoya ("the Meatball") Kawakita, wartime interpreter in a Japanese prison camp; Mildred Elizabeth ("Axis Sally") Gillars. Indicted but never brought to trial: prizewinning Poet Ezra Pound, now in a Washington insane asylum...
...traitor was a bespectacled, wiry, 27-year-old Nisei named Tomoya Kawakita, better known to hundreds of G.I. prisoners as "The Meatball." The son of a California grocer, Kawakita was caught on a visit to Japan by World War II. He threw in his lot with the Japanese. As an interpreter in the prison camp at Oeyama, he taunted G.I. prisoners in their own ball-park English, took savage delight in tormenting them...
During his three-month trial, veterans trooped to the stand to tell how he had forced them to beat each other, made them work when they were sick, beat one man into temporary insanity. After the war, Kawakita returned to California. He was studying at the University of Southern California when a former Oeyama inmate spotted him in a Los Angeles store...
...after war's end, a startled ex-inmate of Oeyama spotted his old enemy walking out of a Sears, Roebuck store in Los Angeles. He called the FBI, who rounded up Tomaya Kawakita, 26, a California-born Nisei back in the U.S. to study at the University of Southern California. Last week, after almost three months of testimony and eight wrangling days of jury deliberation, "The Meatball" listened stolidly in a federal court as he was pronounced a traitor to his country. The penalty: five years to death...
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