Dana Rohrabacher: “I rise tonight to pay homage to a special group of veterans. As all vets, all World War II survivors, they sacrificed…”

“I rise tonight to pay homage to a special group of veterans. As all vets, all World War II survivors, they sacrificed for their country. But this is a very special group of veterans, a very special group of veterans from the Second World War. They are special in that their fight for justice continues to this day. They fought for us, but their struggle goes on and goes on. Instead of fighting the militarists of Japan, they today are forced to fight the lawyers of Japanese global business giants like Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Nippon Steel. Instead of battling in the jungles, they are battling in the courtroom. And the greatest irony is that instead of having the American government on their side, these heroic veterans find themselves arguing in legal battles against representatives of their own government. This is the story of the American survivors of Bataan and Corregidor, some of the most heroic of America's defenders in the Second World War. When they were captured, they were forced to serve as slave labor for private war profiteering Japanese companies. They were deprived of food, medicine, often even clean water. They were used as work animals and treated as animals. The Japanese companies that worked these Americans, they worked them often to death, violated the most basic standards of morality, decency and justice. But most important, these Japanese corporations violated international law. They were accomplices to war crimes.”