On November 13, 2007 OHA suddenly published a slick 67-page document which tried to smear the Hawaii Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just two days before a long-scheduled public meeting. The document also tried to twist history to support the Akaka bill and tried to discredit earlier testimony opposing the bill.
OHA’s 67-page document is entitled “Correcting the Record: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Justice for Native Hawaiians.” It can be downloaded in pdf format from the OHA website at
http://oha.org/images/stories/071113correcting.pdf
and a list of appendices can be downloaded at
http://oha.org/images/stories/071113appendices.pdf
A rebuttal to OHA’s 67-page document was published by civil rights activists one day later. It is entitled “Correcting OHA’s Deceptive ‘Correcting the Record’.” It was written by a few civil rights activists operating under urgent time pressure with zero budget, to counteract the slick OHA document produced by a large staff with large budget over a period of about two months. The civil rights rebuttal describes how the previous civil rights committee from 1996 to 2006 was overwhelmingly stacked with supporters of race-based government and private programs, and worked closely with OHA and the powerful race-based institutions to counteract the Rice v. Cayetano decision, to facilitate development of the Akaka bill, and to support the Akaka bill throughout the first six years it was pending in Congress. The rebuttal straightens out some of the twisted Hawaiian history presented in the OHA report. This rebuttal can be found at the GRIH Wiki.