Tule Lake, located near the California-Oregon border, is an arid, bleak and inhospitable place. It's fiercely hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. It's also a place that figures prominently in the story of one of the ugliest episodes in the nation's history: the forced internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.

Now Sen. Dianne Feinstein has asked Interior Secretary Gale Norton to memorialize that sorry episode by having Tule Lake declared a National Historic Landmark. It would be a powerful symbolic gesture, and it's long overdue.

Some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were evacuated from the West Coast during World War II and sent to remote relocation camps around the United States. Local residents were gathered at the Fresno County fairgrounds, where the racetrack and stables were designated the Fresno Assembly Center.

Tule Lake was the largest of the camps and became notorious. There were constant strikes and demonstrations by internees who harbored the quaint notion that, as American citizens, they deserved the same rights and freedoms as other citizens.

The government used the camp as a repository for those it considered the hard cases, who, in protest, answered "no" to a pair of so-called loyalty questions. The "NO-NOs" and others suspected by the government eventually numbered some 3,000 out of a total camp population of nearly 19,000.

Tule Lake was the last of the camps to close, on March 28, 1946, well after the end of the war.

As Feinstein said, "Designating the Tule Lake Segregation Center site as a National Historic Landmark would ensure that we honor surviving internees during their lifetime, and the center would serve as a lasting reminder of our ability to inflict pain and suffering upon our fellow Americans."

The state made the site a California Historical Landmark in 1979. The federal designation is something that should have been done long ago.