A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." The F.B.I would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, Hoover's proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under "a master warrant attached to a list of names" provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. "The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States," he wrote.
"In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus," it said.
Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration's decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.
The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended "unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include "threatened invasion" or "attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory."
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an "unlawful enemy combatant."
Weiner pretty adroitly nails the historical connections in a very straightforward way. It's not impossible for the corporate media to report things accurately.
I make fun of Hoover with the image up front. But that's only because such figures as he deserve only ridicule. Among the less known atrocities of his decade-long reign was his extensive, but ultimately failed war against Albert Einstein, which is document and described in exquisite detail in the book, The Einstein File.
About the book, Publishers Weekly said:
Not only did J. Edgar Hoover keep a well-guarded (and sometimes comically erroneous) secret file on Albert Einstein, reveals Jerome, a journalist and consultant to Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Communications, he actively sought to have the physicist deported. Though Einstein was far too popular to be brought down by Hoover's normal smear tactics (even when covertly laundered through congressional committees), his file was filled with 1,800 pages of raw materials. But the lists of organizations he supported (antifascist, pacifist and antiracist) and "unsavory" people he knew, such as Paul Robeson, lacked bite, since Einstein (unlike his biographers) happily publicized these associations. Accusations of subversive activity ranged from the surreal (mind control and death rays) to carelessly recycled Nazi propaganda.
Hoover's only hope lay in exposing Einstein as a Soviet spy, a task he fruitlessly pursued from 1950 to 1955 (when Einstein died). Einstein - revealed as anything but politically naïve - fought back against this chilling rerun of his experience in Germany 20 years earlier by calling for civil disobedience in resisting McCarthy and the House un-American Activities Committee, the most radical statement by any major figure at the time. Jerome suggests that popular history has been twisted by this encounter. If Hoover utterly failed to limit Einstein's political influence in his lifetime, Jerome argues, he helped de-politicize Einstein's image, reducing his impact on future generations, pa process this book should help reverse.
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