[Infowarrior] - Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

[Richard Forno]

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/washington/23habeas.html?ei=5065&en=766197
cd970eb337&ex=1198990800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

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 ³protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.²
The F.B.I would ³apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous² to
national security, Hoover¹s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out
under ³a master warrant attached to a list of names² provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years.
³The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which
approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,² he
wrote.

³In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends
the Writ of Habeas Corpus,² it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a
fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration¹s
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 ³unless when in
cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.² The plan
proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that
clause to include ³threatened invasion² or ³attack upon United States troops
in legally occupied territory.²

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
³unlawful enemy combatant.²

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek
a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether
about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is
expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover¹s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war
documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection
makes up a new volume of ³The Foreign Relations of the United States,² a
series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department
since the Civil War.

Hoover¹s plan called for ³the permanent detention² of the roughly 12,000
suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he
said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California
would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for ³detention in military facilities of the
individuals apprehended² in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the
Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge
and two citizens. But the hearings ³will not be bound by the rules of
evidence,² his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover¹s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920,
named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large
part by Hoover¹s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people
suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.¹s ³security index² of
suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the
authority to detain Americans ³who might be dangerous² if the United States
went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the
power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover¹s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served
as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special
national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the
executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the
president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military
chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law
authorizing the detention of ³dangerous radicals² if the president declared
a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950,
after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any
other president approved any part of Hoover¹s proposal.