Re: [scifinoir2] NT Times - Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

[Martin]

Exactly, bosco. In a decidedly neocon group I used to post in, they lo ved to 
rant on for days on end about the "liberal media" and how they were "destroying 
the American Way of life". I casually made the analogy that, if said liberal 
media had actually existed, then Dan Rather's botched attempt to disclose the 
military records of Our Imperial Leader *wouldn't* have been botched. Oh, the 
snide neocon slams I got for that piece of logic...

Bosco Bosco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:          What's amazing about this is 
not Hoover's desire to suspend habeas
corpus is news. The man was a backwards facist and represents all the
things foul that draw this country down from the moral high ground.

What's amazing is that habeas corpus has been suspended and no one
really cares. It wasn't even news worthy. So much for the theory of a
"liberally biased" media.

Bosco
--- "Tracey de Morsella (formerly Tracey L. Minor)"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/washington/23habeas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
> 
> 
> 
> 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.”
> 
> 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.
> 
> Hoover’s 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 “The Foreign Relations of the
> United 
> States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by
> the 
> State Department since the Civil War.
> 
> Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” 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 “detention in military facilities
> of the 
> individuals apprehended” 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 “will not be bound by
> the rules 
> of evidence,” his letter noted.
> 
> The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids
> of 
> 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids,
> executed 
> in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up
> thousands of 
> people suspected of being communists and radicals.
> 
> Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s
> “security 
> index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946,
> Hoover 
> sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be
> dangerous” 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.
> 
> Hoover’s 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 “dangerous radicals” 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 Hoover’s
> proposal.
> 
> 

I got friends who are in prison and Friends who are dead.
I'm gonna tell ya something that I've often said.

You know these things that happen,
That's just the way it's supposed to be.
And I can't help but wonder,
Don't ya know it coulda been me.

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"There is no reason Good can't triumph over Evil, if only angels will get 
organized along the lines of the Mafia." -Kurt Vonnegut, "A Man Without A 
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