Recently declassified papers indicate that in 1950, days after the Korean War started, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pushed forward a plan to declare an emergency, suspend habeas corpus, and imprison 12,000 people from his “little list.”
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.
[…] 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.
Of course, it’s worth noting, as the article does, that this wasn’t purely a Hoover scheme.
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.
In a time of war, any government’s going to have some sort of contingency plan of this sort drawn up. It will be interesting to find out — in fifty or sixty years — what sort of post-9/11 things the Bush Administration decided not to attempt, along with all the things it did do.
Have they released the list itself, the names? Should be interesting.
Yeah, that is the part I would be curious about too.
“I have here a list of twelve thousand names …”
What do you want to bet “Dave Hill, International Man of Mystery” is on the list?